Kerbal Space Program 2 (not dying and getting a new owner) Hype Train.

[Ryaja]

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

#StopKillingStudios !

It's hard, costly and time consuming to build a team capable to build a game. We are seeing it in first hand here.

All these developers being laid off at the same time will mostly surely switch industries. Many of them will even end up earning more money on the long run - guess how this will reverberate on the Game Industry?

Right now, if I would be working on this Industry and since I have a family to care about I would sincerely considering looking for relocation. It's mid 2024 and more game developers were fired already this year than the whole 2023, that was a excrementsty year!

The carnage did not ended yet.

I'm foreseeing a huge chilling effect also on the Stores, 2025 is going to be even worse than 2024 for Gaming in general.

These corporations are, literally, destroying the whole landscape, this is Scorched Earth tactics.

There is hope for change, many indie game like helldivers, palworld, etc. Have been crushing in sales.

Edited June 19 by Ryaja
New page

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, Ryaja said:

There is hope for change, many indie game like helldivers, palworld, etc. Have been crushing in sales.

I hope you are right.

But the Stores still need the big guys with deep pockets to be profitable, and without the Stores, the indies will be in trouble to advertise and sell their games.

I'm afraid they are corroding the foundations of the Industry, not too differently from what happened on the Automobile Industry 10 years ago - you need a minimum critical mass of developers to keep the Industry self-sustainable.

[Mitokandria]

9 hours ago, Lisias said:

#StopKillingStudios !

[snip]

These corporations are, literally, destroying the whole landscape, this is Scorched Earth tactics.

I'm not willing to agree it's that extreme. Corporations with no real business being in gaming, aka "thought it would be an easy cashgrab", are realizing video games aren't just a product to be consumed, but an rather art form to be enjoyed. Playing to the broadest market isn't a gauranteed win. They are now scaling back to consolidate and focus only on further monitization of their known money-makers. Gaming is just another market to them and a market is just a high-stakes Craps, Poker, or Blackjack game. Learn to count the cards or cheat the system and you win...at least until the establishment (gaming community) catches on and kicks you out.

The only bright side to this is the 'gaming landscape' is becoming less cluttered with white noise meaning lesser known publishers and developers are having an easier time being seen, recognized, and rewarded. At least, until a large corporation strikes gold on a wild genre idea and restarts the whole process again.

[PDCWolf]

10 hours ago, Lisias said:

#StopKillingStudios !

It's hard, costly and time consuming to build a team capable to build a game. We are seeing it in first hand here.

All these developers being laid off at the same time will mostly surely switch industries. Many of them will even end up earning more money on the long run - guess how this will reverberate on the Game Industry?

Right now, if I would be working on this Industry and since I have a family to care about I would sincerely considering looking for relocation. It's mid 2024 and more game developers were fired already this year than the whole 2023, that was a excrementsty year!

The carnage did not ended yet.

I'm foreseeing a huge chilling effect also on the Stores, 2025 is going to be even worse than 2024 for Gaming in general.

These corporations are, literally, destroying the whole landscape, this is Scorched Earth tactics.

From contacts in the industry... it's not looking good from a developer perspective either. The industry is the way it is because it seems to be bloated by copious amounts of the wrong people™  leading my feed with those few programmer/gamedev friends I have to be filled with videos like these (TL;DR: Devs being so cautions they slow down whole projects by flooding them with meetings to agree upon things before even getting down to work on anything, over-management, etc).

With all these layoffs, the industry hopefully will fix its own hiring problems, however doers will still flock to the indie space where they can just do without having to please managers and so... which is good for them but bad for the consumer because the right people™ remain making games whilst underfunded and taking decades to complete a single project whilst the AAA space will remain flooded with the opposite kinds of people.

We all want people to not lose their jobs and stuff, but the reality is there's been a wave of under-educated, not as professional, too-much-mba-too-little-coding people flooding the industry on all fronts and it needs to be let go so that actual workers might occupy those spots.

And yes, I know sometimes the skilled, good people are also getting laid off thanks to incompetent people working above them, but sadly that one is also harder to fix.

10 hours ago, Ryaja said:

There is hope for change, many indie game like helldivers, palworld, etc. Have been crushing in sales.

Arrowhead is a smallish studio, sure, but not Indie, and currently backed financially and with infrastructure by Sony, one of the biggest names period. Other than that yeah, it's indie games making the good games currently, however the AAA side is about to make or break with the new COD, new AC, and a couple other big, historic franchises that are about to release new titles. It remains to be seen if the average "dad with 7 kids that can only play 17 minutes a week" (an exaggeration of the current biggest segment in gaming purchases, for humor purposes) is really down to also pass up on AAA releases

----------

As for the OP... rather than KSP2 being kept alive, I'd be much more hyped thinking of a KSP3 made by the correct people with the will to invest what's need to be invested.

[Jack Mcslay]

10 hours ago, Lisias said:

#StopKillingStudios !

It's hard, costly and time consuming to build a team capable to build a game. We are seeing it in first hand here.

All these developers being laid off at the same time will mostly surely switch industries. Many of them will even end up earning more money on the long run - guess how this will reverberate on the Game Industry?

Right now, if I would be working on this Industry and since I have a family to care about I would sincerely considering looking for relocation. It's mid 2024 and more game developers were fired already this year than the whole 2023, that was a excrementsty year!

The carnage did not ended yet.

I'm foreseeing a huge chilling effect also on the Stores, 2025 is going to be even worse than 2024 for Gaming in general.

These corporations are, literally, destroying the whole landscape, this is Scorched Earth tactics.

KSP2 having delivered so little at launch and subsequent updates despite 70 people on staff to me is one of many points of evidence the gaming market was way overdue for a correction.  Game development have become badly mismanaged all across the board, resulting in excess hiring both as a means to attempt to compensate for deficiencies instead of getting priorities straight, such as not diverting resources to creating animated tutorials that not even much better funded titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator have.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Jack Mcslay said:

KSP2 having delivered so little at launch and subsequent updates despite 70 people on staff to me is one of many points of evidence the gaming market was way overdue for a correction.  Game development have become badly mismanaged all across the board, resulting in excess hiring both as a means to attempt to compensate for deficiencies instead of getting priorities straight, such as not diverting resources to creating animated tutorials that not even much better funded titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator have.

Agreed, we have a disease. I have a lot of reserves about the medicine being applied.

Killing the host is not how we cure diseases - at very best, it's a desperate way to try to prevent it spreads.

 

2 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

With all these layoffs, the industry hopefully will fix its own hiring problems, however doers will still flock to the indie space where they can just do without having to please managers and so... which is good for them but bad for the consumer because the right people™ remain making games whilst underfunded and taking decades to complete a single project whilst the AAA space will remain flooded with the opposite kinds of people.

My opinion is that they are not firing the people responsible for the mess.

Yes, lots of developers probably shouldn't had been hired as Seniors, because clearly they weren't. But you can't only hire Seniors for all the positions, because your will going to blow up the budget - there must be a compromise between hiring cheaper, not yet capable workforce and Seniors for training them.

But I digressed - the root cause of this whole ordeal are not being tackled down.

 

3 hours ago, Mitokandria said:

The only bright side to this is the 'gaming landscape' is becoming less cluttered with white noise meaning lesser known publishers and developers are having an easier time being seen, recognized, and rewarded.

The problem I'm foreseeing is that the Stores are set up to be profitable with the current business model, that will start to crumble soon. As soon the Stores became less profitable, they will adapt (and so the Indies will have a hard time to fight for space because they will compete with the big buck guys), or they will just shutdown like the rest of the industry.

 

3 hours ago, Mitokandria said:

At least, until a large corporation strikes gold on a wild genre idea and restarts the whole process again.

Exactly. Things will just happen again, and sooner than we think - Economy cracks on a domino effect.

Today the Studios are the ones on the receiving end. Tomorrow the dudes that depends of these Studios will start to crumble.

Stores will be held hostage of the big guns, and you know exactly what happens when the big corps are your main source of income: we, customers, will be on the receiving end of the whole ordeal, because the Stores will dance the Big Gun's music and not ours anymore.

 

2 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

And yes, I know sometimes the skilled, good people are also getting laid off thanks to incompetent people working above them, but sadly that one is also harder to fix.

And these skilled people will look for jobs somewhere else, will get paid better and will not come back in the majority of the cases.

We are not talking about a couple of Studios where the good ones can be easily absorbed by the competition - we are talking of tons of Studios laying people off, where very few good ones will manage to secure a position on the Industry.

We are not talking about an Industry doing adjustments on their workforce. We are talking about the Industry eroding their workforce - it will take decades to get that know-how back.

[PDCWolf]

12 minutes ago, Lisias said:

My opinion is that they are not firing the people responsible for the mess.

Yes, lots of developers probably shouldn't had been hired as Seniors, because clearly they weren't. But you can't only hire Seniors for all the positions, because your will going to blow up the budget - there must be a compromise between hiring cheaper, not yet capable workforce and Seniors for training them.

It's not about seniority, or at least not "just" about seniority, because there's "seniors" who create the same kinds of issues I'm describing.

18 minutes ago, Lisias said:

And these skilled people will look for jobs somewhere else, will get paid better and will not come back in the majority of the cases.

We are not talking about a couple of Studios where the good ones can be easily absorbed by the competition - we are talking of tons of Studios laying people off, where very few good ones will manage to secure a position on the Industry.

We are not talking about an Industry doing adjustments on their workforce. We are talking about the Industry eroding their workforce - it will take decades to get that know-how back.

And I'm not sure the kno- how is there right now. The way the industry currently is, it's just not geared towards making good games. It's geared towards making stock holding companies either directly richer by making bi or tri-yearly masses-pleasers, or to embolden the position of said stock holding companies by farming ESG scores through destroying in-progress projects with practices to maximize good scoring. Practices which run completely opposite to what makes a good game (or a good product in other areas as well!), but since the scores go up, the holding company sells the stock before the game is out, they keep the farmed score after the evaluation, and go back to making money with other stuff that actually makes them money. Meanwhile the studio is stuck with "socially conscious games" which is the mediocre yawners that come out of implementing those practices.

It's what happened to Redfall, Deathloop, Crew Motorfest, Zau, AC Valhalla, Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad, and so on. Now add to that the fact that those same companies are now filled with people that pad estimates, ask for pre meetings for meetings, and spend more time circlesomething about sprints and scrum on whiteboards than actually getting stuff done and yeah, it's no wonder we are where we are.

The industry needs a good cleanup, and counter-culture indies coming forward to be the better selling games is probably the first good step.

 

[Lisias]

17 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

The industry is the way it is because it seems to be bloated by copious amounts of the wrong people™  leading my feed with those few programmer/gamedev friends I have to be filled with videos like these (TL;DR: Devs being so cautions they slow down whole projects by flooding them with meetings to agree upon things before even getting down to work on anything, over-management, etc).

Here where I live, we call this the Mediocrity Pact: you pretend you are doing meaningful work, I pretend I'm doing meaningful work, and we cover our arses so no one will caught us.

10 to 15 years ago, I was hired on a Industry to help code some firmware - not going to give too much details on this one,  you will understand soon.

First thing I did: I spend a whole week reading every single piece of technical paper the project had, including protocol specifications. Second thing I did, I specified exactly what I would be doing, feature by feature, with alternative paths to handle the expected exceptions. It became a PHD thesis compared to the specification documents they were used to. It took me a month and a half, a time my immediate manager wanted me to do some coding. But I had someone above him getting my back, because I did my way nevertheless.

On a conversation, with that manager visibly nervous, he bluntly told me that I was going to be responsible for that use-cases, and I will be responsabilised if the use-cases would not be validated by the QAS team. I remember looking at them with a puzzled face (or at least, it's how I felt my face's muscles) and asked: "And there's any other way to get the job done?"

TL;DR: The Company had outsourced the development of the product to a company (mine), but also outsourced the QAS to a direct competitor. So it would be the best interest of that competitor to get rid of us to score the positions for their own contractors.

So my direct manager's problem was that he had hired my company to the development job, and he didn't wanted to lose points on his boss if we fail on the job - what, in theory, would be our competitor's best interest and, so, writing a so detailed and specific Requirements would play against our best interest.

Problem: such Requirements was still the best (if not the only) way to get the fracking job done!

What follows was probably my finest hours on that Industry: I had already worked for that Company, so I knew how they think and I understood why they hired competitors for Development and Quality.

TL;DR: if the project fails, BOTH OF US would be sacked, so we were all in the same boat.

So my next task, after writing that document, was to talk with the QAS guys and explain to them (including  their manager, that understood and agreed) that our best interest was to work together in this project, and let our respective bosses to handle politics up there in the top floor - far away from the trenches. I did everything I could to make their lives easier, and they made everything they could to make my job effective (not exactly easier however ), and we delivered the product not as specified, but better.

EDIT: I want to stress the pronoun WE. I didn't saved the day, I just did my job while they did their job and together we delivered the product.

Unfortunately, that project was an exception on our Customer, not the norm. That Industry had already started to crumb - in the exact same way this one is doing now.

It's the reason I think the Game Industry is "over firing", not to mention firing the wrong guys.

The real troublemakers depicted by this video are not the cheeks-covering developers that wanted 4 weeks for a simple task. The real culprit is the idiot that negotiated the 2 weeks. Get rid of that idiot, and the developers will just cope with the demand, or they will be punctually replaced - and problem solved.

  

14 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

It's not about seniority, or at least not "just" about seniority, because there's "seniors" who create the same kinds of issues I'm describing.

It's exactly about "seniority". Under par people were hired as "Seniors" without the merit. And these people climbed the corporate ladder and started solving technical problems with politics.

Firing the people that danced with their music is not going to fix anything. You need to fire the musicians.

Edited June 20 by Lisias
brute force post merge

[PDCWolf]

10 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Firing the people that danced with their music is not going to fix anything. You need to fire the musicians.

Interesting story but this is where we disagree. I'd fire both the musicians and whoever danced for their own benefit, because you know they'll bend the knee when the next song starts playing.

It's the same with the NDA thing... People think their circumstances give them moral ground to make the wrong choice, and others think accepting that is being empathic.  Like letting your manager scam people with your work because you signed an NDA with them makes you the victim. But the wrong choice is the wrong choice period, you're not the victim, you're complicit, the victim is the guy that got scammed whilst you said nothing.

 

Edited June 19 by PDCWolf

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Interesting story but this is where we disagree. I'd fire both the musicians and whoever danced for their own benefit, because you know they'll bend the knee when the next song starts playing.

If the employees don't dance the music, they are fired by disobedience. If they do, they are fired by dancing the wrong music?

You get what you promote. You hire bad musicians, your dancers will dance that music and that's it. It's your fault, not theirs.

They will always bend the knee to whoever is paying their salaries! They are your employees, not your business partners, by Kraken's sake!

Franky, sir, this is schizophrenic.

=== == = POST EDIT = == ===

It's not about (only) personal ethics. It's about plain legislation - you are an employee, you will dance your employer's music or you will get fired - and without a recommendation letter, what on USA is essentially a death sentence to your career.

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

It's the same with the NDA thing... People think their circumstances give them moral ground to make the wrong choice, and others think accepting that is being empathic.

I agree with reserves. Being forced to do unethical things due the NDA sucks, and indeed will reflect in your career in a way or another - i.e., you will risk being rejected by employers that don't agree with that ethics, what ends up trapping you on a professional network where such unethical practices are the norm.

HOWEVER... WE ARE THE MEN WITH THE GUNS (or the money).

Spoiler

Reports can be filed. But you want "justice"? You're the man in the air. You're the man with the gun!

https://clip.cafe/flyboys-2006/reports-can-be-filed-but-want-justice-s1/

We, Game Industry's customers, are the ones paying for this party.

You are victim only the first time you get scammed - from that point, you became an accomplice on future occurrences.

It's up to us, customers, to take a stand on the problem - Companies are committed to financial results (and ideally to the pertinent Legislation, if properly enforced), and nothing else. It sucks? Yeah, but the alternative sucks more, so it's up to us to learn how to cope with the mess.

Edited June 19 by Lisias
POST EDIT

[Pthigrivi]

19 hours ago, Ryaja said:

There is hope for change, many indie game like helldivers, palworld, etc. Have been crushing in sales.

Yeah and BG3 has sold 15m copies in a really niche genre. It's possible if you just let folks immerse and solve the problems that need to be solved. What would suck is if KSP just gets mothballed instead of passed on to a smaller studio who has the patience and passion to do it right.

[PDCWolf]

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

If the employees don't dance the music, they are fired by disobedience. If they do, they are fired by dancing the wrong music?

You get what you promote. You hire bad musicians, your dancers will dance that music and that's it. It's your fault, not theirs.

They will always bend the knee to whoever is paying their salaries! They are your employees, not your business partners, by Kraken's sake!

Franky, sir, this is schizophrenic.

---

It's not about (only) personal ethics. It's about plain legislation - you are an employee, you will dance your employer's music or you will get fired - and without a recommendation letter, what on USA is essentially a death sentence to your career.

Again, we fall under the same disagreement: If your boss tells you to do bad work, and you just follow his instructions, you are a bad worker. I understand office politics and lazyness leading to you to just follow those orders because it can prove beneficial, however you don't get to also complain about the state of the industry, layoffs and what not when you're being exactly part of the problem by taking 4 weeks to produce some basic code. So when you're cleaning house of bad apples, you need to fire the musicians, and the people ready to dance to them.

Sadly, when most of these layoffs happen, they fire only the dancers, but some very scarce times they also fire only the musicians. I don't remember a case where both get the boot.

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

We, Game Industry's customers, are the ones paying for this party.

Voting with your wallet can be completely irrelevant depending on scale. In our current case, even if we round up everybody left in this forum and the discord (~1000 active people) we'll never get TTI to do anything about it but laugh.

This is my last message on this topic as I don't want to do off topic. If we can continue this talk, hopefully it'll be on another thread that isn't sent to get lost in the shadow real of irrelevant subforums.

[Lisias]

15 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

What would suck is if KSP just gets mothballed instead of passed on to a smaller studio who has the patience and passion to do it right.

Exactly my worst worries - as things are developing, there will be very few left, most of them scared to death of losing their jobs, what renders them unable to take risks.

 

11 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Again, we fall under the same disagreement: If your boss tells you to do bad work, and you just follow his instructions, you are a bad worker. I understand office politics and lazyness leading to you to just follow those orders because it can prove beneficial, however you don't get to also complain about the state of the industry, layoffs and what not when you're being exactly part of the problem by taking 4 weeks to produce some basic code.

People don't born good workers. Neither bad workers. People don't born workers at all, it's something we need to learn. We have bad teachers, we become bad workers. We have good teachers, most of us become good workers.

Been there, done that. I have to be taught to become the worker I'm today (besides some quirks I acquired due my time on bad jobs - I had a kid to feed, after all, and yeah, I had to dance that music until I saved money enough to go away and start again).

 

11 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

So when you're cleaning house of bad apples, you need to fire the musicians, and the people ready to dance to them.

Fire the musicians, and the bad dancers will be organically replaced as they are detected. Firing all the dancers will render you without a show and, so, without a public to fund you.

Dancers don't grow on trees, and the Show must go on.

 

11 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Voting with your wallet can be completely irrelevant depending on scale. <...>

Voting with your wallet is the only choice we have. If you can't prevent other people using their votes on bad products, do your best to use your votes on the good products you find.

And let time do its trick - believe, time is merciless. See Boeing.

Edited June 20 by Lisias

[Vexillar]

18 hours ago, Lisias said:

The Company had outsourced the development of the product to a company (mine), but also outsourced the QAS to a direct competitor. So it would be the best interest of that competitor to get rid of us to score the positions for their own contractors.

I feel for you - that's all too common in IT. Back in the 90s, the team I lead had a similar situation (although we were internal to the customer). It turned out that a high-up exec had money in an external contractor. They rubbished our solution, proposed a different approach, and spent 4 years and about GBP 80 million, before finally being removed.

In the mean time, our unfinished suite was put into production and the company continued with it for years afterward.  But the whole thing was spun as "great shareholder value". PAH!

[Fizzlebop Smith]

The company I work for in facing a situation I have never encountered in manufacturing.

There are only a handful of subsuppliers qualified to do some post production requirements to our product.

One of the subsuppliers (A) was purchased outright through a subsidiary of our competitor while leaving most of the active management structure on place.

 

One day... the alternative subsupplier (B) begins increasing replies to RFQ with prices 225-300% more than normal.

Quotes from A were relatively unimpacted. We have fail safes embedded into projects. Subsuppliers A is charged a fee that is relative to any penalties we face for a delay as a result of their failure to meet contracted deadlines.

 

We had multiple jobs in process with A. Who proceeds to blow EVERY single deadline related to a particular Job. They made excuses, and apologized to no end.

Giving discounts on future packages they also loveed up. I pleaded to stop using these people..something has changed!

But the increasing the margins !! Despite being penalized we still came out financially on top.

Until the customer decided to go with the owner of subsidiary A on all future projects.

We learned later that company A was sold to a direct competitor. It was cheaper for them to eat any cost associated with sabotage.

I was blown away even though I shouldn't be.

 

[Devblaze]

[Lisias]

7 hours ago, Vexillar said:

I feel for you - that's all too common in IT. Back in the 90s, the team I lead had a similar situation (although we were internal to the customer). It turned out that a high-up exec had money in an external contractor. They rubbished our solution, proposed a different approach, and spent 4 years and about GBP 80 million, before finally being removed.

In the mean time, our unfinished suite was put into production and the company continued with it for years afterward.  But the whole thing was spun as "great shareholder value". PAH!

And you can bet similar things was and still is happening inside the Game Industry. Kraken knows why, some managers think it's a good idea to turn their workforce into adversarial and play "Natural Selection" - as it would be a good idea to have predators locked inside on a place with you.

 

4 hours ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

We learned later that company A was sold to a direct competitor. It was cheaper for them to eat any cost associated with sabotage.

You know, I won't be surprised if time tells us that similar things happened around here. There're a lot of weird things that I had detected over the years that I just could not explain why they happened (or still happens) and no one does anything about.

 

Edited June 20 by Lisias
I will take the 5th, Your Honour.

[AstroWolfie]

On 6/19/2024 at 7:03 AM, PDCWolf said:

new AC

Ace Combat?

[TwoCalories]

On 6/20/2024 at 8:30 AM, Devblaze said:

Are ---> Were

32 minutes ago, AstroWolfie said:

Ace Combat?

Ace Combat 8 is pretty much confirmed, there was a leak on a VA's resume, I believe, that said an "AC8" would release in 2025.

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, AstroWolfie said:

Ace Combat?

One would think the fact that I was talking about big franchises rules out Ace Combat... or the fact that I wrote "Valhalla" right afterwards.

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, TwoCalories said:

Ace Combat 8 is pretty much confirmed, there was a leak on a VA's resume, I believe, that said an "AC8" would release in 2025.

As a matter of fact, I only consider confirmed the releases that were already launched. Anything else are just rumours spread by the Marketing guys.

[cocoscacao]

Uhm... How are we going to rename this thread after June 28th? Truth denial hype train? 

[Lisias]

51 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

Uhm... How are we going to rename this thread after June 28th? Truth denial hype train? 

"The Show Must Go On"

 

[kerbiloid]

22 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

Uhm... How are we going to rename this thread after June 28th? Truth denial hype train? 

Phantom Hype Train.

[Grenartia]

On 6/21/2024 at 11:37 PM, cocoscacao said:

Uhm... How are we going to rename this thread after June 28th? Truth denial hype train? 

Take Two Hate Hype Train