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

[Deddly]

22 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

What a silly and reductive hypothesis.

I'm not saying I disagree, but if you're going to call something out as silly, it would be much more interesting to read an explanation rather than a blanket statement of opinion.

[Bej Kerman]

6 hours ago, Deddly said:

I'm not saying I disagree, but if you're going to call something out as silly, it would be much more interesting to read an explanation rather than a blanket statement of opinion.

Okay, let me rephrase it like this: "Had you considered that the whole KSP2 problem was exactly all the time they were given?" is a reductive thing to say.

I don't believe an explanation is quite so necessary; with the incredibly complicated dynamics between Nate, Intercept/StarTheory, Take Two, Private Division, Squad, etc. from Star Theory being banned from discussions with the legacy developers and secrecy preventing recruits from knowing exactly what it is they needed to be doing at ST/Int, to Star Theory being poached and Intercept carrying a grand triple-A vision for KSP with a budget fit for a simple remaster/DLC and being expected to work on top of legacy assets for a sizeable chunk of time, I think it's quite self-explanatory for me to claim it's reductive to say the only issue was "they had too much time" and that such a hypothesis is silly. At least, I believe most of us now are aware of how spectacularly troubled KSP 2 development was, so it should go without saying that time was not the reason it all crumbled.

[Grenartia]

21 hours ago, Lisias said:

Good thing you are not a project manager so.

At what point in your thought process did you decide this was a constructive thing to say? There are reasons I'd never be made a project manager: namely, I'm willing to name the problem instead of passing the blame to the most convenient party. 
 

21 hours ago, Lisias said:

Crunch time is when you desperately tries to do on the remaining time you still get everything you should had done, but didn't, with the time you had before.

Every single project in which I was hired in the final stages ended up in "death marches" (you see, no one hires a Senior when everything is going well...) had a past of pretty long delivery times that were mismanaged. Absolutely no exceptions.

Give too much time to people that don't know how to manage it, and you will take too much time to realize when they messed up - and then the choice will be a crunch time in the hope to salvage the project, or just ditch it and fire everybody.

Or maybe its a sign that upper management generally has no clue how the sausage gets made, and has poor communication skills with the actual workers. 
 

21 hours ago, Lisias said:

The very video you provided says exactly the opposite.

Where? Give me a timestamp. 

 

21 hours ago, Lisias said:

It's not a unfair consideration, to tell you the true. But you are forgetting something very, very important: these soul-sucking demons don't walk in the streets hunting for souls. The souls must go to them and ask to be... hummm... haunted.

Quite easy to do when the entire group of soul-sucking demons can orchestrate macroeconomic factors in such a way to provide a steady stream of reluctant victims. 

[cocoscacao]

8 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

with the incredibly complicated dynamics between Nate, Intercept/StarTheory, Take Two, Private Division, Squad,

I am assuming you are taking SZ video as info source. Original plan was a refurbished KSP1. When asked for more time to include more features in the game, a simple NO would put an end to those plans, and we might be in better position than we are today. 

[Lisias]

6 hours ago, Grenartia said:

At what point in your thought process did you decide this was a constructive thing to say? There are reasons I'd never be made a project manager: namely, I'm willing to name the problem instead of passing the blame to the most convenient party.

Because fewer things can be worst for a Project than having a good person but terrible manager in charge.

Good people don't like to screw good people, and since good people tends to gather together, if one of them ends up in managing without having the skills, the project at a whole will suffer because everybody will try to prevent screwing the manager.

Having a Good Manager that it's also a Good Person is simply one of the best blessings you can have professionally.

Having a Bad Manager that it's also a Good Person, is a curse. You will fight every day between the need to get rid of the guy and your natural impulse to stick to the Golden Rule with someone that you feel deserves it more than the average.

And the net result is you feeling like crap if you choose to save your job, or unemployed if you choose otherwise.

(obviously, I may be wrong about you - my apologies if I am)

 

6 hours ago, Grenartia said:

Or maybe its a sign that upper management generally has no clue how the sausage gets made, and has poor communication skills with the actual workers.

Bad managers.

But don't even think that they are the only reason for the problem.

 

6 hours ago, Grenartia said:

Quite easy to do when the entire group of soul-sucking demons can orchestrate macroeconomic factors in such a way to provide a steady stream of reluctant victims. 

Now it's you that are giving them too much credit.

They don't need to work behind the scenes to screw and take over small and medium business. Most of them do the job by themselves. On that video that you brought to the table, that Marsh company? They were failing to meet the expenses but yet still have their own airplane for their brass.

With managers like these, being sold to Apollo was probably the best thing that could happen to their employees - whatever bad that happened to them, it would be 10 fold worst otherwise.

Edited Sunday at 02:12 PM by Lisias
Tyops, as usulla...

[Tony Tony Chopper]

39 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

[...], and we might be in better position than we are today. 

Really, I don't think so. It probably wouldn't have changed much on the baseline - not as much as leaving out downward compatibility, imo. It would probably have been a better place to start with the years of development it would have taken anyway. Old hardware needs to be replaced sooner or later, that's a given point. Why this burden? What did it cost even? I miss the dev skills, but that's what I think.

[Scarecrow71]

48 minutes ago, Lisias said:

-snip-

To me it sounds like you've got something personal against project managers.  None of what you said gives any reason why or explanation for what is happening with Haveli or what their structure is going to be.  None of it.  Everything you said is speculation and conjecture with no substance other than "Ape not hurt ape".

Don't get me wrong - the wrong people in the right position can hurt a project more than a good person in the wrong position.  I don't disagree that projects need to be managed by the right people.  But that is a discussion for a way different thread well into the future after we know what is going to happen here.

[cocoscacao]

1 hour ago, Tony Tony Chopper said:

Really, I don't think so.

Well I did use the word 'might', not 'would'. You can technically screw up anything, so there's no guarantee. Even so, failed refurbishing with 2 years of development vs failed new game with 7+ years of development... You get the point. 

[Lisias]

On 1/25/2025 at 6:40 PM, Scarecrow71 said:

That's not really an indicator of future success though, is it?  I mean, that's what Take Two did with Intercept Games, and look how that turned out.

Not all companies that were built from ground up reached success, but all companies that reached success were created somewhere in the past.

So your point is?

 

On 1/25/2025 at 7:00 PM, Bej Kerman said:

What a silly and reductive hypothesis.

You don't have the slightest idea of how many tragedies (financial, managerial, technical, heck even in the aerospace industry) happened exactly due silly and reductive hypoghesys that were ignored because they were considered silly, reductive or both.

Reality doesn't have an Ego, Causality just don't care about silliness.

[Scarecrow71]

9 minutes ago, Lisias said:

So your point is?

Didnt think I'd have to explain it, but...

You were talking about a new company for this specific franchise being built from the ground up, and your post is full of hopium and excitement.  It is as if you believe it is a forgone conclusion it will succeed.  So my counter to that is that for this very specific franchise that was done once already and failed.

I am not talking about all of history, and neither were you.  Stop trying to move the goalposts simply to make yourself seem smarter or right.

Edited Monday at 03:05 AM by Scarecrow71

[Lisias]

On 1/27/2025 at 12:05 AM, Scarecrow71 said:

You were talking about a new company for this specific franchise being built from the ground up, and your post is full of hopium and excitement.  It is as if you believe it is a forgone conclusion it will succeed.  So my counter to that is that for this very specific franchise that was done once already and failed.

I'm just glad to be around, I thought this whole circus would be on the ground by this time.

I'm just counting our blessings.

And, yes, I believe they will succeed in the exact same way I believe it's constructive to talk with you (most of the time, at least).

I may be wrong? Yep. But as long as the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, it is the most rational thing to do.

Edited Tuesday at 03:17 AM by Lisias
Kinda of typo...

[Scarecrow71]

28 minutes ago, Lisias said:

But as long as the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, it is the most rational thing to do.

The big issue here is that there are no known benefits.  Yes, there is a new owner.  But there still has been zero communication, and we don't know what is going to happen.  So again, anything at this point is speculation.  Which means that there are no currently known benefits.

I will say that I hope things get better for this franchise.  I just can't get my hopes up until they finally decide we are worth their time to talk to.

[Lisias]

41 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

The big issue here is that there are no known benefits.

We still have Forum.

Granted, it's not enough and there aren't any signs that could be used to know if we are going to like whatever is going to happen - but at least we will still be here to dislike them...

What's a sensibly better situation than before, when we were in the hands of someone that was trying to sell the whole thing to anyone that would pay them more than they would get on a tax write-off.

 

[Scarecrow71]

9 hours ago, Lisias said:

We still have Forum.

For how long, though?

I'm not trying to be a doomer here, but rather I'm speaking from a place of practicality.  The forums have had issues for months, with multiple periods of extended downtime.  The license dies in a couple of months, and although the DNS thing is resolved, that is no guarantee that the forums will live on after the license expires.  Again I go back to the fact that the new owners haven't even had the common courtesy to come out and talk to us, which never bodes well.

[para 9]

I'd rather hear nothing than hear more BS from Nate and Dakota, as we did for years.

The new owners of the IP don't owe us anything. Early Access doesn't confer a legally-binding liability to follow through on speculative future plans. Caveat emptor. EA purchases are made on an "as is" basis. Your decision to acquire an EA user license should be made on the current state of the game; not what you hope it might be in the future. Everyone who paid for KSP2 got exactly what they bargained for. Buyers were even granted a window to refund. The game is released. That's all, folks  

The new owners certainly don't owe us indefinite support for a free forum devoted to legacy titles -- titles that have little prospect for future growth. 

Edited Monday at 04:07 PM by para 9

[Lisias]

12 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

For how long, though?

I'm not trying to be a doomer here, but rather I'm speaking from a place of practicality.

Good question. I don't know, and there's a chance that someone would look on all of this in a (near?) future and think "nah, much ado about nothing" and pull the server's plug.

As a matter of fact, it's unavoidable that some day this will happen, as nothing lasts forever (even cold November rain). It may happen in 20 years, it happen in 20 days.

All I'm saying is that, even if this thing drops dead in 20 days, it's still way more time than we thought we could get a few months ago. We would be still at profit - besides a bittersweet one.

It's the reason I say "count our blessings".  Let's enjoy it while we can, let's pretend this will not ever end in the mean time, and let's be grateful where gratitude is due. They are paying the bills, after all. At least this we should credit them.

 

12 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

The forums have had issues for months, with multiple periods of extended downtime.  The license dies in a couple of months, and although the DNS thing is resolved, that is no guarantee that the forums will live on after the license expires.

Yes. Forum is causing some commotion, and yet they are doing something to keep us afloat instead of just pulling the plug and going on with their lives.

The License expiring not means Forum will die in the next day, it only means that Invision will not issue updates neither provide support for it, so we will be fine on the short run. But it will be, undoubtedly, a less than promising outcome.

However, Licenses have this annoying habit to be renewed only on expiration dates. And, still, they have about a year to come back and renew the License without paying a full price again, so... Even if it expires, it's not a definitive sign of death.

We need to wait and see. There's absolutely no other option (and, believe me, I looked for it).

 

12 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Again I go back to the fact that the new owners haven't even had the common courtesy to come out and talk to us, which never bodes well.

Indeed, in their list of priorities, communicating with us is pretty down there in the backlog, in the "don't bother looking on it yet" chapter.

Someone there wants to keep secret of what they are doing. Don't know why, don't know until when. All I can infer (because I don't have how to know) is that keeping such secrecy is way more important to them than handling our anxiety. We will have to learn to live with it.

Again, counting our blessings is the best thing we can do - and rest assured that, even if the worst happens, there're people (and more than one) looking into salvage what needs to be salvaged in order to reboot a smaller, indie and non official community (as a matter of fact, I suspect at least half a dozen will spawn...).

Count our blessings. It's the best (and probably only) advice I can give.

Edited Tuesday at 03:22 AM by Lisias
The day they outlaw tyops will precede the day I will go up the river...

[Fizzlebop Smith]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

However, Licenses have this annoying habit 

Indeed, in their list of priorities, communicating with us is pretty down there, in the "don't bother looking on it yet" chapter.

Someone there wants to keep secret of what they are doing. 

 

I wonder how much of this is intending to keep secrets and how much of it is "too early". 

There are alot of questions I ask at work.. where the answers feel evasive or misleading. Then I try to remember the people I am asking them of are all brand new and know less about what's going on than myself.

 

There are probably a great number of hurdles still I'm place. Org. Charts not withstanding .. who is even supposed to tell the person that communicates with the other person...that eventually tells the public (insert message)

 

 

Edited Monday at 06:12 PM by Fizzlebop Smith

[Dakitess]

The threat of a Forum disparition also concerns the KSP1 part ?

I would not mind at all the KSP2 section to disappear, of course, but KSP1 is a bit more problematic. I guess our own french forum will live longer then x)

[PDCWolf]

22 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

For how long, though?

I'm not trying to be a doomer here, but rather I'm speaking from a place of practicality.  The forums have had issues for months, with multiple periods of extended downtime.  The license dies in a couple of months, and although the DNS thing is resolved, that is no guarantee that the forums will live on after the license expires.  Again I go back to the fact that the new owners haven't even had the common courtesy to come out and talk to us, which never bodes well.

So far, the domain transfer (and hosting transfer it implies) shows clear interest from our benefactors in keeping the forum going.

As for coming to talk to us, PD/IG didn't because they were trash, under a trash label. These people have apparently just formed their label and it could take from months to a year and even more to get everyone on their seats before a public face to speak to us gets picked and cleared. Yes, it's still stupidity that they're trying to keep the acquisition in the down low when they've got an 'active' EA project in the package they purchased. At least they should feel better that no one is interested in tales of the shire (barely above 20k wishlists) pre-release to keep tabs on them as much as we do here.

TL;DR:

• T2/PD/IG - Proven bad.
• Haveli-Annapurna - On their grace period due to barely getting together and probably not even having their legal papers set up. Of course such a grace is not infinite.

[Bej Kerman]

17 hours ago, Dakitess said:

The threat of a Forum disparition also concerns the KSP1 part ?

I would not mind at all the KSP2 section to disappear, of course, but KSP1 is a bit more problematic. I guess our own french forum will live longer then x)

The KSP 1, KSP 2 and French categories are all part of the same forum. Losing the license for the forum doesn't mean just deleting the KSP 2 category, it will all go offline. Every single last post.

I'm personally curious who will get the last word in this forum's history, after all these years.

[Grenartia]

On 1/26/2025 at 7:56 AM, Lisias said:

Because fewer things can be worst for a Project than having a good person but terrible manager in charge.

Good people don't like to screw good people, and since good people tends to gather together, if one of them ends up in managing without having the skills, the project at a whole will suffer because everybody will try to prevent screwing the manager.

Having a Good Manager that it's also a Good Person is simply one of the best blessings you can have professionally.

Having a Bad Manager that it's also a Good Person, is a curse. You will fight every day between the need to get rid of the guy and your natural impulse to stick to the Golden Rule with someone that you feel deserves it more than the average.

And the net result is you feeling like crap if you choose to save your job, or unemployed if you choose otherwise.

(obviously, I may be wrong about you - my apologies if I am)

Its not for me to decide where I fall on that spectrum. But I will say that most good managers are also good people, because being a good person is a prerequisite for being a good manager. If they appear to be a 'good manager', but are a bad person, then they're simply only good at pretending to be a good manager. Unfortunately, our society tends to reward those types more and more often than anyone else. Nepobabies constantly failing upwards, while cravenly leading their teams from the rear. 
 

On 1/26/2025 at 7:56 AM, Lisias said:

Now it's you that are giving them too much credit.

They don't need to work behind the scenes to screw and take over small and medium business. Most of them do the job by themselves.

I think you're underestimating things like lobbying to rewrite laws that advantage them over their potential victims, insider trading, etc. 

There's an entire range of different forms of macroeconomic manipulation that you can accomplish with enough of Daddy's Money, a few bought-off senators and congressmen, intimidated regulatory agents, and a complete and total lack of a moral compass. 
 

On 1/26/2025 at 7:56 AM, Lisias said:

On that video that you brought to the table, that Marsh company? They were failing to meet the expenses but yet still have their own airplane for their brass.

That doesn't really prove your point (and actually proves mine). The airplane was almost certainly a drop in the bucket compared to their expenses. It was almost certainly bought as an actual asset, and served as one. For an expanding business (especially in the era before the 07/08 financial crisis), a plane wasn't (and in many cases still isn't) simply a luxury item. The luxury aspect isn't as important as being able to send your dealmakers anywhere they may be required without having to worry about the hazards of more publicly-accessible airline travel (lost luggage, cramped seating, non-weather-related cancellations or delays caused by the airline, etc.). A company jet also serves as proof of success by the very act of owning it, which can help seal a deal. 

In other words, pre-buyout, the Marsh team likely saw selling the plane not only like looking for a dollar in the couch cushion to pay a $100 debt, but more importantly, equivalent to selling an important source of securing future revenue (IDK, probably like selling the car you use to commute to work). Post-buyout, all that the new ownership cared about was looting the house of all possible valuables before burning it down for insurance money. The spare dollar wouldn't have made a difference to the previous owners, but the new ones can leverage it to help buy a mansion to loot and burn next year. 
 

On 1/26/2025 at 7:56 AM, Lisias said:

With managers like these, being sold to Apollo was probably the best thing that could happen to their employees - whatever bad that happened to them, it would be 10 fold worst otherwise.

That's more of a grey area. Either way, they'd probably get blindsided by a layoff, but being laid off by the owners who are doing very well while their puppets get golden parachutes is just kicking them while they're down. 
 

On 1/27/2025 at 9:49 AM, para 9 said:

I'd rather hear nothing than hear more BS from Nate and Dakota, as we did for years.

Nate obviously had his hands tied by the suits. He ain't blameless, but there's far more blame that should be getting flung at the nameless and faceless suits that imposed repurposed bovine waste rules like "reuse KSP1 code, and don't talk to any of its devs, current or former". As for Dakota, he deserves none of the blame. He was even more hamstrung by virtue of being lower on the totem pole. 
 

On 1/27/2025 at 9:49 AM, para 9 said:

The new owners of the IP don't owe us anything. Early Access doesn't confer a legally-binding liability to follow through on speculative future plans. Caveat emptor. EA purchases are made on an "as is" basis. Your decision to acquire an EA user license should be made on the current state of the game; not what you hope it might be in the future. Everyone who paid for KSP2 got exactly what they bargained for. Buyers were even granted a window to refund. The game is released. That's all, folks

Riddle me this, batman: I never bought KSP2. I did, however, buy KSP1, along with both DLCs. I.E., outside of EA. Am I supposed to be up excrements creek without a paddle, too? Because I expect continuing support for my purchase from whoever owns the IP. That's not an unreasonable expectation to have. 
 

On 1/27/2025 at 9:49 AM, para 9 said:

The new owners certainly don't owe us indefinite support for a free forum devoted to legacy titles -- titles that have little prospect for future growth. 

When does the obligation end, then? And how was it communicated to potential customers?
 

15 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

So far, the domain transfer (and hosting transfer it implies) shows clear interest from our benefactors in keeping the forum going.

It really doesn't. All it shows is that T2 included this place as part of a package deal. We're likely just an ant in a box of bananas to them. 

[PDCWolf]

16 minutes ago, Grenartia said:

It really doesn't. All it shows is that T2 included this place as part of a package deal. We're likely just an ant in a box of bananas to them. 

"Oh yes if you give us money you can have the privilege of getting this ball of 200 angry users that requires you pay more money monthly for their website to be angry in, which also requires every couple months you pay thousands of dollars in forum software licenses." Or to make it clearer, in my opinion a constant, monthly, maintenance mess and resource drain of a forum is not a "nice tidbit included in the package". It's an expenditure Haveli decided they'll keep paying out of their pocket for... for whatever value they see in it, PR or otherwise, they could've absolutely received it, looked at it and said "nah, we ain't paying for that" the moment control was passed over.

[Skorj]

On 1/25/2025 at 3:42 AM, Lisias said:

Crunch time is when you desperately tries to do on the remaining time you still get everything you should had done, but didn't, with the time you had before.

Every single project in which I was hired in the final stages ended up in "death marches" (you see, no one hires a Senior when everything is going well...) had a past of pretty long delivery times that were mismanaged. Absolutely no exceptions.

Give too much time to people that don't know how to manage it, and you will take too much time to realize when they messed up - and then the choice will be a crunch time in the hope to salvage the project, or just ditch it and fire everybody.

 To me, it's obvious this is what happened with KSP2.  They had lots of people, they had lots of time, so a miss that big is clearly bad project management.  People working on too many unrelated tasks and not getting the core must-have stuff done at high quality (there's also some sketchy engineering practices in there too).    Now, this may have been the result of Take2 setting out silly milestone goals that forced this situation, or it may have been an unforced error, no way to tell from here.  The big puzzle to me about KSP2 is how they were anywhere near meeting their milestones for T2 at the steps along the way. 

While all we have to go on for RW/KSA is what they say about themselves, at least what they're saying looks like good project management.  I think they understand how to do it right, assuming they aren't just BSing us (and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt).  So far they seem to have what it takes to deliver a worthy successor to KSP (and I'd love it if they ended up using the Kerbal IP for it).

After all, all the project really needs are 3 requirements IMO:

1. A solid moddable base engine for a rocket sim, one that isn't the crashtastic mess of KSP1. 
2. Updated graphics.  I don't think they need "modern" graphics, in the sense of hundreds of people cranking out super-detailed art assets (we can live without Kerbal/Kitten shoelace physics), but a step up so that stuff like volumetric clouds and good exhaust plumes are natural to do in the engine.
3. Some sort of actual progression system, rather than just a sandbox with random missions.  Colonies building towards interstellar was just one way of many to do that.

Only number 1 is actually hard IMO, the rest is just run-of-the-mill game design any competent game studio could deliver.  And 1 isn't a problem to be solved by throwing a large team at it, but by a small team of the right people.  There's no point in ramping up funding for the full project until 1 is proven.  I'm excited for the future of some sort of KSP successor because RW seems to be doing just that.  Of course, we'll see.

[Scarecrow71]

9 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

they could've absolutely received it, looked at it and said "nah, we ain't paying for that" the moment control was passed over.

Well, until the license expires, we don't really know if they are going to keep paying or not.

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Well, until the license expires, we don't really know if they are going to keep paying or not.

The license.

The hosting is a different issue and is most probably paid for monthly, unless they've also got themselves some internal housing service (which still, requires wages and bills monthly). Even if the software was free, there's still a monthly cost they'll be footing.