Take Two Interactive (Rockstar, 2K, Private Division) canceling games, ending projects and laying off 5% of its workforce

[Icegrx]

2 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Or he was being lied to, or he is part of the lie. O don't know what would be worst.

In a way or another, a coup d'etat was ongoing for about 2 years already. One of the questions still on the open is if the insurgents were only waiting for the fall down, or if they helped on it.

But something apparently is clear: some clauses on some contracts were broken. If the aggrieved party is going to take some action, it's uncertain at this point.

Insurgents? Coup d’etat? Broken contracts? 
What kind of weird conspiracy theories are you cooking? How would you possibly know any of this? 
stop it

[Lisias]

9 minutes ago, Icegrx said:

Insurgents? Coup d’etat? Broken contracts? 
What kind of weird conspiracy theories are you cooking? How would you possibly know any of this? 
stop it

I'm just one of the messengers. You can stop one (me), but sooner or later other will pass.

[NH4Cl Enthusiast]

32 minutes ago, Icegrx said:

Insurgents? Coup d’etat? Broken contracts? 
What kind of weird conspiracy theories are you cooking? How would you possibly know any of this? 
stop it

You know, since the game sucks and I'm not getting a refund, I'm totally counting the forum and reddit entertainment as part of what I paid for. Please don't ask these outlandish takes to stop, it's the only fun there's left at this point!

To be more serious, I'm just calling Occam's razor on this whole debacle. The explanation is very mundane and unexciting. IG was poorly managed, both the current and projected numbers looked bad. Someone at T2 had a final meeting where they looked at the numbers and decided to cut their losses. The discussion was something like this:

"Oh man, this sucks. It was a really good IP but there's no way this will turn a profit." 

"Yeah, it's a shame but we're looking at least two more years before 1.0 can even come close to reality."

"And you're confident IG can't pull it off?"

"Ehh, it's fifty-fifty. Well, more like twenty-eighty. Plus the sales projections they sent us are just nonsense and for some reason they're using this weird 80's font so I'm not sure if I'm even reading it right. Funny pictures though."

"Well, Zork (at this point it's revealed these are actually evil alien lizard people), I'm not sinking another ten million to this. Let's just call it. Oh man, we're gonna look real bad on this, aren't we?"

"Yeah, but it'll blow off. Sucks for the devs, though. At least The Great Scale King will be happy to know we can pinch off some costs."

"It's decided then. Now to point two on the agenda - the mind controlling nanobot serum. You said this was to be delivered via bluetooth emissions..."

[Pulstar]

24 minutes ago, NH4Cl Enthusiast said:

To be more serious, I'm just calling Occam's razor on this whole debacle. The explanation is very mundane and unexciting. IG was poorly managed, both the current and projected numbers looked bad. Someone at T2 had a final meeting where they looked at the numbers and decided to cut their losses.

Yeah pretty much, I doubt it's a coincidence this happened in late April when their fiscal year ends in March. Newest numbers in the spreadsheet didn't add up, overall company numbers might not have been good enough (this is hypothetical, the T2 annual report will be released in mid-May, but they no doubt have the full picture/data internally already for some time) and actions were taken to make the bottom line prospects look better for the new fiscal year, which also explains the other news about layoffs in T2 in general from the first post ITT breaking on the 17th-ish of April.

This in my experience is just business as usual in large publicly traded companies, for better or worse.

Edited May 2 by Pulstar

[Lisias]

27 minutes ago, NH4Cl Enthusiast said:

You know, since the game sucks and I'm not getting a refund, I'm totally counting the forum and reddit entertainment as part of what I paid for. Please don't ask these outlandish takes to stop, it's the only fun there's left at this point!

The Conspiracist that lives in me salutes the Anarchist that lives in you!

 

27 minutes ago, NH4Cl Enthusiast said:

To be more serious, I'm just calling Occam's razor on this whole debacle. The explanation is very mundane and unexciting. IG was poorly managed, both the current and projected numbers looked bad. Someone at T2 had a final meeting where they looked at the numbers and decided to cut their losses.

I agree. Problem - the most simple explanation for the info I had gathered until this moment involves a serious breach of Contract at best. Or a kinda of "coup d'etat" at worst (perhaps in the same grounds StarTheory was sacked - you know, we have a precedent already).

Problem: talking too much, and I risk slandering someone - and this would be a concrete problem.

Edited May 2 by Lisias
Tyops are cosnpiring agaisnt me!!!

[Stevie_D]

Considering the reports in Eurogamer and other PC websites, this seems like the nail in the coffin for KSP2. 

Nate can come out with any statement he wants, but the facts on the ground are that Intercept *were* the Seattle office. That office is now closed. Take 2 are reducing their workforce massively and cutting back on many projects. 
You don't close an office of 70 people to then just open a new office somewhere else with 70 people. So, in the increasingly unlikely event KSP2 isn't cancelled, it will be continued with an *extremely* reduced staff, most likely halved or more. Maybe even a quarter.

Considering KSP2 was already a day (600+ days actually, hah!) late and a dollar short to the market, as well as receiving a terrible reception, and still does have a terrible reputation, ...and even WITH 50-70 staff still looked YEARS away from completion, I can only imagine how much longer it would've taken with a dev team even half the size.  A project taking even longer to complete with a constant grind of negative publicity and bad reviews hammering away and working against you? It's hard to see a No Man's Sky redemption story here. Hello Games never laid off half or three quarters of its staff.

Considering the cataclysmic rocky road this project has already suffered over the years, these continual massive blows aren't the sort of setbacks a big project can keep taking and keep afloat - a cursory and basic glance over the history of gaming will tell you that flat out

So glad I never wasted £45 on this and waited. And that's now the problem for this project, if it does indeed limp on in a zombified, animated corpse of a project. There are many, many, people like me who will see this news today and not even bother coming back in to check on this game because it's development might take twice as long or be half as good or both, due to a skeleton crew working on it. I usually checked in here or googled it once every couple months. Now? Might be years, if I bother looking at all. Today's news will make interest in the game drop off a cliff and Take 2, who only go by metrics, will see KSP2's internet engagement profile of searches and social media interest fall accordingly. 

That's why I believe this is the final nail in the coffin, even if Nate tells us the game development continues on. It's his job to spin it positively and lie to the customers that the ship isn't sinking.

It's a crying shame, because the initial idea of the increased scope of the game was glorious,...

but here lies the dead body of KSP2.

It was an ugly, disfigured, and wretched child, but the idea of it held a lot of promise.

[NH4Cl Enthusiast]

29 minutes ago, Lisias said:

The Conspiracist that lives in me salutes the Anarchist that lives in you!

 

Thank you, this comment made my day! I'm feeling 25 years younger already  I'm just here, basking in the blazing inferno that is this forum and the ksp subreddit. And you know what? When life hands you a nice fire like this, you make s'mores.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, NH4Cl Enthusiast said:

Going from "overgeneralizing usually isn't a great idea" to generalizing into a narrative where most C levels are actual psychopaths in the span of two sentences

I believe, de-escalation from overgeneralizing to generalizing is exactly what I promised in these two sentences. I also used the phrase "a lot" instead of "most". If two of the shoes in  your house have baby rattlesnakes in them, that's a lot, even though it's probably far from being the most. It's also two more rattlesnakes than you'd like to have in your house, and you might start thinking that there is something systematically wrong with your house or the shoes that it happened twice.

1 hour ago, NH4Cl Enthusiast said:

Most of them are fairly normal people who are just good at their jobs and their job is to make money and not cater to the feelings of gaming communities.

I am very good at my job too, which is dealing with simulation and control systems. I could be making bank in military-industrial or self-driving cars, but I'm not going to, because I don't want that on my conscience. So I make video games instead. Because I can do my job, one I'm very good at, without putting lives at risk. Being good at your job and not carrying about people's feelings only goes so far. When you kick hundreds of people on the street to maximize the profit, saying, "It's just my job," is about as good of a defense as "I was just following orders," while committing war crimes.

Is that every C-level? No. Most run startups and will go down with the ship if crap hits the fan. But we aren't talking about these people when we're talking about studios getting unceremoniously closed, are we?

And before you say, "But they must make profit to stay afloat," gaming companies posted record earnings in 2023. December 2023 was the highest revenue month ever for games. Bar none. And the Take Two CEO has recently increased his own salary to $43M/year as a pat on the back for that. I don't know how familiar you are with studio finances, but running the studio of the size of Intercept costs several times less than T2 CEO's salary. And we haven't even talked about the bonuses. That's just salary.

 

If you have a studio your corporation owns, a corporation you are a CEO of, and it's being mismanaged and isn't delivering on targets, replace that leadership. Possibly even dismantle the studio and absorb the employees into the other projects. If you are a CEO taking in $43M/year and your solution is to serve 70 WARN notices, I'd like to hear you explain how this is a total normal person behavior of doing one's job. Please, go ahead.

[Lisias]

17 minutes ago, K^2 said:

If you are a CEO taking in $43M/year and your solution is to serve 70 WARN notices, I'd like to hear you explain how this is a total normal person behavior of doing one's job. Please, go ahead.

You get what you promotes. If we promote sociopaths into high management roles, it's a surprise some (if not most) of them will reach the top?

We (you, me, and everybody else) are the ones funding this party, that money came from our pockets.

[Cryptobux]

You suggest that the CEO should bankroll, from his own personal salary, a loss-making division of the company he runs? That's why you're not a CEO.

::Edit - and before you repeat that you said they should change management, T2 already did that with Star Theory.

Edited May 2 by Cryptobux

[K^2]

4 minutes ago, Cryptobux said:

You suggest that the CEO should bankroll, from his own personal salary, a loss-making division of the company he runs? That's why you're not a CEO.

I'm saying that if maybe you had a loss-generating division operating under your nose for four years, you don't get to quadruple your salary, and then fire absolutely everyone in that division without looking at who was actually at fault there.

But also, I happen to pay taxes. A lot of taxes, actually. I pay more in taxes every year than half of the country makes as their pre-tax paycheck. So I'm paying for children going to local schools, for people who aren't covered through work to receive some sort of healthcare, even for some poor people getting food. And I think that's the right thing to do. Because that's how you end up with a nice society full of healthy, educated people, and not a dystopian hellhole where everything sucks.

If you don't understand that, you're part of the reason why things suck.

5 minutes ago, Lisias said:

We (you, me, and everybody else) are the ones funding this party, that money came from our pockets.

You got me there.

[Cryptobux]

1 minute ago, K^2 said:

I'm saying that if maybe you had a loss-generating division operating under your nose for four years, you don't get to quadruple your salary, and then fire absolutely everyone in that division without looking at who was actually at fault there.

But also, I happen to pay taxes. A lot of taxes, actually. I pay more in taxes every year than half of the country makes as their pre-tax paycheck. So I'm paying for children going to local schools, for people who aren't covered through work to receive some sort of healthcare, even for some poor people getting food. And I think that's the right thing to do. Because that's how you end up with a nice society full of healthy, educated people, and not a dystopian hellhole where everything sucks.

If you don't understand that, you're part of the reason why things suck.

You got me there.

Ok, somehow you're conflating a humblebrag about yourself, taxes, and society with a productive arm of a company. Try to stay on topic.

Also, noone gives a hoot about your claimed income. Go for it.

[K^2]

4 minutes ago, Cryptobux said:

Try to stay on topic.

Literally the first sentence of that quote. But I get it, you didn't care about the second part so much, that you had to spend the entire post telling me how much you didn't care. And then to say one more time how much you and everybody else didn't care about it. Just to make sure I know you don't care.

Noted, other people's income is never a thing you think about, Cryptobux. So lets stick to the topic of... Oh, you might want to skip that part. We were talking about CEO salary and whether it's a good use of company finances, and I know how much you don't care about it.

[Majorjim!]

1 hour ago, Stevie_D said:

It was an ugly, disfigured, and wretched child, but the idea of it held a lot of promise.

This is exactly what my parents said of me. 

[NH4Cl Enthusiast]

8 minutes ago, K^2 said:

I believe, de-escalation from overgeneralizing to generalizing is exactly what I promised in these two sentences. I also used the phrase "a lot" instead of "most". If two of the shoes in  your house have baby rattlesnakes in them, that's a lot, even though it's probably far from being the most. It's also two more rattlesnakes than you'd like to have in your house, and you might start thinking that there is something systematically wrong with your house or the shoes that it happened twice.

You're arguing semantics over the words you used which is just splitting hairs, but as I said you're still spinning the narrative where "lots", as in a sizeable number that could easily in the context be interpreted as most (over half) of them are actual psychopaths. If I told you lots of Europeans drink coffee in the morning, then another person says most Europeans drink coffee in the morning, you would not go on a tantrum saying you've been mislead. Lots can mean most and most means lots while they're not completely interchangeable. It's a matter of what kind of narrative you're creating.

I'm assuming you have read at least one credible study where C level executives have been psychiatrically evaluated in statistically relevant numbers in order to make claims on their psychological condition? Because calling people psychopaths on a whim is incredibly immature and pretty insulting to boot. I take some personal offence at this as I've worked in an advisory role with big corporation executives and a very good colleague of mine also rose through the ranks into such a position. I hope you take a moment and come down from your unwarranted stance where you don't actively consider the thought that you might actually be in the wrong and take a moment to consider how you'd feel if I claimed that "lots" of your colleagues and friends who you personally like and respect are psychopaths. If you can't see the problem in that then that's on you and I'm not interested in teaching you how to think, but I also feel the need to call you out on this.

47 minutes ago, K^2 said:

I am very good at my job too, which is dealing with simulation and control systems. I could be making bank in military-industrial or self-driving cars, but I'm not going to, because I don't want that on my conscience. So I make video games instead. Because I can do my job, one I'm very good at, without putting lives at risk. Being good at your job and not carrying about people's feelings only goes so far. When you kick hundreds of people on the street to maximize the profit, saying, "It's just my job," is about as good of a defense as "I was just following orders," while committing war crimes.

Is that every C-level? No. Most run startups and will go down with the ship if crap hits the fan. But we aren't talking about these people when we're talking about studios getting unceremoniously closed, are we?

And before you say, "But they must make profit to stay afloat," gaming companies posted record earnings in 2023. December 2023 was the highest revenue month ever for games. Bar none. And the Take Two CEO has recently increased his own salary to $43M/year as a pat on the back for that. I don't know how familiar you are with studio finances, but running the studio of the size of Intercept costs several times less than T2 CEO's salary. And we haven't even talked about the bonuses. That's just salary.

Nice strawman, but I never said any of that and you do know that yourself too as you're literally trying to put words in my mouth by saying so. I never even said anything about maximizing profits. I'm talking about bog standard financial decisions that happen in every single industry on the planet in every single large corporation. Bad projects shut down all the time, even good projects shut down all the time due to sometimes incredibly stupid reasons and people are laid off all the time and most of them don't deserve it. It sucks a lot for the affected people and generally speaking nobody likes it and I'm not defending the system at all which enables this. It's demotivating, soul crushing, all manners of wrong and burns people like me out very quickly, which happened to me too and I wasn't even in the big seats but just a highly specialised senior engineer. 

Reality is though, that IG is a company which secured funding but failed to deliver the product. Nobody else is responsible for their failure but themselves. You can be butt hurt over it as much as you want, but it's the publisher's money and they deemed IG not to be viable. Is it fair for us consumers? Not at all. Is it fair to the individual developers? Not at all. Is it fair to IG management? Well, they could've certainly done a better job. I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, but this is where the failure sits. Is it fair to expect that T2 keeps pouring money down into a project that won't return a profit? I don't think so, they too bought something. The state of this game has been clear enough since launch and I very much doubt the people at T2 would be cutting off a profitable studio. It's possible since morons exist at every level, but typically there are also smart people who stop that from happening. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they're too risk averse. None of that makes them psychopaths.

 

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

If you have a studio your corporation owns, a corporation you are a CEO of, and it's being mismanaged and isn't delivering on targets, replace that leadership. Possibly even dismantle the studio and absorb the employees into the other projects.

Yeah for example if you had a developer called Star Theory and it became apparent they're not able to hit their target release, internally they have nothing to show for their work so far that even remotely resembles a playable game and then you decide to restructure that company under closer scrutiny and call it Intercept Games and offer the old developers a job at the new company. Does that sort of move sound good for you?

[kdaviper]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5437163/

No time to read this yet but here is a review of 45 papers about narcissism in leadership roles

 

[boolybooly]

OMG ... 

Is there any chance development can continue with a smaller team?

Sorry about the treachery everyone!

 

[Codraroll]

So, a question I haven't heard anybody make yet: Will this forum remain up? Hosting it is an expense presumably paid for by the now-defunct developer.

It seems they will continue "support" for KSP2. That might very well just mean "the game will still be available on Steam." Not that they plan to develop it further, but they'll at least ensure that there remains a way to get paid by future customers, if any show up. Like a street musician who has stopped playing and gone home, but at least left his hat on the sidewalk, in case any passers-by happen to throw money in it anyway.

If my own experience with layoffs is anything to go by, the folks at the office are now (well, time zone difference notwithstanding) packing their boxes, sharing some goodbye cake, and handing their laptops to the IT people, before the real estate people will come to inspect the facilities tomorrow, and list it as available for rent next week or so. 60 days' notice doesn't mean you keep working for 60 more days, it means you get paid for 60 more days and sent home without further duties.

Some employees may still be "hard at work with KSP2", as implied by the Tweet. That probably just means writing documentation, to make it easier for whomever ends up buying the code base in case they want to continue the project. It doesn't mean continuing development, it means packing stuff neatly into boxes and writing a list of what can be found in each box, before the boxes are carted off to storage somewhere.

I hope somebody will buy the IP and continue the project. Maybe it has already happened, maybe it won't ever happen. Either way, I'll continue to watch for news. I just hope the forum will continue to be available as a news channel.

[NH4Cl Enthusiast]

10 minutes ago, kdaviper said:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5437163/

No time to read this yet but here is a review of 45 papers about narcissism in leadership roles

 

Completely different thing from casually calling people psychopaths. Just to debunk this particular paper's relevance here it says very clearly that for this field of study:

"Definitions of narcissism in organizational psychology draw on the criteria indicated above, but define narcissism as a personality trait rather than a mental illness. It is seen as relatively stable and existing in all individuals, albeit to varying degrees."

So it's about certain personality traits being more prevalent in leadership roles, which should not come as a surprise to anyone. I would still not go around calling people narcissists either though, it's an equally insulting thing to do.

[Pulstar]

2 hours ago, Cryptobux said:

You suggest that the CEO should bankroll, from his own personal salary, a loss-making division of the company he runs? That's why you're not a CEO.

From a business POV this kind of situation of having a loss-making division is not as clear cut as you think it is. I've seen multiple restructuring attempts of loss-making divisions or plants, firing everyone is a last resort, usually you try to salvage as much as possible, cut fixed costs (including cutting admin/support jobs), centralize/consolidate/move staff around, reduce shifts, shutdown one production line etc. Severance packages cost money, hiring new people costs money, preparing layoffs costs money, union negotiations cost money etc. so it must all be worth the end result and the alternative cost.

As for how this connects to the topic at hand, well T2 says "support" will continue (YMMV on what they mean by this or how much you can trust PR as such), so we have an odd case where they supposedly are not axing the project but feel no need to keep the production staff around, which is odd to say the least. I would expect retaining an engineering handover team if this is a switch of studios responsible is happening at a minimum (well unless they want to start over, which normally is what happens, here it is hard to say, again PR is vague), but even that doesn't guarantee better results than merely keeping IG around with new management. AFAIK studios versed in making orbital mechanics games with the KSP2 roadmap feature set are not exactly growing on trees...

This is before going on a long tangent about how much value added a CEO actually provides as compared to his salary, and how good are prospects of a company that sells the output of "knowledge workers" skilled labor rather than one of production machinery, if one just fires all the staff with their know-how. Or one about how much actual business need there really is to lower costs in the company and how much is purely artificial based on bonus targets the CEO has, because big investors want to squeeze their lemons dry. Or one about how good of a manager the mentioned CEO is. Or the social responsibility impact of his salary cut vs people losing jobs etc.

Edited May 2 by Pulstar

[Flush Foot]

13 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

So, a question I haven't heard anybody make yet: Will this forum remain up? Hosting it is an expense presumably paid for by the now-defunct developer.

https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1039965578754007060/1235360830695145543

Dakota on Discord: “this server isn't going anywhere any time soon. same with the forums.”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[pandaman]

My thoughts on this...

It would appear definite that changes are happening, exactly what they are is, for us at least, currently unknown.

It could be complete a shut down.

It could be a restructuring and downsizing, with the team relocating, but development continues in some way.

We will find out in due course.

The WARN notice seems to be very similar to what I experienced in the UK where all affected employees get notified simultaneously and put on 'consultation', even those whose jobs are safe still get the same, brutal, information at the same time.

Then those that are being kept on or moved around are informed and offered new positions etc.  And the unfortunate ones are let go.

That, I think, is the stage we are at now.  TT knows what it wants to do, but the affected staff will find out, possibly individually, how they will be affected in the coming days.   It is a time of great uncertainty for everyone there and they all have my best wishes.

[Oak7603]

7 minutes ago, Flush Foot said:

Dakota on Discord: “this server isn't going anywhere any time soon. same with the forums.”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

KSP2 was being fully developed until it wasn't...

I guess that the forums and Discord are for the KSP franchise as a whole which still makes some money and so could remain open even if there is no longer any development in KSP2. 

[Lisias]

On 5/2/2024 at 7:21 AM, boolybooly said:

Is there any chance development can continue with a smaller team?

There're signs that I.G. was sacked in favour of another Studio in the same way StarTheory was sacked in favour of i.G.

You will find something on Reddit , initially mentioned here (but I can't vow for the veracity of the information).

So, yeah, apparently development will keep ongoing - but if History had taught me something, is that we don't have a good omen about how things will develop. Time will tell.

-- -- DISCLAIMER 2024-0504:13:13Z -- --

I'm talking about signs, not evidences. For all aspects, this should be seen as a Conspiracy.Theory with roots on wishful thinking - but based on evidences from the past that makes the thing plausible.

Edited May 3 by Lisias
Tyops are still conspiring against me!!!

[Pulstar]

23 minutes ago, Lisias said:

There're signs that I.G. was sacked in favour of another Studio in the same way StarTheory was sacked in favour of i.G.

You will find something on Reddit , initially mentioned here (but I can't vow for the veracity of the information).

I'm interpreting this more as something that developer happens to coincidentally still be working for, despite the original pitch losing out to Star Theory. For one I think he would be less chatty about the whole thing if he did have a contract with Take Two, because then he would certainly have a gag order/NDA on it. It's certainly a good marketing opportunity for him, I would do the same in his shoes. Not the first time somebody tried to capitalize on a disappointed, to put it mildly ,fanbase.

However I do agree that the vague PR "continue to support/hard at work" statements and other scraps of information we've got do allow the possibility that a developer switch is taking place, giving us a deja vu or flashbacks to the Star Theory shutdown. Still it depends how honest PR is being with us and how much you trust them, support/worked on sadly can mean a lot of things and the new developer is the best or least bad of the many possibilities allowed by such wording.

Edited May 2 by Pulstar