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

[Ryaja]

I know it's not much but the build I'd and size on the voyager channel changed https://steamdb.info/app/954850/history/

[stephensmat]

16 minutes ago, Ryaja said:

I know it's not much but the build I'd and size on the voyager channel changed https://steamdb.info/app/954850/history/

The previously announced update is still coming. My hope is that we'll get more information at that point, or soon after. This *might* all still be in play. They *might* even be handing off production to another Subsidiary, or even another Developer, like they did a few years ago.

My guess is the reason we haven't heard anything is because the Devs themselves don't know yet. 70 layoffs are announced, but how many of them have been decided? How many of them have been told?

We can't expect them to tell us what they don't yet know themselves.

[Ryaja]

4 minutes ago, stephensmat said:

The previously announced update is still coming. My hope is that we'll get more information at that point, or soon after. This *might* all still be in play. They *might* even be handing off production to another Subsidiary, or even another Developer, like they did a few years ago.

My guess is the reason we haven't heard anything is because the Devs themselves don't know yet. 70 layoffs are announced, but how many of them have been decided? How many of them have been told?

We can't expect them to tell us what they don't yet know themselves.

The devs don't know/had to sign NDAs most likely

[stephensmat]

6 minutes ago, Ryaja said:

The devs don't know/had to sign NDAs most likely

Yup. That's why I'm not angry about any of this. As bad as it is for us, these guys are playing for their livelihoods.

[AtomicTech]

4 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

This situation is getting worse.  The community is now starting to be impacted, including the mods.

 

Meh, ShadowDev failed to finish most projects, tried to force his own (often arbitrary) standards and techniques without consulting the tons of folks trying to come up with a community standard in the early days of KSP 2 modding, and his code wasn't often up to par. Had he finished projects and collaborated with the community (and the more experienced devs), then I would've had a completely different take.

We've already had the mass modding exodus for KSP. 

[Scarecrow71]

So, for anyone who cares...

Dead Island 2 was in development hell for more than 8 years and went through 3 different studios before getting a release in 2023.  And it sold 2 million copies by May 2023 and has generally positive reviews.  Dead Island 1 came out in 2011, and DI2 was supposed to come out in early 2015...but then, as I said, went through 3 different studios (Yager, Sumo Digital, Dambuster) before getting serious development work started in 2019.  And at that point it took them 4 years to release.  Side note - Dambuster is the studio that finished the product, and they are an internal studio owned by Deep Silver.  You can read about the game here:

Dead Island 2 - Wikipedia

Now, what does this have to do with KSP2?  Mostly nothing...apart from showing that sometimes games eventually do come together in spite of all the garbage going on with corporations.  DI2 also had to deal with stuff due to the pandemic in 2020/2021, but they eventually got through it.

I guess what I'm saying is that I still hold some small ray of hope that the game gets finished.  I am hoping that TT turns this over to a studio that is competent and capable and that finishes this thing the way it should have been done originally.  I'm a realist, and I know that this is a long shot and may not happen.  But a guy's gotta have hope, right?

[AtomicTech]

6 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I guess what I'm saying is that I still hold some small ray of hope that the game gets finished.  I am hoping that TT turns this over to a studio that is competent and capable and that finishes this thing the way it should have been done originally.  I'm a realist, and I know that this is a long shot and may not happen.  But a guy's gotta have hope, right?

I am right there with you

We just gotta hope for the best.

[Bej Kerman]

Ultimately, it's just a game. If it does go somewhere after this, great, if it doesn't, we'll all find some other toy to play with

[Jaypeg]

On 5/3/2024 at 2:50 PM, K^2 said:

Intercept isn't going to be working for the next 60 days. They were already sent home. The notice is a legal formality. In practice, employees are fired on the spot and given 60 days of pay and benefits. Nobody is working on KSP2 right now, and no progress towards 1.0 will be made until a replacement studio is found. We don't know how long that will be, but don't expext anything to happen over the next couple of months at least, and it might take a lot longer. I would be shocked if we get any code updates this year, unless something was basically ready to go and can be pushed out by a skeleton crew of PD devs, and even that would be minor. 1.0 is not coming this year. It probably isn't coming in 2025 either.

interesting.

Mike said something cool on twitter though: They are ""handing the game off"" to another group. So someone will work on it apparently.

[Pulstar]

19 minutes ago, Jaypeg said:

Mike said something cool on twitter though: They are ""handing the game off"" to another group. So someone will work on it apparently.

Don't get your hopes up without a proper official announcement stating as much (and even then I would be skeptical about it resulting in more than bare minimum support to keep the game from being delisted on steam).

For all you know he could be simply making sure all the paperwork, keys, accounts, backups, concept art, cutscene master recordings, marketing materials etc. are accounted for and handed over to PD for mothballing and spending the next years forgotten in some closet, deep storage or archive.

Edited May 4 by Pulstar

[Stevie_D]

1 hour ago, Jaypeg said:

Mike said something cool on twitter though: They are ""handing the game off"" to another group. So someone will work on it apparently.

As Pulstar says, you shouldn't get your hopes up by that. It's the same difference between "developing" a game and "supporting" a game (the terminology the corporate press release used). Just because you support a game it does not mean that game is actively being worked on. 
Handing off the game to another group could be handing it over to 2 people who just manage the steam account for it. I'm not saying that will be the case, but it's an example of why you shouldn't read too much into that term.

Whatever happens, one thing is certain - this game is not going to continue on in the same manner it has been up to now. The 5% layoff by Take 2 included nearly *all* Intercept employees - that tells you something. If they laid off 5% of their workforce evenly then only 5% of Intercept Games employees would've been affected. 90% is the region we're looking at for Intercept, and that's a conservative estimate. Even if they rehire some of them, you wouldn't close the entire studio if you had a similar workforce. You close the physical building because you do not need a building for that many people anymore. Half the size? A quarter? 1 single office room in Private Division's HQ because only 5 people will now work on the game? Who knows. But if any future development does happen on this game, it will be *greatly* reduced. I'd be highly surprised if the road map stays the same as it is at the very least.

Edited May 4 by Stevie_D

[Lisias]

On 5/3/2024 at 1:50 AM, K^2 said:

I would be shocked if we get any code updates this year, unless something was basically ready to go and can be pushed out by a skeleton crew of PD devs, and even that would be minor. 1.0 is not coming this year. It probably isn't coming in 2025 either.

Given the current status quo, this statement is the most optimistic leap of faith I had read on this Forum for while.

[Pthigrivi]

How unusual is that we’ve gotten no official word on any of this?

[joratto]

7 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

How unusual is that we’ve gotten no official word on any of this?

First I was waiting for a Friday night update. By now, I don't even expect an update on Monday.

[Overheal]

At this point, not surprised, just disappointed. 

I knew this was a mess on launch but I gave them my $50 anyway because I wanted to support it. But clearly someone high up said to shove this out to early access way too early and unstable and feature incomplete to inject cash into someone's pocket. It should have been at least as feature complete as KSP1 before launch, if not have 1 of the new flagship features or 2, like multiplayer or colonies, or physicalized asteroid belts, you know, the trailer bait.

I hope the project lives on in some productive fashion, either in another studio or made open source. From the offset though for my part the problem seemed to be Unity and how it was implemented. KSP2 never made significant stability changes to how KSP1 worked, large craft would still bring supercomputers to a crawl etc. and it didn't help that the game implementation was, hey, stack 30 of this same part together and let it all wobble every tick. There didn't seem to be much tricks used under the hood to make the game stable, because it can't decide if it's a space crash simulator or a space program game. So lo and behold, let's calculate all these trusses every tick, let's not lightweight these parts/payloads hidden behind a faring at launch, and watch framerate go poo and watch things spontaneously wiggle themselves into a billion pieces, let's make it practically impossible to maintain fixed orbits for all your relay sats because of floating point error, etc. - those kinda issues bug me more than a lack of multiplayer and colonies, the base game should be running and operating a lot smoother, and a lot more like a refined game that knows what it wants to be. 

31 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

How unusual is that we’ve gotten no official word on any of this?

Extremely Weird. It leaves the community to run wild with our thoughts and no direction, and the silence is deafening. If there was short term hopefulness for the direction of the game you'd anticipate an official word from someone at the studio other than the boilerplate 'talk when we can lol' that we have. It leads to deductive inferences, like either nobody at the studio can talk competently about the future of the project, or because they are part of the layoff, they don't want to, like the community manager appears to have effectively said 'no, I'm not polishing this turd for the higher ups anymore, I'm mentally checked out, have to figure out how I'm going to eat this July.' And that would be completely understandable, despite frustrating as a supporter? backer? gamer? customer? victim? mark? In this debacle. And the corpo statement just reads as 'no no no this wasn't a rugpull, please don't delist our game and issue millions of dollars of refunds, new infrastructure update in 2 weeks! Make Kerbal Great Again!' For all we know it boils down to putting the game in maintenance mode and keeping it propped up like Bernie from Weekend at Bernies. 

Edited May 4 by Overheal

[Kerbart]

7 minutes ago, Overheal said:

I knew this was a mess on launch but I gave them my $50 anyway because I wanted to support it. But clearly someone high up said to shove this out to early access way too early and unstable and feature incomplete to inject cash into someone's pocket. It should have been at least as feature complete as KSP1 before launch, if not have 1 of the new flagship features or 2, like multiplayer or colonies, or physicalized asteroid belts, you know, the trailer bait.

The reason it was pushed into early access was because of endless delays. The advertised publication date ("Spring 2021" and so on) was moved a couple of times.  I doubt it was primarily a money grab but rather an "either you have something to publish or we cancel the product" situation.

There's little doubt that without EA last year, the state of development would have been worse than what it is right now. With nothing to show for after about half a decade of development. For what is by T2 standards a niche title. I have very little doubt this project would have gone on the chopping block all the same.

Maybe it would have been better that we. We wouldn't have that $50 hangover and KSP2 would be the sweet dream that never was, instead of the nightmare that finally ended.

[AtomicTech]

4 hours ago, Jaypeg said:

interesting.

Mike said something cool on twitter though: They are ""handing the game off"" to another group. So someone will work on it apparently.

Link?

[KincaidFrankMF]

41 minutes ago, Overheal said:

But clearly someone high up said to shove this out to early access way too early and unstable and feature incomplete

Agreed, but I wonder if the ultimate cause of this whole mess wasn't something simpler and more fundamental, right from the start.

When KSP2 was first announced, something really jumped out at me from those early interviews with Nate. There was a feeling in sections of the community that the reason KSP1 still had bugs and framerate issues after so long was that the original devs were a bunch of gifted amateurs who didn't really know what they were doing. Nate wouldn't come right out and say that, obviously, but it was all over the subtext. We're not going to have any of those problems because we're bringing in a fresh team to redo the core architecture from scratch. And because we're using proper professionals we should have a faster, slicker, all-singing-all-dancing version of the game ready to ship in about, oh, six months?

And that proved to be rubbish. The reason KSP still has issues is because it is (ok, was) utterly unique and therefore presents a unique set of challenges. Ok, so the original devs may not have known one end of a GPU from the other, but in all other respects they clearly knew exactly what they were doing thank you very much.

That false premise, that KSP1 was coded in a fundamentally inefficient and amateurish way, shaped everything that followed. Harvester was side-lined. A new team was brought in. They started the whole painful process of trying to simulate an entire solar system from scratch... and found out that it was really, really hard.

With just a touch more hubris, they might have had a good long conversation with the KSP1 team upfront and done things differently. I loved For Science, for all its faults, but there's nothing obvious here that couldn't have been done quicker/cheaper/better by simply building onto the existing KSP1 framework. Using the original team, supplemented with some fresh eyes to take a good hard look at what could be improved.

The only thing on the roadmap that obviously demands a redo-from-start approach is multiplayer, and (with the benefit of hindsight) that clearly wasn't worth everything that followed. Even if some optimist did decide that it warranted all the extra work of making a brand new game, the KSP1 team would still have been the logical choice to spearhead the project. They could have designed the new architecture to be as compatible as possible with the old, for example, so that chunks of code could be imported wholesale with minimal effort. As it is, it very much looks from the outside as if they designed the new system to be completely different, then were forced to start cannibalising KSP1 code anyway because nothing was working right, and spent years trying to force square pegs into round holes as a result.

One false assumption at the start. Lots of mistakes afterwards, sure, along with an enormous amount of hard work, but it could all have been so much easier 

[LameLefty]

Someday, after the NDAs have expired and/or no one cares enough to enforce them anymore, I really hope the crew from NoClip gives us an hour-long deep-dive into this mess: how it started, what really happened with Star Theory, how we got from Nate telling us just a couple weeks ago that everything was fine and showing us some WIP stuff like the new clouds, etc. to T2 just sacking the whole crew essentially overnight. 

In the meantime, 11 years after I started playing KSP in the first place, I’m seriously considering just wiping my installations of both games and forgetting about it all until around Labor Day (first weekend of September for non-USAians) and seeing what’s going on then. This has just been too painful. I know it’s dumb to say that about a game, but KSP and everything associated with it has always been more than just a game to me. 

[Pulstar]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

How unusual is that we’ve gotten no official word on any of this?

Unusual depends on what the currently ongoing situation really is.

It's not at all unusual if you assume the worst. Whether one bases this on a bunch of EA games or game devs that go out with a whimper with people guessing they're dead because the website etc. has not seen a single update in ages, or on the typical hiding head in the sand until the problem goes away (media buzz dies down) this is rather typical in such scenarios.

It is unusual only if there are concrete plans to continue development. The absolute best case scenario would be that PD is still fishing for or in negotiations with another studio to "handle" (which might not necessarily mean "finish the roadmap") the game and they don't want to say anything without being certain (having a contract). But honestly if that was the case PD would outright clarify the situation since there is PR fallout from it. The only reason why one would not bother to minimize PR fallout is if there is even worse PR fallout on the horizon.

It's possible T2 is waiting until after the annual report goes public on the 16th of May so that it overshadows any other news related to them for one reason or another lessening the impact of the news (either because the figures are good, so why complain or they're so bad that IG getting closed is not the same order of bad new magnitude). I already mentioned earlier ITT that the timing of the job cuts rumors mentioned in the first post of this topic is not coincidental. The leak might have been deliberate to pre-emptively soften the impact of what is in the annual figures, after all why do job cuts if figures are great?

FYI their Q3 earnings release indicated a 842 million USD net loss for the 3 quarters. Projections for Q4 also have a loss with the lower (worst case) bound being slightly over a billion year to date, now the market is aware of that, they have been given explanations which are no doubt somewhere in the transcript. Most of this seems to be from impairment on on some intangible assets (IPs, brand value, goodwill etc. of something they overpaid for like another studio possibly, need to check) that clearly had way more value initially posted into the books than in reality and needed a correction. Page 15 and 16 of the below is where I got this from:

https://ir.take2games.com/static-files/2f8bd105-3bb8-4f05-97a2-36749e251a27

In any case if they say nothing next week I'm quite certain there will be radio silence until they publish their annual report on the 16th IIRC.

 

Edited May 4 by Pulstar

[Infinite Aerospace]

1 hour ago, AtomicTech said:

Link?

You can find that on Michael (NerdyMike) Linkedin. He comments about being layed off at Intercept Games, how it's bittersweet in essence but how he's enjoyed his time there and is doing what he can to ensure his work (whatever that might entail) is 'left in good hands'. Now that, left in good hands part suggests he is handing over to someone else, otherwise that statement is a non-statement. He also mentions Dakota being someone else whose being layed off but does not state the team as a whole is being layed off.

 

Whether there's anything in that or not remains unclear, we also know BlackRack has been let go, but the likes of Nate, Nertea, for example still have their positions (on Linkedin) at Intercept Games - Private Division. Again, whether there's anything beyond face value, is unknown. It might just be that neither Nate or Chris has bothered to update their current job on Linkedin, OR it could mean that not everyone is gone and development is simply being restructured, relocated. 

 

 

Edited May 4 by Infinite Aerospace
Forgot the link! *Facepalm*

[dprostock]

23 minutes ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

You can find that on Michael (NerdyMike) Linkedin. He comments about being layed off at Intercept Games, how it's bittersweet in essence but how he's enjoyed his time there and is doing what he can to ensure his work (whatever that might entail) is 'left in good hands'. Now that, left in good hands part suggests he is handing over to someone else, otherwise that statement is a non-statement. He also mentions Dakota being someone else whose being layed off but does not state the team as a whole is being layed off.

 

Whether there's anything in that or not remains unclear, we also know BlackRack has been let go, but the likes of Nate, Nertea, for example still have their positions (on Linkedin) at Intercept Games - Private Division. Again, whether there's anything beyond face value, is unknown. It might just be that neither Nate or Chris has bothered to update their current job on Linkedin, OR

 

 

Marvel is looking at how to reinvent the entire franchise to continue to get the "juice" out of a corpse.

And there are still films and television series, many of them of dubious quality, about WWII.

Why not bring out the next mediocre fix in a DLC at $25? Someone is going to buy it, right? 

[AtomicTech]

29 minutes ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

You can find that on Michael (NerdyMike) Linkedin. He comments about being layed off at Intercept Games, how it's bittersweet in essence but how he's enjoyed his time there and is doing what he can to ensure his work (whatever that might entail) is 'left in good hands'. Now that, left in good hands part suggests he is handing over to someone else, otherwise that statement is a non-statement. He also mentions Dakota being someone else whose being layed off but does not state the team as a whole is being layed off.

 

Whether there's anything in that or not remains unclear, we also know BlackRack has been let go, but the likes of Nate, Nertea, for example still have their positions (on Linkedin) at Intercept Games - Private Division. Again, whether there's anything beyond face value, is unknown. It might just be that neither Nate or Chris has bothered to update their current job on Linkedin, OR it could mean that not everyone is gone and development is simply being restructured, relocated. 

 

 

Thanks

[MARL_Mk1]

Isn't Take Two going to have a public meeting with shareholders or investors or something soonish? Maybe we'll hear more about this "officially" by then. (Officially, meaning through the project lead's mouth, that is.)

Edited May 4 by MARL_Mk1

[MechBFP]

43 minutes ago, MARL_Mk1 said:

Isn't Take Two going to have a public meeting with shareholders or investors or something soonish? Maybe we'll hear more about this "officially" by then. (Officially, meaning through the project lead's mouth, that is.)

Yes, although unlikely anything specific to KSP2 that would mean much unless someone specifically asks for details.