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

[Scarecrow71]

4 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Um, no? People are giving KSP 1 a free pass despite how bad it is because they see KSP 2 underperforming. I'd rather give neither a free pass.

While I cannot prove people aren't giving KSP1 a free pass, it doesn't mean that KSP1 is inferior to KSP2.  And you seem to ignore the fact that KSP1 is far more stable, has better performance, and works all-around better than KSP2.

Again, if you think both games are so terrible...why are you here?

[cocoscacao]

I'm weary of criticizing work that hasn't been done. If KSP 2 ever hits v1, I'll make performance, feature, gameplay comparisons to KSP 1. Was development on the right track? No idea, because we didn't get any substantial information on that front. But that's a whole other can of worms...

[Bej Kerman]

12 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

And you seem to ignore the fact that KSP1 is far more stable, has better performance, and works all-around better than KSP2.

I'm not giving it a free pass for being marginally  better.

[Lisias]

19 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Rose tinted glasses.

Perhaps. But are you sure you are not the one wearing it?

Let's get some perspective here.

The 1971 John Lennon's album "Imagine", featuring the eternal song with the same name, sold about 8 Million copies at its time (I'm taking the original album, not the reprints). Source. This is less than twice the 5 Million units sold by KSP or, in the other hand, KSP sold more than half copies of the best selling album from John Lennon ever.

Oukey we are talking a 1971 versus a 2010 sized consumer base. On a somewhat naïve approximation, World population in 1971 was about 3.7 Billion people, while in 2010 it was somewhat as 6.7 B. Source.

So, assuming that Imagine would had the very same reception in 2010, we are talking about hypathetical 1,81 * 8 = 14.48 Millions copies (again, hypathetical approximations! ).

What makes KSP selling about 1/3 of the total number of copies of the best selling album of one of the best selling singers of all time.

KSP was (is?) huge. It have historical and cultural value beyound most people realize, including you.

Of course, you are free to disagree, what you probably will and this will settle the matter.

But your opinion can't change facts: @HarvesteR created something that is comparatively 33% as popular as the best seller album of one the best seller musicians of all times. His childhood fantasies were materialized and have the remarkable distinction of being launched into Space and visited the International Space Station (anyone knows if Jeb is still there?).

And you, my friend? What can you say about you? What can you say about you that would make your opinion more valuable than mine or other people around here? You being entitled to an opinion is not the same as have it valued by anyone else - you need to bring some effort to ground your opinions - more or less the same way I'm doing for mine.

Otherwise, it would be only empty words...

Edited May 15 by Lisias
Tyops are still conspiring against me!!!

[Bej Kerman]

6 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Perhaps. But are you sure you are not the one wearing it?

No, and I'm certainly not trying to mathematically quantify what counts as a niche through sale figures just to avoid the undeniable fact that nobody in everyday life is talking about KSP.

7 minutes ago, Lisias said:

And you, my friend? What can you say about you? [...] Otherwise, it would be only empty words...

Poetry. 

[Fizzlebop Smith]

41 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

No, and I'm certainly not trying to mathematically quantify what counts as a niche through sale figures just to avoid the undeniable fact that nobody in everyday life is talking about KSP.

Poetry. 

Because the quantity has so far surpassed what niche was intended to encompass that it obtained international recognition in the gaming / development industry & soared to vaulted heights that still maintain It as one of the top 500 games being played on steam DESPITE more than 2/3 of people pole not using the launcher and 15 years past its launch date?

 

No one has excused anything for the game. Many here will talk at length about shortcoming and various hard limits the game has. But most require some form of supportive argument to engage. Tired rhetoric & diatribes fall to engage people for long.

A couple Stata posts or detailed examples of a social impact to support their frame with a "your wrong the game sucks" will only continue the discourse for so long before the majority feel your stance has been sufficiently invalidated.

Edited May 15 by Fizzlebop Smith

[Bej Kerman]

49 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

Because the quantity has so far surpassed what niche was intended to encompass that it obtained international recognition in the gaming / development industry & soared to vaulted heights that still maintain It as one of the top 500 games being played on steam DESPITE more than 2/3 of people pole not using the launcher and 15 years past its launch date?

 

No one has excused anything for the game. Many here will talk at length about shortcoming and various hard limits the game has. But most require some form of supportive argument to engage. Tired rhetoric & diatribes fall to engage people for long.

A couple Stata posts or detailed examples of a social impact to support their frame with a "your wrong the game sucks" will only continue the discourse for so long before the majority feel your stance has been sufficiently invalidated.

Ask someone on the streets if they know what a Kerbal is. Random strangers. Good luck

[PDCWolf]

8 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Ask someone on the streets if they know what a Kerbal is. Random strangers. Good luck

Ask them where Argentina is on a map, ask them what 7723/22.7 is, ask them what's the length of the pushrods on a Mercedes OM611 engine is. You'll quickly realize that decimal maths, geography and car mechanics are "niches" by the bogus, nitpicky measure you use and consistently keep changing.

10 hours ago, Stephensan said:

• most of the time
• not really but from what ksp 2 team has said the crafts need everything active for resources, and improvements have been made but is still WIP, still in EA.
• only if there was actual modders to actively mod the game  from ksp 1 so we could have visual mods (almost no one wants to mod ksp 2)
• with how limited ksp 2 mods are, yes you can pretty much mod it with all current version mods you can do that, nearly instantly. and little to no issues besides 1-2 mods that are poorly made.
• I'm up to 84 different saves working, just lower fps for some reason
• known bug. besides the other over 1,000 bugs that was fixed in one year alone, some are lower priority

ain't reading the rest, just adding input.

Gee, and why would a game lose FPS as you add more saves when you only ever use one? oh yeah, because it's built like garbage. But hey, it's early access so it gets a free pass because maybe, someday, some magical group of developers will pick up this cancelled garbage and fix it. And why does nobody want to mod it? Surely not because it's a good platform with established modding standards and an official API.

Every game should just never hit 1.0 by the sort of "arguments" I'm reading, that way you can do no wrong even if you ship a unity asset flip prototype because there's the hope for it to be magically fixed before the heat death of the universe.

[snip]

Edited May 16 by Vanamonde

[Bej Kerman]

2 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Ask them where Argentina is on a map, ask them what 7723/22.7 is, ask them what's the length of the pushrods on a Mercedes OM611 engine is. You'll quickly realize that decimal maths, geography and car mechanics are "niches" by the bogus, nitpicky measure you use and consistently keep changing.

Those are terrible analogies and you know it. Nobody is suggesting a stranger knows the Isp of a Mainsail engine. I am suggesting you see if any street-going stranger even knows what KSP is on the surface. It's far more like just asking what Argentina is or how division works or what Mercedes does.

[Scarecrow71]

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I'm not giving it a free pass for being marginally  better.

Marginally?  What exactly makes KSP1 only marginally better than KSP2?  I agree that KSP1 has its flaws and problems.  But if you think that the buggy dumpster fire that KSP2 was at launch, or continues to be today, is only marginally worse than KSP1, then nothing anybody says here will make any sense to you.

14 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Those are terrible analogies and you know it. Nobody is suggesting a stranger knows the Isp of a Mainsail engine. I am suggesting you see if any street-going stranger even knows what KSP is on the surface. It's far more like just asking what Argentina is or how division works or what Mercedes does.

Right.  But they do those "man on the street" things on the late night talk shows all the time, and they ask people general questions.  "What's the capital of the US" and "How many ounces in a pound" and "Show me where Maine is on this map".  And you know what?  Most of the people that they show - not that they ask, but that they show on TV - can't answer the questions correctly.  By your own definition, that makes basic US geography and simple weight conversion mathematics niche areas of interest.

Edited May 15 by Scarecrow71

[K^2]

2 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

And you seem to ignore the fact that KSP1 is far more stable, has better performance, and works all-around better than KSP2.

I happen to remember how KSP1 played and looked in 2014, a year into its early access and four years into development overall, same as KSP2 now. The latter's doing much better.

[Scarecrow71]

Just now, K^2 said:

I happen to remember how KSP1 played and looked in 2014, a year into its early access and four years into development overall, same as KSP2 now. The latter's doing much better.

Normally I'd say that you are comparing apples to dragonfruit here, what with advances in technology AND that people should have learned from previous mistakes.  However, I wasn't around in 2014, so I cannot fully comment on what KSP1 was like at that time.  I can only state that, today, the game is better than its successor in their current states.

[Bej Kerman]

25 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I'm not giving it a free pass for being marginally  better.

Marginally?  What exactly makes KSP1 only marginally better than KSP2?  I agree that KSP1 has its flaws and problems.  But if you think that the buggy dumpster fire that KSP2 was at launch, or continues to be today, is only marginally worse than KSP1, then nothing anybody says here will make any sense to you.

I mean, of course it doesn't make sense to me. It is like how a Flat Earther sounds when trying to explain their beliefs.

25 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

35 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Those are terrible analogies and you know it. Nobody is suggesting a stranger knows the Isp of a Mainsail engine. I am suggesting you see if any street-going stranger even knows what KSP is on the surface. It's far more like just asking what Argentina is or how division works or what Mercedes does.

Right.  But they do those "man on the street" things on the late night talk shows all the time, and they ask people general questions.  "What's the capital of the US" and "How many ounces in a pound" and "Show me where Maine is on this map".  And you know what?  Most of the people that they show - not that they ask, but that they show on TV - can't answer the questions correctly.  By your own definition, that makes basic US geography and simple weight conversion mathematics niche areas of interest.

Again, bad analogies. I'm not on about asking "do you know what color the 0.625m stack separator is in KSP?" or some ridiculous trivia like that. I am on about asking people if they are even AWARE of this game's existence - caps for emphasis . It might shock you to know a game hardly anyone is aware of outside a specific industry is basically a niche, even if you may find it possibly shaking to think that a core aspect of your life is inconsequential to most people. A lot of people heavily invested in niches seemingly tend to go through some kind of denial, exhibit A ; ). Frankly, I have never heard anything said about this game unless I went out of my way to look for it so I'm leaning towards niche.

[herbal space program]

15 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

However, I wasn't around in 2014, so I cannot fully comment on what KSP1 was like at that time. 

I joined the forum in 2014, and back then KSP1 still had all kinds of  bizarre bugs. I still remember coming back from my first Jool5 mission, at least a year after joining, and posting a mission/bug report about how the entire KSC spontaneously blew up as I was trying to land my Laythe  spaceplane there.  It was met  with  "yeah, we knew about that one, quit wasting our time!"

[Flush Foot]

Just now, herbal space program said:

the entire KSC spontaneously blew up as I was trying to land my Laythe  spaceplane there

At least the KSC didn't follow you all the way to Laythe (and yes, I know that bug is / seems to be gone now)

[Great Liao]

Why is there so much denial in this thread? Does it matter if KSP2 lived or died?  Just play the game that you like.

[NexusHelium]

53 minutes ago, Great Liao said:

Why is there so much denial in this thread? Does it matter if KSP2 lived or died?  Just play the game that you like.

Oh my gosh finally.

2 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

"One of the smartest communities".

If you don't want to bother with this game or this game's community, please just don't. I would much rather you play the game you enjoy than you attacking a game you don't and arguing with everyone who does enjoy playing it.

There are a lot of people on here who argue against the future of KSP 2 but I at least rationalize with them as they genuinely want the game to succeed. With you, it just seems like you are part of the sequel community just to fight with everyone who doesn't have your exact beliefs and actually cares about the game. And there's just no point to that. If you don't like KSP 2 or the direction it's taking, just don't play KSP 2. You can pretend it doesn't exist for all I care, but there is no point to arguing with everyone who actually enjoys it and its design.

And, of course, if there's something I'm missing with your viewpoint on the game, feel free to express it and correct me.

Edited May 15 by NexusHelium

[FleshJeb]

4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Um, no? People are giving KSP 1 a free pass despite how bad it is because they see KSP 2 underperforming. I'd rather give neither a free pass.

I’m in the same camp of, “Even KSP one is unacceptably buggy.”

My two best arguments are:

• Do you still have to manually slow your timewarp before an SOI change so that your trajectory doesn’t go to hell?
• Do you still reflexively quicksave before doing almost anything? Not because you’re afraid you’ll screw up, but that KSP will.

I tried playing pure vanilla about 5 years ago when mechjeb was in bad shape. Was doing a very simple, very standard mission to the mun. Did the transfer burn, set up my capture burn, punched the stock Warp To Node button, and the damn thing blew right through the SOI. I pretty much quit playing after that.

That kind of thing should never have survived ten minutes of QA. Between that and my experiences with other games, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the game dev industry has very little respect for player time and energy.

[Skorj]

I don't have kraken-style bugs in KSP1 any more (I do try to avoid any part overlap to keep the kraken at bay).  The worst I worry about is wonky landing gear physics, which frustratingly Juno has too.  But I do save in case the game crashes due to memory leaks, which happens every so often. 

While I'm not pushing the bounds of KSP1 ship size, I haven't really seen the old style of bugs past 1.7 or so.  Maybe I'm just lucky, but for the past few years the only bug I've seen other than kraken attack with overlapped parts is the game crashing.

30 minutes ago, FleshJeb said:

I tried playing pure vanilla about 5 years ago when mechjeb was in bad shape. Was doing a very simple, very standard mission to the mun. Did the transfer burn, set up my capture burn, punched the stock Warp To Node button, and the damn thing blew right through the SOI. I pretty much quit playing after that.

That kind of thing should never have survived ten minutes of QA. Between that and my experiences with other games, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the game dev industry has very little respect for player time and energy.

I haven't seen that except for bad interaction between vanilla and the Alarm Clock mod when I set an alarm very close to the burn.  KSP1 will blow past where you want it to if you manually set very high timewarp and then try to stop on a dime, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.

Couldn't agree more though about the game industry not valuing players' time.  It's why the good indie games shine.

[Fizzlebop Smith]

24 minutes ago, Skorj said:

Couldn't agree more though about the game industry not valuing players' time.  It's why the good indie games shine.

I do not think they value the developers time anymore either. There is an aspect of Teamwork that is difficult to directly quantify.

When a group works together ling enough.. they become a single machine. This is true in many industries.

The current trend .. I feel.. will be felt for a long time.

[Stephensan]

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Ask them where Argentina is on a map, ask them what 7723/22.7 is, ask them what's the length of the pushrods on a Mercedes OM611 engine is. You'll quickly realize that decimal maths, geography and car mechanics are "niches" by the bogus, nitpicky measure you use and consistently keep changing.

Gee, and why would a game lose FPS as you add more saves when you only ever use one? oh yeah, because it's built like garbage. But hey, it's early access so it gets a free pass because maybe, someday, some magical group of developers will pick up this cancelled garbage and fix it. And why does nobody want to mod it? Surely not because it's a good platform with established modding standards and an official API.

Every game should just never hit 1.0 by the sort of "arguments" I'm reading, that way you can do no wrong even if you ship a unity asset flip prototype because there's the hope for it to be magically fixed before the heat death of the universe.

"One of the smartest communities".

i haven't seen a single other user actually show that they lose fps when there is more campaign saves besides me, unless you can provide evidence that proves otherwise without adjusting any hardware settings.. i have been asking around for others to test it and they don't see a difference.. its strange that only one user seeing this issue is a problem and even QA team(s) cannot see/find the same issue.. for me keep it clean until there is more evidence shown... the only thing that the bug report shows that EVERYONE universally has is a longer "hang" time when loading all the saves.

i doubt most people have 7.65gb or nearly 15,000 files (and at the time i reported the bug around 7.5k~) in the campaign page.. since day ONE of ksp 2 being out for the public.

 

• Quote

  And why does nobody want to mod it?

   

Easy, the game was pushed out a year to early and the state from 0.1.0 was appalling to 99.9999999% of the gaming community, most if not all ksp 1 modders wrote a post (lost into the forums as of now trying to find it) saying they will not be modding the game until they get official modding API support AND the game is post 1.0, or out of early access. A complete 180 from ksp 1, just simply due to the release of early access and the state it was "in"..

 

People that try to compare ksp 1 to 2 is missing the point that even during the early stages of ksp 1 there was modding support and everyone cared for it, even if the game was "janky" at times, that's why there is still a LOT of ways to make "kraken" drives. comparing ksp 1 vs 2, almost all of them "well i can just mod it the way i want" for ksp 1, ksp 2 doesn't get such a luxury that ksp 1, it is expected for ksp 2 to be full complete out of EA with modding API support before old ksp 1 modders will even attempt (even then some still say no) to start modding ksp 2, as if that stopped them modding ksp 1..(narcissistic tone) a little unfair when ksp 2 has come along way from the state of ksp 2 0.1.0 to 0.2.1 a full year and over 1000+ bugs fixed, with some visuals, and a milestone during that time when... Due to it was promised that it will have it.....Now with a running start of negative hate and a near permanent looming hate around it due to how fast development/communication is. Yes there is mods for ksp 2 , but most are QOL features, just like early days of ksp 1 with some adding new parts, money, size of planets, and entire gameplay reworks for science....

If you read almost everything in discord since day one, watch everything from ksp 2 for information from streams to youtubers, its easy to conclude that ksp 2 team wasn't ready to push out the game in the state it came out last year but more so forced to, "what about the videos they state that they couldn't stop playing and its so much fun" when a company pays tens of thousands to hundred of thousands of dollars in marketing they want the game sound the absolute best and heck was even possible it wasn't suppose to come out in this state, almost as if the videos was produced before the game was completed due to a large company is behind it.. The community didn't want the game out until it was ready, but you really would know who wanted ksp 2 be out? T2, they see that the project has been in there hands for 2-3~ years and hasn't produced a solid game, yeah you CAN make a game that can/could rack up a lot of code/tech debt quite easily, but takes time to make a game, but that is something that ksp 2 was forced to launch in, a state of where most of the code/intresting things that been "promised" needed to be ripped out just so they had a core game that people could "play"..  if you looked at LinkedIn back in 2022~ ish there was only like 45-30 members working on ksp 2, even if every single one of those is a engineer/coding, doing a game in 2-3 years is just simply not possible in the state it was in, even if there is/was assets before t2 made IG and "deleted" star theory, you can look at the videos and stuff that there was a shift of how ksp 2 should be, and could see that ksp 2 before IG was just going to be ksp 1+ visual upgrades and no DLC's.. that's it, IG changed it to something much larger, and much more interesting, and the greed of a public company with stocks greed took over. even if the star theory team "is/was" IG..

it really doesn't matter what i say, peoples views are different.

i just really wonder how the game would have been if they waited a year. i doubt the team would have been fired right now, and if someone didn't know zero development from 2023 and past, would probably think its a game to stick, but one way or another ksp 2 was released in the state it was, if it was either from t2 wanting the game pushed out for money or IG ambition.

 

Im just as frustrated that development, communication and games release is slow hard and rocky, but it didn't stop me from playing for 1200 hours before science.

 

anyway enough gaslighting onto me, so i prove my views onto someone else. drink water, stay hydrated, and best of all, more water is more hydration.

[K^2]

2 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Normally I'd say that you are comparing apples to dragonfruit here, what with advances in technology AND that people should have learned from previous mistakes. 

Honestly, expectations of what games look like outpaced the growth in tech, IMO. I don't think the retro graphics are there only for nostalgia. For a lot of indy devs it's a good way to focus on the overall style of the art without the nightmare of modern rendering pipelines.

Second point's valid. People should have learned from the mistakes. ST and consequently Intercept leadership did suffer for their hubris; I can't possibly deny that. So fair point, but obviously didn't happen. Intercept ended up stepping on many of the same rakes.

2 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I can only state that, today, the game is better than its successor in their current states.

Measured by overall user experience (which is the ultimate test) yes, I completely agree.

The reason for my point is that I expect problems plaguing KSP2 would eventually be solved. Even by the same team, given time. And I'm not yet giving up on this happening with another team down the line. Just like Squad managed to stumble their way to figuring out how to make a space simulator rocket builder game, so I suspect would Intercept or their successor.

And that's where we can measure the two games on another metric. I don't think you can polish KSP1 past where it is. You can add mods, but that will cause performance and stability issues. You can try to add some improvements in vanilla by spending more time on the game, but you run into fundamental limitations of the architecture. KSP2 has a better framework. You can add more interesting planets, more varied materials, more procedural components, larger structures and eventually larger rockets. It's possible in KSP2 because it was designed to be expanded in that way. It is part of the reason why KSP2 is so full of bugs - they built a system for a much larger and complex game than what you see, but you're getting all the bugs upfront. And that's fine for a game in EA. (Less fine that it's at this stage of development long after it was supposed to release, but again, scheduling is a separate discussion.)

Finished version of what you can build on KSP2 framework is a better game than KSP1 could possibly be. And this is a crucial point, because it's the answer to, "Why not just continue work on KSP1?" Because KSP1 could never be everything that KSP2 can be given the same amount of work on new features. Yes, that came with a huge upfront debt for the Intercept which they never managed to work through, but the end goal is worth it if the projects get finished.

[Lisias]

18 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Second point's valid. People should have learned from the mistakes. ST and consequently Intercept leadership did suffer for their hubris; I can't possibly deny that. So fair point, but obviously didn't happen. Intercept ended up stepping on many of the same rakes.

With all the due respect, I think it's more vanity than hubris. Hubris is excessive pride in the abilities you have.

 

7 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

No, and I'm certainly not trying to mathematically quantify what counts as a niche through sale figures just to avoid the undeniable fact that nobody in everyday life is talking about KSP.

Nobody is a hell of an overstatement.

https://www.google.com/search?q=KSP+kerbal&newwindow=1&sca_esv=697ef796fdf142b1&sca_upv=1&tbm=nws&prmd=isvnmbtz&sxsrf=ADLYWIIIH1GZtdFejJF6E0qkmPP2X8jjWw:1715814738088&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjm2Nr_45CGAxU2rZUCHQdTAQsQ0pQJegQILBAK&biw=1309&bih=764&dpr=1

 

7 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Poetry. 

 

1 hour ago, Stephensan said:

Easy, the game was pushed out a year to early and the state from 0.1.0 was appalling to 99.9999999% of the gaming community, most if not all ksp 1 modders wrote a post (lost into the forums as of now trying to find it) saying they will not be modding the game until they get official modding API support AND the game is post 1.0, or out of early access. A complete 180 from ksp 1, just simply due to the release of early access and the state it was "in"..

This post?

There's a recent update from the OP there, I suggest to read it.

Edited May 15 by Lisias
brute force post merge

[K^2]

22 minutes ago, Lisias said:

With all the due respect, I think it's more vanity than hubris. Hubris is excessive pride in the abilities you have.

Star Theory has made some beautiful games with a team of fewer than 20 people. A lot of people they hired for Intercept were seasoned Unity developers and artists with great successes on their resumes. They are quite capable as game developers. If you don't recognize that, you're being angry at clouds.

[DoomsdayDuck555]

22 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Nobody is a hell of an overstatement.

https://www.google.com/search?q=KSP+kerbal&newwindow=1&sca_esv=697ef796fdf142b1&sca_upv=1&tbm=nws&prmd=isvnmbtz&sxsrf=ADLYWIIIH1GZtdFejJF6E0qkmPP2X8jjWw:1715814738088&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjm2Nr_45CGAxU2rZUCHQdTAQsQ0pQJegQILBAK&biw=1309&bih=764&dpr=1

Well, if you look something up you tend to get results that are similar to what you looked up.