Where is Nate?

[dprostock]

The reactions of the community are interesting. It's like an earthquake, as the days go by the hopes of finding people alive diminish and mourning begins.

[Alewx]

Was Nate always PD or IG before this? Because that alone would already tell quite a lot.

[FreeThinker]

12 hours ago, dprostock said:

The reactions of the community are interesting. It's like an earthquake, as the days go by the hopes of finding people alive diminish and mourning begins.

Well Technically we had an earthquake one year ago, its only now that we realize the whole stucture of the project is about to crash  down.

Edited May 9 by FreeThinker

[kerbiloid]

Maybe some IG employees are looking for job or are already mentioned in other company staff in their social network stories?

[Yakuzi]

21 hours ago, MechBFP said:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/take-two-reportedly-shuts-down-roll7-and-intercept-games-private-division-suffers-mass-layoffs

"Bloomberg reported other Private Division staff have been affected by the layoffs, with a source telling GamesIndustry.biz that the "vast majority" of the label's teams in Seattle, New York, Las Vegas and Munich have been let go."

Of course who knows if that is accurate or not.

It is definitely going to be nuanced but it would not surprise me if all these studios "failed" as  a result of being setup to fail.

Thanks for sharing the link to that article @MechBFP

From that article and the text you cited it seems like the only other game studio (besides IG) that's been shut down was Roll7, the developer of OlliOlli World and RollerDrome. The other game studios or the location of their headquarters weren't mentioned either in the article you linked or the Bloomberg article.

Here's the PD associated game studios (and HQ location) listed on the Private Division website (PD) or Wikipedia page (W). Studios or locations mentioned in the articles are highlighted:

• Blooper Team (Krakow, Poland), W
• Die Gute Fabrik (Copenhagen, Denmark), PD W
• Evening Star (LA, USA. London, UK. Melbourne, Australia), PD W
• Game Freak (Tokyo, Japan), W
• Intercept Games (Seattle, USA), W
• Moon Studios (Vienna, Austria), PD W
• Obsidian Entertainment (Irvine, USA), PD W
• Panache Digital Games (Montreal, Canada), PD W
• Piccolo Studio (Barcelona, Spain), PD W
• Roll7 (London, UK), PD W
• Squad (Mexico City, Mexico), PD W
• Wētā Workshop (Wellington, New Zealand), W
• Yellow Brick Games (Quebec City, Canada), PD W

Also (again from the article and the text you cited) the "vast majority" of staff reference specifically refers to staff of publisher Private Division, not game studio staff.

Without knowing the exact numbers and distribution of the layoffs, it certainly appears that subsidiary publisher PD and two of its game studios have borne the brunt of the recent Take Two eliminations. However, from the data available it seems that these eliminations didn't randomly close or gut "all studios" under the PD umbrella, just two in particular.

 

Which brings us back to my original questions on the following claim:

On 5/4/2024 at 10:07 PM, gfdgfherytrey said:

My point is that it seems disappointing that we were scammed not by Intercept Games, but by Take Two and Private Division as a whole. Intercept Games never did anything to us. They just made the game. Take Two and PD are the reason behind this.

Could you explain how we were scammed?

Why do you think either Take Two or PD (or both?) are the reason behind this and not Intercept Games?

 

Edited May 9 by Yakuzi

[MechBFP]

50 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

Also (again from the article and the text you cited) the "vast majority" of staff reference specifically refers to staff of publisher Private Division, not game studio staff.

In house studios. Those studios you listed from wiki include studios they publish for but don’t directly own, unlike IG, Roll7, and potentially 2 others that had yet to be revealed with an official name. 

[Yakuzi]

1 hour ago, MechBFP said:

In house studios. Those studios you listed from wiki include studios they publish for but don’t directly own, unlike IG, Roll7, and potentially 2 others that had yet to be revealed with an official name. 

As far as I could find PD is a video game publisher only.  EDIT: I was wrong, IG and Roll7 are subsidiaries of PD as @MechBFP correctly pointed out.

From the Private Division wikipedia page:
"Private Division is an American video game publisher based in New York City. [...] Private Division funds and publishes indie games developed by small to mid-sized studios."  Continued within the spoiler below:

Spoiler

"Take-Two's prior publishing model has been focused on its two internally-owned labels, Rockstar Games which is used for its action_adventure-games like Grand Theft Auto, and its 2K label that includes 2K Games and 2K Sports for other games. All such games are developed principally through internal development studios or from large third-party truple-A studios (such as Firaxis Games with  Civilization IV or Gearbox Software for the  Borderlands series).
Take-Two formed Private Division as a new publishing label to help smaller and independent studios."

From the Private Division website:
"Private Division is a developer-focused publisher that empowers studios to develop the games that they are passionate about creating, while providing the support that they need to make their titles critically and commercially successful on a global scale." Continued within the spoiler below:

Spoiler

"The Label publishes the Kerbal Space Program franchise, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey from Panache Digital Games, The Outer Worlds from Obsidian Entertainment, OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome from Roll7, After Us from Piccolo Studio, and more. Private Division has future unannounced projects in development with Moon Studios, Evening Star, Yellow Brick Games, Wētā Workshop, and other esteemed independent developers. The Label publishes the physical retail edition of Hades from Supergiant Games on PlayStation® and Xbox consoles. Private Division continues to build its internal studio capacity, with Roll7 and Intercept Games as internal developers for the Label. Private Division is headquartered in New York City with offices in Seattle, Las Vegas, Munich, and Singapore.

What unites all of us is a passion for games and commitment to supporting the best studios in creating titles of the highest quality. We publish games that we love to play ourselves and that we want the world to experience. We are champions of great videogame creators, empowering and supporting the finest talent in the industry, and propelling those games to their greatest potential."

If this info is false, could you provide sources that describe the true organisational structure of PD including its in-house studios?

EDIT: Nevermind, I get what you're saying. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Still, my original questions stand. Let me rephrase the second one though.

On 5/4/2024 at 10:07 PM, gfdgfherytrey said:

My point is that it seems disappointing that we were scammed not by Intercept Games, but by Take Two and Private Division as a whole. Intercept Games never did anything to us. They just made the game. Take Two and PD are the reason behind this.

Could you explain how we were scammed?

What makes you certain Intercept Games never played a role in any of this?

Edited May 9 by Yakuzi

[PopinFRESH]

15 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

As far as I could find PD is a video game publisher only.

 

From the Private Division wikipedia page:
"Private Division is an American video game publisher based in New York City. [...] Private Division funds and publishes indie games developed by small to mid-sized studios." Continued within the spoiler below:

  Reveal hidden contents

"Take-Two's prior publishing model has been focused on its two internally-owned labels, Rockstar Games which is used for its action_adventure-games like Grand Theft Auto, and its 2K label that includes 2K Games and 2K Sports for other games. All such games are developed principally through internal development studios or from large third-party truple-A studios (such as Firaxis Games with  Civilization IV or Gearbox Software for the  Borderlands series).
Take-Two formed Private Division as a new publishing label to help smaller and independent studios."

 

From the Private Division website:
"Private Division is a developer-focused publisher that empowers studios to develop the games that they are passionate about creating, while providing the support that they need to make their titles critically and commercially successful on a global scale." Continued within the spoiler below:

  Hide contents

"The Label publishes the Kerbal Space Program franchise, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey from Panache Digital Games, The Outer Worlds from Obsidian Entertainment, OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome from Roll7, After Us from Piccolo Studio, and more. Private Division has future unannounced projects in development with Moon Studios, Evening Star, Yellow Brick Games, Wētā Workshop, and other esteemed independent developers. The Label publishes the physical retail edition of Hades from Supergiant Games on PlayStation® and Xbox consoles. Private Division continues to build its internal studio capacity, with Roll7 and Intercept Games as internal developers for the Label. Private Division is headquartered in New York City with offices in Seattle, Las Vegas, Munich, and Singapore.

What unites all of us is a passion for games and commitment to supporting the best studios in creating titles of the highest quality. We publish games that we love to play ourselves and that we want the world to experience. We are champions of great videogame creators, empowering and supporting the finest talent in the industry, and propelling those games to their greatest potential."

 

If this info is false, could you provide sources that describe the true organisational structure of PD including its in-house studios?

I think @MechBFP was just pointing out that Intercept Games and Roll7 were wholly owned subsidiary studios of Private Division, which is as stated in the quote you've posted. Some other studios, such as Obsidian, they don't own and are solely the publisher of one or more projects that were done by those studios.

[Yakuzi]

56 minutes ago, PopinFRESH said:

I think @MechBFP was just pointing out that Intercept Games and Roll7 were wholly owned subsidiary studios of Private Division, which is as stated in the quote you've posted. Some other studios, such as Obsidian, they don't own and are solely the publisher of one or more projects that were done by those studios.

Thanks for pointing that out, I realised as I was including the links:

1 hour ago, Yakuzi said:

EDIT: Nevermind, I get what you're saying. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Edited May 9 by Yakuzi

[Meecrob]

On 5/8/2024 at 12:41 PM, PopinFRESH said:

They were well received, at least initially, by their fans but that player base was fairly small and did not appear to be growing very quickly.

AND Take Two wanted them to sell like AAA titles.

[K^2]

11 hours ago, Yakuzi said:

What makes you certain Intercept Games never played a role in any of this?

I mean, for starters, they are fully owned by T2. So anything that happened at Intercept is responsibility of T2, outside of potentially crimes committed by some individuals acting rogue, in which case, it's not fair to even say that it's IG's fault, but that individual's. So either T2 fault or individual's fault. Not IG's.

But also, just from experience, absolutely everything that IG was doing has gone through layers of checks at PD and T2. That includes the pitch approval, road map coordination, milestones, vertical slices, release dates, marketing, every frame of the Early Access video announcement... Obviously, there's only so much oversight into day-to-day, so it's possible, likely even, to know the exact reasons for every individual thing that falls behind, but once it accumulates into a pattern, people start looking into it, including specialists in a given field who are there exactly to do various due-diligence checks and find problems with the pipeline.

So at the end of the day, T2 accepted how IG is being run and how KSP2 deliveries are going. If T2 was seeing it as mismanagement, steps would have been taken (and some have in the past). The bottom line is that it was T2 that decided that KSP2 market potential isn't meeting the bar they have for warranting the expense given the pre-closure roadmap.

[dprostock]

15 hours ago, K^2 said:

So at the end of the day, T2 accepted how IG is being run and how KSP2 deliveries are going. If T2 was seeing it as mismanagement, steps would have been taken (and some have in the past). The bottom line is that it was T2 that decided that KSP2 market potential isn't meeting the bar they have for warranting the expense given the pre-closure roadmap.

One million potential buyers in the U.S. market alone 

[K^2]

3 hours ago, dprostock said:

One million potential buyers in the U.S. market alone 

I'm probably going to overanalyze this, so if this turns into a wall of text, I'll add a tl;dr at the end.

We have a pretty good estimate for best case scenario for KSP2. It's everybody who owned KSP buying the game at full price on release. Plus some new people who earlier bounced from game's difficulty, but are now lured in with shiny trailers and kept with better tutorials. That's the big prize, and the reason why publishers like sequels and why KSP2 got started in the first place. But you also want to know the worst case. When you're just starting the work on the game, your worst case is always $0. Project fails, you have nothing to sell, and you lost your investment. The initial, Star Theory budget for the game was probably in the $20M-$30M range. With the game changing hands, increased in scope, and getting further delayed, that budget has potentially as much as tripled. The worst case scenario went from, "This stings," to "We've had to sacrifice other projects (we haven't even announced yet) to keep funding this, and now it's all gone." This is when you start wanting more concrete data on what the worst case scenario is, and this is when you start seriously considering Early Access.

And in some ways, the fact that EA was so broken and unfinished gave T2 the best possible data. It really was the worst-case scenario. We got to see how many of these potential buyers would go out and buy the game at full price pretty much no matter what. And there are zealots out there who'll be saying the community has failed. We didn't buy EA in sufficient quantity, and T2 lost faith in us. I think that's stupid for two reasons. First of all, T2 wanted an honest answer and they got an honest answer. They now know exactly what the floor for KSP2 sales is - it's EA sales. But more importantly, I don't think KSP2 EA did poorly. The estimates vary from 240k to over 500k. I'm inclined to believe that various factors typically resulting in overestimates are hitting KSP2 particularly hard, so lets go with that lower number. Quarter of a million is not bad for early access. Not at all. And given that a lot of that would be at full price or close, that's around $10M in sales. This doesn't turn into $10M revenue, because Valve takes a cut and there are additional costs on just getting EA out and maintained, but it's respectable and it helps.

So then, if EA went smooth from the sales perspective, why is this not good enough? Well, that's the thing, I think it is good enough. And I think it helped a lot. We have to look at what's going on with the US economy. Brace yourself, I'm going full nerd.

Take Two purchased KSP from Squad in 2017. We know that talks on getting KSP2 under way have started immediately, and it's likely that by late 2017 or early 2018 Star Theory started work on KSP2. US federal rate was around 1%. In 2019, the game was announced at E3, and KSP fans went nuts. Coverage was fantastic, excitement was in the air. Nate promised way more stuff than likely was in the original 2017 plans, and got an ok from T2 to expand the scope. (I never really learned in which order these two things happened, I think it'd be kind of funny to picture Nate just running rogue here, but the reality is that there was probably already some sort of an agreement that if the game's news are well received... But I'm speculating here.)

Late 2019, T2 is in talks with ST to get the game scoped up, including how much it's going to cost to hire more people, extend development time, etc. We don't know all the details, but T2 doesn't like what they're hearing, they cut ties with ST, spin up Intercept, and use the fact that Star Theory's basically ruined to hire a bunch of people over. It's effectively a hostile takeover. Pandemic hits full force. Notably, fed cuts rate to basically 0% to keep the economy from tanking. Nobody's quite sure how developing games in the pandemic world will go. We enter the uncertain era. But there's light. Turns out, game development working from home is not bad, and game sales are booming. And that 0% fed rate? Oh, that's a gold mine. Suddenly, you can start new projects, expand scopes, and pay for it with borrowed money. So long as the game ships eventually and is good, you make profit. The more games you make this way, the more money you make as a company. This is when we get delay announcements, and behind the scenes, Intercept Games is growing and what I would call KSP2 Mk2 enters its new pre-production. This is a bigger game that's going longer to develop, but it's ok, because T2 has taken out credit to make the game, and based on the community reaction, they expect it to sell.

Fast forward to mid-2022. Fed rate starts climbing. Suddenly, what was free no longer is. Now, if you're not offsetting your costs with revenue and you keep borrowing, you're paying interest. This is likely what pushed the Early Access decision. Take Two needed to be sure they aren't going to be loosing all that money plus interest, and also to offset the costs, so that the interest isn't costing as much. Keep in mind that fed rate announcements are made fairly early. By the end of '22 the rate was at 4% and it was probably expected by the time EA decision was made internally. Game entered Early Access in early 2023 and odds are, that helped keep the development going for the next year and change. By late 2023, fed rate hit its current value of 5.5%. It hasn't been this high since 2007. Every publisher out there that took out credits is bleeding, and that's basically everyone. Studios and projects are getting shut down left and right. My honest expectation is that if EA never happened and didn't generate $10M, we'd see Intercept closed half a year ago.

So now we're getting into the current situation. Yes, KSP2 EA did pretty well. Yes, there are tens of millions of USD still on the table for the full release of the game, and the game can probably make that if the tech issues are sorted, which I'm sure they can be with time. But T2 needs money to pay for the project right now, and they can't borrow it. Their heavy hitters are still burning cash and aren't going to generate revenue for a bit yet, so every dollar the company makes from other titles has to go to feed that. KSP2 can make good money, but only once 1.0 and some DLCs ship, and that's a year out at the absolute best, possibly longer. So based on the information T2 has and on how the project is going, it has to be shut down.

But the money-making potential of the game is still there. When restarted, KSP2 won't have to be started nearly from scratch like with Star Theory to Intercept transfer. It can truly be restarted, continuing the development. Whatever work is left to ship the game, that's what will still need to be done. Some time will be lost onboarding a new team, but it's not a huge amount of time overall. The moment additional funds are available, I would expect T2 to want the development to resume.

 

tl;dr In current market conditions, continuing development of a game that's more than a year out from being able to sustain its development with revenue is a huge risk. If you have a sure thing with huge ROI, yeah, you keep pouring what resources you have into it. But anything less than certain or only marginally profitable has to be shelved. It doesn't have to stay shelved forever, though. New revenue streams are going to become available soon and the forecast for the market is positive. At this point, I expect T2 to circle back to KSP2 in a few months at best, after GTA VI release at worst. It does mean that the most optimistic, rose-tinted glasses forecast for v1.0 release is late 2025 (with some scope cuts and if PD already has a new team in mind) and 2028 in the worst case.

And we probably will have a better picture after next week's earnings call. So stay tuned, but don't hold your breath.

_{(Edit: Fixed "By the end of '24" to read "By the end of '22" per Flush Foot's post below.)}

Edited May 10 by K^2
Fix a mistyped year.

[Flush Foot]

37 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Keep in mind that fed rate announcements are made fairly early. By the end of '24 the rate was at 4%

I expect you meant "end of '22", but otherwise

"lots of interesting inferences that are probably close enough to reality"

Edited May 10 by Flush Foot

[K^2]

10 minutes ago, Flush Foot said:

I expect you meant "end of '22"

Fixed. Thanks.

[The Aziz]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

Every publisher out there that took out credits is bleeding, and that's basically everyone

fast forward to financial report and announcement of record profits.

Please, publishers are greedy pricks. Many of the most successful titles I play(ed) were developed and released without a publisher.

Would KSP2 exist without a publisher? Probably not. But would it work better if the publisher assigned bigger budget from day one instead of giving more and more time? I think so.

[Mitokandria]

On 5/6/2024 at 11:02 PM, Pthigrivi said:

We just don’t know any of that. Im one of those idealistic artists who had to get real and support a family. I ply my trade (design/architecture) and hold the line when it comes to honor and right livelihood best I can. Still, when the money you move (move, not earn) hits 7 or 8 digits the world goes a bit sideways. My wife calls it the dragon sickness. Its just greed—the colossal, unthinking greed of investors. Its everywhere and inescapable. Its a subtle vampirism sucking the life out of everything we do, and as soon as you touch real money it preys on you. I have no doubt whatever that Nate is personally devastated by how all this turned out. He played the good soldier as they marched him up that hill and then they screwed everyone he knew and everything he cared about. Ive been there, and its honestly hard to get out of bed after that. If you’re a real human and actually care about the people around you money will ruin your heart. 

I've heard it referred to as "Dragon Sickness" before as well. Couldn't for the life of me remember where, but almost certainly during my time living in Europe.

Once you get enough money/power/fame the rules of the world really do change and the things that matter to the low earning masses stop relatable.

[K33N]

On 5/4/2024 at 5:09 PM, Westinghouse said:

If he does eventually come out and make a statement, it will probably be excuses along the lines of "...we did a good job, but unfortunately game development is hard..." 
Yes, game development is hard. But a team of over 50 professional game designers should have been able to improve on what a marketing company created as a side project a decade ago.  It's damning that these people were paid salaries for 7 years and were unable to add anything new that the original game didn't have apart from improved sound and music, those godawful cartoon tutorials and the childish PAIGE voice. 

The cartoon tutorials were objectively great though. 

[dprostock]

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

I'm probably going to overanalyze this, so if this turns into a wall of text, I'll add a tl;dr at the end.

We have a pretty good estimate for best case scenario for KSP2. It's everybody who owned KSP buying the game at full price on release. Plus some new people who earlier bounced from game's difficulty, but are now lured in with shiny trailers and kept with better tutorials. That's the big prize, and the reason why publishers like sequels and why KSP2 got started in the first place. But you also want to know the worst case. When you're just starting the work on the game, your worst case is always $0. Project fails, you have nothing to sell, and you lost your investment. The initial, Star Theory budget for the game was probably in the $20M-$30M range. With the game changing hands, increased in scope, and getting further delayed, that budget has potentially as much as tripled. The worst case scenario went from, "This stings," to "We've had to sacrifice other projects (we haven't even announced yet) to keep funding this, and now it's all gone." This is when you start wanting more concrete data on what the worst case scenario is, and this is when you start seriously considering Early Access.

And in some ways, the fact that EA was so broken and unfinished gave T2 the best possible data. It really was the worst-case scenario. We got to see how many of these potential buyers would go out and buy the game at full price pretty much no matter what. And there are zealots out there who'll be saying the community has failed. We didn't buy EA in sufficient quantity, and T2 lost faith in us. I think that's stupid for two reasons. First of all, T2 wanted an honest answer and they got an honest answer. They now know exactly what the floor for KSP2 sales is - it's EA sales. But more importantly, I don't think KSP2 EA did poorly. The estimates vary from 240k to over 500k. I'm inclined to believe that various factors typically resulting in overestimates are hitting KSP2 particularly hard, so lets go with that lower number. Quarter of a million is not bad for early access. Not at all. And given that a lot of that would be at full price or close, that's around $10M in sales. This doesn't turn into $10M revenue, because Valve takes a cut and there are additional costs on just getting EA out and maintained, but it's respectable and it helps.

So then, if EA went smooth from the sales perspective, why is this not good enough? Well, that's the thing, I think it is good enough. And I think it helped a lot. We have to look at what's going on with the US economy. Brace yourself, I'm going full nerd.

Take Two purchased KSP from Squad in 2017. We know that talks on getting KSP2 under way have started immediately, and it's likely that by late 2017 or early 2018 Star Theory started work on KSP2. US federal rate was around 1%. In 2019, the game was announced at E3, and KSP fans went nuts. Coverage was fantastic, excitement was in the air. Nate promised way more stuff than likely was in the original 2017 plans, and got an ok from T2 to expand the scope. (I never really learned in which order these two things happened, I think it'd be kind of funny to picture Nate just running rogue here, but the reality is that there was probably already some sort of an agreement that if the game's news are well received... But I'm speculating here.)

Late 2019, T2 is in talks with ST to get the game scoped up, including how much it's going to cost to hire more people, extend development time, etc. We don't know all the details, but T2 doesn't like what they're hearing, they cut ties with ST, spin up Intercept, and use the fact that Star Theory's basically ruined to hire a bunch of people over. It's effectively a hostile takeover. Pandemic hits full force. Notably, fed cuts rate to basically 0% to keep the economy from tanking. Nobody's quite sure how developing games in the pandemic world will go. We enter the uncertain era. But there's light. Turns out, game development working from home is not bad, and game sales are booming. And that 0% fed rate? Oh, that's a gold mine. Suddenly, you can start new projects, expand scopes, and pay for it with borrowed money. So long as the game ships eventually and is good, you make profit. The more games you make this way, the more money you make as a company. This is when we get delay announcements, and behind the scenes, Intercept Games is growing and what I would call KSP2 Mk2 enters its new pre-production. This is a bigger game that's going longer to develop, but it's ok, because T2 has taken out credit to make the game, and based on the community reaction, they expect it to sell.

Fast forward to mid-2022. Fed rate starts climbing. Suddenly, what was free no longer is. Now, if you're not offsetting your costs with revenue and you keep borrowing, you're paying interest. This is likely what pushed the Early Access decision. Take Two needed to be sure they aren't going to be loosing all that money plus interest, and also to offset the costs, so that the interest isn't costing as much. Keep in mind that fed rate announcements are made fairly early. By the end of '22 the rate was at 4% and it was probably expected by the time EA decision was made internally. Game entered Early Access in early 2023 and odds are, that helped keep the development going for the next year and change. By late 2023, fed rate hit its current value of 5.5%. It hasn't been this high since 2007. Every publisher out there that took out credits is bleeding, and that's basically everyone. Studios and projects are getting shut down left and right. My honest expectation is that if EA never happened and didn't generate $10M, we'd see Intercept closed half a year ago.

So now we're getting into the current situation. Yes, KSP2 EA did pretty well. Yes, there are tens of millions of USD still on the table for the full release of the game, and the game can probably make that if the tech issues are sorted, which I'm sure they can be with time. But T2 needs money to pay for the project right now, and they can't borrow it. Their heavy hitters are still burning cash and aren't going to generate revenue for a bit yet, so every dollar the company makes from other titles has to go to feed that. KSP2 can make good money, but only once 1.0 and some DLCs ship, and that's a year out at the absolute best, possibly longer. So based on the information T2 has and on how the project is going, it has to be shut down.

But the money-making potential of the game is still there. When restarted, KSP2 won't have to be started nearly from scratch like with Star Theory to Intercept transfer. It can truly be restarted, continuing the development. Whatever work is left to ship the game, that's what will still need to be done. Some time will be lost onboarding a new team, but it's not a huge amount of time overall. The moment additional funds are available, I would expect T2 to want the development to resume.

 

tl;dr In current market conditions, continuing development of a game that's more than a year out from being able to sustain its development with revenue is a huge risk. If you have a sure thing with huge ROI, yeah, you keep pouring what resources you have into it. But anything less than certain or only marginally profitable has to be shelved. It doesn't have to stay shelved forever, though. New revenue streams are going to become available soon and the forecast for the market is positive. At this point, I expect T2 to circle back to KSP2 in a few months at best, after GTA VI release at worst. It does mean that the most optimistic, rose-tinted glasses forecast for v1.0 release is late 2025 (with some scope cuts and if PD already has a new team in mind) and 2028 in the worst case.

And we probably will have a better picture after next week's earnings call. So stay tuned, but don't hold your breath.

_{(Edit: Fixed "By the end of '24" to read "By the end of '22" per Flush Foot's post below.)}

Excellent financial analysis! But it remains to be known the composition of the team that was initially hired:

-How many engineers in charge?

-Did they have mathematicians and physicists on staff?

-Who gave the scientific support and the guidelines to be carried out?

Much to my chagrin, I remember well that in 2020 priority was given to music (?) and engine flashes (?) Not to mention the continuous promotional videos made with a software that had nothing to do with KSP2. 

And before anyone starts barking, I want to know that as a programmer (nowadays it is called a developer) I have worked to make commercial applications even with an Economist and a Stock Trader. I'm just a programmer.

[K^2]

2 hours ago, The Aziz said:

fast forward to financial report and announcement of record profits.

No need to fast forward. December 2023 was the highest revenue month for gaming industry ever, full stop. 

These aren't contradictory, though. In fact, part of the reason 2023 was so great for revenue is because the rates were so low the previous years, and more good games were being made. Turns out, the market's not saturated. If you make more good games, people will buy more good games. However, when a lot of the hires were made in late 2021 and early 2022, the publishers were counting on all that projected revenue and were expecting to continue borrowing money. But now borrowing money is more expensive, money that already has been borrowed needs repayment (because a lot of loans are flexible, and new rates apply to money already borrowed!) and well, revenues are great, but the bubble was simply larger. So cuts are being made, and over the next couple of years, we'll see revenue drop back down because of it. It sucks, and I wish companies would budget for the money they have and not what they might be able to borrow, but without some major changes to laws regulating all of that, it's not likely to change much. Rates going back to somewhere in 1-2% range will help to balance things out, but doesn't solve underlying problem.

24 minutes ago, dprostock said:

-How many engineers in charge?

KSP2 credits list 24. Not all of them were concurrent, though. Say about 20 at any given time? Reasonable fraction for a 70-something person studio.

27 minutes ago, dprostock said:

-Did they have mathematicians and physicists on staff?

Physicists, two, but not concurrently. They hired one, he left to join... Microsoft, I think? And then they hired another.

Caveat is that both of them were from academia, and while looking at their field of work and experience, they seem like they were well qualified in their fields, they had no game development experience. It's hard to know how much experience either one of them had with game physics outside of the industry, but it is definitely a weak spot. A good physicist from academia can certainly learn game engine physics, but it is something to learn, and it does take time.

I happen to have come to game dev from academia, particle physics specifically, and I have worked on game physics in a few places. I actually have two patents on game physics from one of the games I've worked on. So this is familiar territory for me, and in my opinion, the people Intercept hired to lead physics for the game would be capable of delivering on quality, but could be partially responsible for it taking longer than anticipated due to their inexperience with the specifics. The fact that the first one left and had to be replaced, means that time was lost twice.

I do kind of understand the decision to hire from academia. Game physics is a niche with very few experienced people, meaning we get payed pretty well. Academia pays peanuts, so you can get someone green for about half, if not a third, the cost if you're willing to wait for them to learn some of the specifics. I don't think it was necessarily a bad decision for Intercept, but it was one that hurt them more than they probably expected.

34 minutes ago, dprostock said:

-Who gave the scientific support and the guidelines to be carried out?

Beyond the experts they hired? No idea. But if they asked around in the industry, people would help. Game dev has that in common with academia. Despite fierce competition between the studios, people who actually do the work don't take it that seriously. If you go to a conference, people will happily tell you how to implement cool cutting edge tech they got into their games. Desire to be first is there, and people keep secrets for the newest stuff close to heart, but then the resources to catch up to it are shockingly easy to get once the first game with that tech is out.

37 minutes ago, dprostock said:

Much to my chagrin, I remember well that in 2020 priority was given to music (?) and engine flashes (?)

I don't think it's the matter of priority. If an artist made a flashy thing, it's a flashy thing that's immediately available to be shown. If engineers made a cool thing, it needs to be integrated with something else, have assets hooked up, added to the game... You can't show it off nearly as easily as the art stuff. So art stuff's more prominent in marketing materials.

I don't think KSP2 was misprioritized. I think the scope was much greater than they had resources for, and that's some combination of problems in studio leadership, engineering team leadership (from what I heard) and from PD/T2 on running with it.

And I think a lot of this would still get us to a good and finished KSP2 eventually. Just a lot slower than initially promised. It'd be over budget, but if it weren't for the market situation, I think it'd be over budget by an acceptable to T2 amount, and the latter would still make profit from the game when it would eventually ship. And again, I think that will still happen. We just went from, "Development is slow," to "Development is effectively paused."

[Pthigrivi]

13 hours ago, Mitokandria said:

I've heard it referred to as "Dragon Sickness" before as well. Couldn't for the life of me remember where, but almost certainly during my time living in Europe.

Its from Tolkien  The way the gold and the jewels and the arkenstone drove everyone crazy, the desire to heap up a big pile of it and lord over it like Smaug. 

Edited May 11 by Pthigrivi

[KerikBalm]

On 5/10/2024 at 2:46 AM, K^2 said:

,they are fully owned by T2. So anything that happened at Intercept is responsibility of T2, outside of potentially crimes committed by some individuals acting rogue, in which case, it's not fair to even say that it's IG's fault, but that individual's. So either T2 fault or individual's fault. Not IG's

Gotta disagree with the "Not IG's" part. The logic doesn't follow.

If IG screwed up, and T2 was reviewing a d approving their plans, then it was T2 AND IG's fault. I can see how you say that T2 shares the blame, but I don't see how IG (or Nate for that matter) is absolved of blame.

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

Did someone ask for Nate?

[K^2]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

If IG screwed up, and T2 was reviewing a d approving their plans, then it was T2 AND IG's fault.

Studio's job is to make the best game they can with resources given. Publisher's job is to make sure the scope and resources match, either by scaling up the budget or by cutting scope.

We have clear evidence of the latter falling short. KSP2 was overscoped for the budget or underbudgeted for the scope, and it was PD's responsibility to address. Based on my own experience making games and scheduling work to meet milestones negotiated with the publishers, I think IG did reasonably well with resources they had. Not stellar, there have been pretty big slip-ups, but nothing that I'd describe as failure. If we all agree that there was failure to deliver, and we're looking to ascribe blame, I can only place it on T2/PD based on this.

There have been problems within IG. As far as I know, the major ones have been addressed. It's hard to say if they were addressed in a timely matter, as all of my information on it is second-hand. It is possible, that there have been systemic failures on the side of the leadership, resulting in what would be fair to call "studio's fault." But this is speculative. We do not have clear evidence of it.

In short, T2/PD failures are evident. IG's are speculation, but plausible.

[Pthigrivi]

^Definitely. I personally think the scope was really ambitious but great given what KSP1 was. I, personally, have little interest in multiplayer but I see the appeal. I also think while interstellar is cool getting the basic game down first with colonies and resources was the most important thing to making a really compelling play experience. If T2 + PD weren't comfortable funding the full scope just rebuild KSP1 with colonies and respources and add GP2. Make interstellar as expansions. Obviously we didn't even get to colony parts before IG got liquidated but again to me thats because T2 needed cash and wasn't willing to wait for a viable product and forced a premature EA. I think he was wrong on wobbly rockets and maybe some of the way workspaces played out but as far as the overall tone, ideas, and general design goes Nate did a great job. Thats me though. I always thought removing money and skills to make room for colonies and resources was smart. If you didn't you might feel differently.

Edited May 12 by Pthigrivi