Was the spirit of EA Violated? Or not

[Jacke]

4 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

EA worked for a couple years when indie developers used it to promote and fund good games that publishers would have probably ruined.

See: FTL. Factorio. KSP. Darkest Dungeon.

Also the original Subnautica was an EA success.  I was there as an EA Player.  Back when Unknown Worlds had a rockin' forum website, we filled that with feedback and all sorts of commentary.  The game benefited a lot from EA.  I started that game from scratch so many times.  But the start of Subnautica is almost its best part.  I can still picture my first dives off of the escape pod into those amazing waters.  At night with all the glow-in-the-dark marine life.  It's one of the few games I've completed.

I'm not sure why things went wrong with the sequel, but I know it never got the same passion on the website.  I think the story went the wrong way.  Then there was all that mysterious drama about a writer who was sacked and then the story changed a lot and the game somewhat.  Subnautica Below Zero came out, there's improvements, some irritants.  But...it lacks the spark that is through-and-through the original.

And not long afterwards, the forums were shut down and replaced with a Discord, which for any sized community--especially one with lots of mods and various discussion--isn't a good substitute.

 

4 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

If a publisher who makes so much total money that the financing of a game is akin to an error on their tally sheet, makes that game EA, then no it's not even remotely in the "spirit" of EA.

But that spirit's been dead* for so long it doesn't really matter anymore.

I won't sign your petition. Not because I don't agree with it but because Internet petitions aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

*can a spirit die?

I wish I had reactions left for the day.  Knocked another one out of the park, @Superfluous J.  Sad, ain't it? 

[ezequielandrush]

I think they did.
They made promises that they couldn´t keep. Also they bluntly lied to us when they told us the MP (for example) was really fun.
In the light of recent events they lied to us.

The problem with liers is that you can´t know beforehand they´re lying to you.

I´ll sign it but I don´t think it will change anything. Not buying again an EA game might help though. Steam should review their EA policies

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

Paying 70 employees for over a year just to maintain a legal pretense of active work doesn't make sense when a skeleton crew of 15 would have served that purpose just as well. All signs point to they were hoping it would turn out to be a viable product, and it just didn't.

Note that the Steam page for KSP 2 is not changed so this argument is still valid.  Not for people who bought it earlier but people who buys is after development stopped. 
Granted its an playable game but not that is promised.

[Lisias]

6 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

Paying 70 employees for over a year just to maintain a legal pretense of active work doesn't make sense when a skeleton crew of 15 would have served that purpose just as well. All signs point to they were hoping it would turn out to be a viable product, and it just didn't.

If they were working full time in the project, yes.

If they were working on other projects too, well... Not exactly.

 

6 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

*can a spirit die?

Well, they are trying to kill it, no doubt.

 

5 hours ago, Superluminaut said:

I think a corporate game development studio doing early access is fundamentally absurd.

I think it may be a good idea, as long the corporation understands the development model - instead of (ab)using it as a marketing tool.

The problem here wasn't a corporation using EA to develop the game. The problem is the corporation being a freeloader, (ab)using it for free workmanship and free marketing.

EA is being (ab)used by corporations to save money, not to develop a better game.

 

6 hours ago, Yaivenov said:

It is my opinion that the Early Access release was a cash grab executed when it became obvious they were never going to complete the project.  It was just an attempt to ameliorate their financial losses.

I don't doubt they would do it, but I don't think it's the case this time.

I understand that most of people around here are not fond of the C-Suite (neither do I), but most of them are not stupid idiots as we like to think about them. They are dumbasses on STEM, no doubt, but they have other skills - and they know how to use these other skills.

One of these skills is the Sense of Opportunity. They are excellent opportunists (not necessarily a bad thing). They are risk takers, and so, they know how to calculate risks. They don't win all the time, but they know how to lose and still be profitable (believe me, they do it).

So, unless P.D. had an team of incredibly inexperienced and/or completely incompetent C-Suit people on the helm, they would not try to purposely scam people on E.A. like you are suggesting. The risks were too high.

Unless they would had nothing to lose...

There're people on Forum suggesting that the TTI's C-Suit cornered P.D. demanding some financial results or the axe would start to fall on some heads/projects. I think this hypothesis is, by far, one of the most probable (remember the upper management of P.D. being fired earlier this year?).

So P.D.'s C-Suit people, feeling the knife in their throats, decided to risk it all in a bold move - let's publish everything no matter the state and see if we get lucky and one of them sticks. What could they possibly lose? "We are already losing our jobs: worst case scenario, we lose our jobs the same - the money invested on all these years of development weren't ours at first place, why we would bother wasting it?"

So, TL;DR: I don't think TTI or even PD did EA to scam people and try to recoup some money - the risks were too high, the earnings were too low.

So they did EA in "good" faith, or PD (and not TTI) did EA in a desperate attempt to save their necks, disregarding any consequences.

[moeggz]

16 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

As I find generally to be the case, most problems with form (ex, communication style, perceived intentions) are actually just downstream manifestations of problems of substance. I highly suspect we would never be having this conversation or any one like it, if development was actually going smoothly, they were making progress, and finding success tackling the aforementioned core challenges

This is something I and others said multiple times throughout EA. I think a lot of anger at the communication/CMs was misplaced disappointment with the development speed. 

If the game was fun and developing quickly they could’ve talked as much or as little as they wanted. You don’t really need to have a big dev interview once a month if there’s a content update once a month to show what the devs have been up to. A KERB update post is easily replaced by weekly patches with detailed patch notes. 

Then they can talk a lot, nearly not at all, be sassy like the Wendy’s Twitter, be very proper or whatever other style they want and it wouldn’t really matter. The frustration always stemmed from this being the slowest progressing EA game I think any of us have ever played. With the devs not active (for the most part) interacting with the community that frustration was expressed to the CMs, and eventually it became (unfairly) frustration at the CMs.

[PopinFRESH]

21 hours ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

That has to do with internal politics regarding the parent / publisher / developer.

I am talking about whether people feel Intercept Games approached Early Access in the spirit it was intended : primarily two way communication between community / developers.

I feel it was handled as a big title launch, not ground up EA.

Short answer, no.

Long answer; In my opinion, it should be abundantly clear at this point that the intention in 2019 was to release a feature complete game; to which the development team failed miserably at. Take Two / Private Division gave them three years worth of additional development time which still was not enough time for them to get anywhere close to a shippable product. I don't think we will ever know for sure due to those with knowledge being unable to disclose any details, however, I believe Take Two gave them (Private Division and/or Intercept Games) an ultimatum to start generating revenue or stop incurring expenses; so they elected to hastily try to patch it up to get anything they could shove out the door in 4 months and slapped an Early Access label on it in hopes they could generate enough revenue to sustain them through completion (e.g. what your essentially saying in the above quote).

The EA announcement was largely where they lost me in terms of communication as the rational regarding launching as EA in that video seemed completely hollow and disingenuous to me. It made no logical sense in context with all of their prior communications, even the ones made just a few short months prior to that video. Watching all of the "delayed" and intermediate update videos sequentially upto the EA announcement video it is hard not to come to the conclusion that they were either lying or substantially misrepresenting things in all of their prior videos; or they were being very disingenuous in their stated reasoning for launching it in Early Access. To me the latter is far more likely in my opinion.

[Flush Foot]

12 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

EA worked for a couple years when indie developers used it to promote and fund good games that publishers would have probably ruined.

See: FTL. Factorio. KSP. Darkest Dungeon

See also: Satisfactory (headed for v1.0 / exit from EA 'soon^TM' and (I would argue) Dyson Sphere Program (no idea when 1.0 is coming, nor what it might include, but their game is fairly fun, well-received/reviewed, and continues development with reasonable levels of communication, though it has been a while since I've heard anything...)

[FreeThinker]

turned out his gut feeling was right from the start

Edited May 7 by FreeThinker

[Jacke]

3 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

turned out hit gut feeling was right from the start

Yeah.  My gut feel was reinforced by hardware that never had a hope of going anywhere with KSP 2.  After the events of last week, I've now removed my Like on it from Steam and marked it as Ignore.  Because even when I get the hardware that could run KSP 2, I'm fairly sure "It's dead, Jim."

And Much Adventure now has a new video out from May 1st:

 

[Lisias]

25 minutes ago, Jacke said:

<...>After the events of last week, I've now removed my Like on it from Steam and marked it as Ignore.  Because even when I get the hardware that could run KSP 2, I'm fairly sure "It's dead, Jim."

I'm following the backslash on Steam. Dude... I'm taking some popcorns and waiting people starting to buy the game just to lay a terrible review and then ask for refund, because it's literally the only thing people didn't did yet there.

[TLTay]

55 minutes ago, Jacke said:

Yeah.  My gut feel was reinforced by hardware that never had a hope of going anywhere with KSP 2.  After the events of last week, I've now removed my Like on it from Steam and marked it as Ignore.  Because even when I get the hardware that could run KSP 2, I'm fairly sure "It's dead, Jim."

And Much Adventure now has a new video out from May 1st:

 

I thought about it, but I have slow rural internet and don't want to waste 20 hours downloading excrement just to pinch out a freshly steaming pile of disapproval.

Edited May 7 by TLTay

[Superfluous J]

Like any of the big streamers care. They're happy for the furor over it because it drives ad views.

[VlonaldKerman]

4 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

turned out his gut feeling was right from the start

Yeah. I think most clear-eyed people were thinking along these lines, while hoping that they were over enough of the major humps that the remaining dev time/money would be worth it for T2.

As of February 2023, all the money T2 had sunk into the game was gone, not a factor. The only thing that mattered was, "How much money will they have to spend from now on? And will that be worth it?"

That being said, I think many (most?) of us were concerned that whatever issue(s) had delayed the game and caused it to be in such a horrible state were not yet solved, which seems to have been the case.

In his most recent KSP video, this guy observes that KSP 2 was always going to be compared to modded KSP 1, not vanilla or EA KSP 1. This is because KSP 2 was essentially modded KSP 1, but redesigned from the ground up to be more stable and performant. Everyone knew you could make a science mode, have colonies, etc. The only UNSOLVED problem was doing it performantly. As far as I know, they never solved that problem, and until they do, KSP 2 will never surpass modded KSP 1.

In all likelihood, T2 corporate pulled the plug on the team which has thus far failed to deliver on the main points-of-success/failure for the game. Like some other users have speculated, they're probably getting an independent team to review the project and determine if it could be salvageable by another team, or if the hole is too deep to dig out of.

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

I'm following the backslash on Steam. Dude... I'm taking some popcorns and waiting people starting to buy the game just to lay a terrible review and then ask for refund, because it's literally the only thing people didn't did yet there.

I though steam has implemented some feature to prevent you having your review bomb  count when they detect you refunded the game

[Yaivenov]

4 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

Like any of the big streamers care. They're happy for the furor over it because it drives ad views.

Not wrong.  I'd only believe the sincerity of the likes of Manley or Dodd.  People who were rocket nerds first and just happened to fall into influencing.

[Lisias]

12 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

I though steam has implemented some feature to prevent you having your review bomb  count when they detect you refunded the game

Yes, they did. But you have 2 weeks for the refund, what's good enough for bombing the game due a crisis. In the mean time, your review is there.

Besides, counting or not, seeing a lot of reviews with the label "Refunded" being marked as "useful" sends a hell of a message, believe me.

Anyway, there's the financial burden of the refunding - and this is the nastier part of the deal, not the bombing itself. Someone lose a bit of money (besides the refunded amount) when this happens. There's a fee applied when you buy it, and there's a fee applied at chargeback - someone is going to pay for the party.

The old and faithful 1USD bill is the best and most effective voting ballot still in existence.

=== == = POST EDIT = == ===

So I did a research on the Refund thingy, and I found that no, reviews from people that refunded the game are still being counted. Like this one.

Some other criteria must be in effect nowadays.

Spoiler

 

Edited May 8 by Lisias
post edit

[Yaivenov]

Full disclosure: bought KSP2 for $50 when it came out.  Unplayable. Sat on it expecting development.  Tried again after updates.  Still unplayable.  4.8 hours total game time since purchase 15 months ago

 

Finally requested a refund citing several reasons (especially the violation of EA policy by making explicit claims of future development) but I definitely mentioned the closure of the developer studio.  The response?  Lilian directed me to contact the developers.  Yeah.  Thanks Lilian.

 

Edited May 8 by Yaivenov

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Yaivenov said:

Finally requested a refund citing several reasons (especially the violation of EA policy by making explicit claims of future development) but I definitely mentioned the closure of the developer studio.  The response?  Lilian directed me to contact the developers.  Yeah.  Thanks Lilian.

I heard of people managing to get the refund on the 2nd or 3rd try.

Additionally... Steam don't want to lose (yet more) money themselves, if the studio is closed and the respective wallet is near depleted, Steam would have to pay the refund from their own pockets. What is not exactly unfair, but still highly undesirable (for them).

I respect Steam a lot for the many, many good things they are doing for gaming (almost as much as I respect GoG) - but some line must be drawn somewhere. I really don't think KSP2 was a scam, but it ended up working as one and someone must be accountable, or the very principles in which our Economy works may be jeopardized.

[Scarecrow71]

19 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Steam

20 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Steam

20 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Steam

I think what a lot of people are forgetting is that Steam isn't the only place the game was sold.  Myself, much like others, purchased the game on Epic.  Which means it isn't just Steam's terms that need to be checked, but Epic's as well.  And if the game is canceled, BOTH could be on the hook for refunds.

[K^2]

On 5/6/2024 at 9:40 AM, dave1904 said:

Obviously not. Didn't you hear? They were all fired. 

That's such an awful take this year. I'm not going to try to defend performance of IG - or rather, not the whole of IG. They have clearly fallen below the mark a number of times as a studio, but we've also seen some fantastic work put in by individuals and teams. So that's the first complaint, don't put everyone in the same bucket. There were several absolutely amazing people who just lost their job, and you're making it sound like it's their fault. At best, it's thoughtless. At worst, hypocritical and shamefully ignorant.

Second is that how well or poorly the team has done is not remotely the deciding factor in whether a studio gets to stay. Just earlier this week we got news that Microsoft is making cuts across Bethesda, and Tango Gameworks got closed. They are developers of the Hi-Fi Rush, a game released just last year to overwhelming public acclaim and won a number of awards in 2023 and 2024, including Best Audio at TGA and Best Animation at BAFTA.

And they just got shut down. No warning, no nothing.

 

So saying Intercept got "fired" for doing bad job on KSP2 is simply not true. Individual people get fired for bad work. Studio shutdowns happen for absolutely unrelated reasons.

[cocoscacao]

31 minutes ago, K^2 said:

So saying Intercept got "fired" for doing bad job on KSP2 is simply not true. Individual people get fired for bad work. Studio shutdowns happen for absolutely unrelated reasons.

I actually wanted to open up a new thread to ask forum members to refrain from personal attacks. We've no idea what went on behind the curtains. Sure, we're all angry and disapointed, but let's not judge too quickly.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

That's such an awful take this year. <....>

Second is that how well or poorly the team has done is not remotely the deciding factor in whether a studio gets to stay. Just earlier this week we got news that Microsoft is making cuts across Bethesda, and Tango Gameworks got closed. They are developers of the Hi-Fi Rush, a game released just last year to overwhelming public acclaim and won a number of awards in 2023 and 2024, including Best Audio at TGA and Best Animation at BAFTA.

And they just got shut down. No warning, no nothing.

Exactly. There's something else happening on the Industry.

Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe':
industry expresses fury and heartbreak over closure of Hi-Fi Rush and Prey studios

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/making-good-profitable-games-will-no-longer-keep-you-safe-games-industry-expresses-fury-and-heartbreak-over-closure-of-hi-fi-rush-and-prey-studios/

Good, profitable Studios are being shutdown the same - they aren't even considering selling them (someone would probably buy them!), they are shutting down everything and the kitchen's sink.

Obviously, this is not random, there's some methodology on this - but I just can't understand it right now.

[dave1904]

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

That's such an awful take this year. I'm not going to try to defend performance of IG - or rather, not the whole of IG. They have clearly fallen below the mark a number of times as a studio, but we've also seen some fantastic work put in by individuals and teams. So that's the first complaint, don't put everyone in the same bucket. There were several absolutely amazing people who just lost their job, and you're making it sound like it's their fault. At best, it's thoughtless. At worst, hypocritical and shamefully ignorant.

Second is that how well or poorly the team has done is not remotely the deciding factor in whether a studio gets to stay. Just earlier this week we got news that Microsoft is making cuts across Bethesda, and Tango Gameworks got closed. They are developers of the Hi-Fi Rush, a game released just last year to overwhelming public acclaim and won a number of awards in 2023 and 2024, including Best Audio at TGA and Best Animation at BAFTA.

And they just got shut down. No warning, no nothing.

 

So saying Intercept got "fired" for doing bad job on KSP2 is simply not true. Individual people get fired for bad work. Studio shutdowns happen for absolutely unrelated reasons.

Its sarcasm for the question about accountability and if we think IG did their job or not. I know its in bad taste. I just don't care if it is or not. 

[dave1904]

11 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Exactly. There's something else happening on the Industry.

Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe':
industry expresses fury and heartbreak over closure of Hi-Fi Rush and Prey studios

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/making-good-profitable-games-will-no-longer-keep-you-safe-games-industry-expresses-fury-and-heartbreak-over-closure-of-hi-fi-rush-and-prey-studios/

Good, profitable Studios are being shutdown the same - they aren't even considering selling them (someone would probably buy them!), they are shutting down everything and the kitchen's sink.

Obviously, this is not random, there's some methodology on this - but I just can't understand it right now.

The profits are not high enough. 

[J.Random]

idk and idc about Hi-Fi Rush, but as for Prey devs... Prey was 6(? or 7?) years ago. After that there was Deathloop (boring) and Redfall (utter crap). I loved Dishonored series and Prey, but lately Arkane didn't deliver anything interesting.