Intercept/PD needs to speak out NOW

[never_do]

33 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

Please... try scrolling through the dozens and dozens of threads with very intelligent, highly detailed & articulate dissertation on various limitations/ ways they were f*ING up.

Yes. All the nice people who barked at anyone who said anything critical about the game after FS came out on discord and reddit.

I know there was a lot of criticism over here. But on other platforms it was basically the "this is fine" meme in action.

[Stevie_D]

I personally don't know what anyone is hoping for from ANY announcement... be it from Take 2, PD, or Nate - it will all amount to a nothing burger.
You know why?
Because words do not define who you are or what you are doing, only actions do. And T2/PD's actions were made very clear when they closed the IG studio. 

They didn't simply reduce the staff by 5%, like the rest of their corporation, they closed the studio. That action speaks volumes.

[Snip]

This is why people say "actions speak louder than words." It is not simply a trite, cliched platitude, actions speak the truth of your intentions. Words do not.

• Take 2 can come out with a statement and say, with corporate speak words, that they are still "Fully Committed" and "100% support" KSP2's continued development to "completion." But we know for a fact that is not with a 70 person strong team, because of their actions. And, unless they specifically state "to complete the roadmap" then "completion" could mean ANYthing that they deem "completed." It could mean anything, even as little as going down to a 4 person team that keeps selling you a dream of a completed game that stays in Early Access for the next 8 years until the last of you finally realize they are preying upon peoples' love of the franchise making them gullible enough to throw 50 bucks at them for a glorified, never-finished beta.
• Private Division may come out and say that members (obvs not all) of Intercept have been "absorbed" into PD and they will assume direct control over the project. But, again, it will never be a 70 strong team, maybe not even a quarter of that, as we know due to so many layoffs. Their main goal is to serve their Take 2 overlord daddy. They will at best say they still back Nate and the project, and probably "remain committed" and perhaps use the words "a restructured team" or "reprioritized infrastructure" that will not speak the truth of "we sacked 70 people and rehired 10 because we culled the weakest performing IPs on our books." They may even say that they can "reassure" us as a community that KSP2 "will be finished" but without ever specifying what that means.
• Nate Simpson is a frontman. Nothing more. He is there to put a warm and reassuring face to you, the customer, that he and the company "are fans" and "have your best interests at heart." It is a time old corporate way of connecting to you on an emotional, one-to-one scale because human beings relate to other human beings and naturally want to believe them. Some of you *want* to trust him. That is a part of their corporate game and sales technique. He told you he was a fan, and that he loved and was involved in the community LONG, LONG before KSP2, but ...somehow... NEVER noticed over those YEARs of community involvement that nearly everyone universally HATED wobbly rockets,... and he even thought that we loved them and that was part of KSP's "Dna" and "charm." Then acted SURPRISED when we were all aghast at how bad wet noodle time in KSP2 was. That, among other glaring oddities, hints at a truer perspective - he is a corporate front man, the face of the project, pretending to be your friend and to keep you assured that he is one of you.  That is *how* corporate businesses work.  If you don't understand that then you are seriously naive. Any statement from him will say that he is "elated" or "so pleased" to still be keeping this project going after the "restructuring" at Take 2. He will tell you that "as promised" this project is going to be seen through to completion. He will tell you it has been a turbulent time but their love for KSP2 remains and he looks forward to proving all the naysayers wrong (so that the fanboy stans will stay onside.) He may say his love for the project gets stronger, or has been reinvigorated, or he looks forward to the dream coming true. He may promise "improved communication," now that he is allowed to speak again, and that things will be different from now on. "Lessons will have been learned" (an old doozy,) new ways of doing things will be implemented or their "work pipeline" has been "streamlined" - to make the "process" faster and smoother. Everything will point to positivity and a bright future.

Words. All words. Then, look at the history of their *actions* over the last 7 years, and ask yourself where their true priorities lie.

You will not get closure. They will not tell you the game is being shut down, because they never do something like that when there is currently a furore or the public media and spotlight is on a project. At best, if it is cancelled they will wait a year or so and then quietly announce it is one of a number of games being removed from steam.

Edited May 13 by James Kerman
Redacted by a moderator

[Lisias]

On 5/7/2024 at 11:57 PM, justspace103 said:

Silence is allowing this community that i have been a part of and loved so much to implode with panic and doom of the death of this franchise. I am starting to agree with them.

There's absolutely nothing better that can be said about the subject that wasn't said here:

Except by a tiny little detail:

THEY ARE DOING IT ON PURPOSE. It's "by design".

They have nothing to gain by speaking something now, before everything goes public on  Q2 Earnings Conference Call (the next one, 16th of the current month). And they have nothing to lose neither by remaining silent.

In fact, it may be even a tactic to measure the interest on the Franchise - the more people are crying loud, the more is the potential customer base in the future, and this will surely help them on planning how much to spent on it.

One person is unpredictable. A group of people is statistically predictable with a very great rate of success (the bigger the group, the most accurate are the prediction) once you know what you need to measure.

We are being monitored. As we were lab rats - the only difference, if that they need these rat labs' money to be kept afloat.

So, no. They don't need to do anything to get what they need from us - we are already doing it for them.

Edited May 13 by Lisias
Hit "Save" too soon

[cocoscacao]

23 minutes ago, Lisias said:

In fact, it may be even a tactic to measure the interest on the Franchise - the more people are crying loud, the more is the potential customer base in the future, and this will surely help them on planning how much to spent on it.

Minor disagreement. Everyone who played KSP 1 is probably interested in KSP 2 completion. Being a niche game, I suspect they want new players to hop in. You can easily find out how many people are interested now, but with the current state of the game, you can't pull new players in. Even if finished (in a nice way), maybe it won't attract more people.

[K^2]

22 hours ago, Lisias said:

In fact, it may be even a tactic to measure the interest on the Franchise [...] We are being monitored. As we were lab rats

I think you're getting a bit dramatic on this. Is someone going to take notes on how this went down? Maybe. Could be useful. Was the silence orchestrated on purpose just to gauge the reaction? Definitely not.

22 hours ago, Lisias said:

They have nothing to gain by speaking something now, before everything goes public on  Q2 Earnings Conference Call (the next one, 16th of the current month). And they have nothing to lose neither by remaining silent.

That part's true, though, and fully explains the silence without having to imagine a conspiracy. Saying anything will only fan the flames, so they're choosing not to.

The silence is ethically questionable, of course, but that's a future T2's problem. Corporations aren't known for planning particularly well past the next quarter.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

I think you're getting a bit dramatic on this. Is someone going to take notes on how this went down? Maybe. Could be useful. Was the silence orchestrated on purpose just to gauge the reaction? Definitely not.

I would not use "definitely". I had worked on a Marketing Shop in the (long) past, and this was in the menu.

As well as to shutdown for a few minutes a critical service to measure how many active users you really have by counting the support tickets later, or to deactivate a login to check if someone is using it.

Just because it was easier and cheaper than paying for a monitoring service.

Don't let your professional ethics get into your reasoning - there're a lot of unethical people in charge of things around the World.

[dprostock]

4 minutes ago, Lisias said:

I would not use "definitely". I had worked on a Marketing Shop in the (long) past, and this was in the menu.

As well as to shutdown for a few minutes a critical service to measure how many active users you really have by counting the support tickets later, or to deactivate a login to check if someone is using it.

Just because it was easier and cheaper than paying for a monitoring service.

Don't let your professional ethics get into your reasoning - there're a lot of unethical people in charge of things around the World.

How do you recoup millions of dollars of investment when you have already captured (and very badly) part of the return?

Unless they take the operation to another city where there are more serious developers and people with proven knowledge.

It has sounded ridiculous to me that during the pandemic they have had more than a month of connectivity problems to work at home.

Imagine Wall Street with those people! 

[K^2]

2 hours ago, dprostock said:

It has sounded ridiculous to me that during the pandemic they have had more than a month of connectivity problems to work at home.

That was a hard problem for most studios, actually. You'd be surprised at the amount of traffic you need. Normally, a studio has LAN that can take it, but the internet service to studio usually isn't as robust, and mostly one way. Studio can receive decent amount of data but send a lot less. Due to security concerns, all of the inbound traffic to the studio is going through VPN and it can only take so much on existing service and gateways.

Normally, upgrading this isn't a problem, but if you're in a large tech center, like Seattle, at the start of the pandemic lockdown, and suddenly every business and many residences need a service upgrade, while ISPs themselves are also operating under lockdown... Yeah, that took months to sort. That's kind of how being a game dev was then.

Some studios were more cloud oriented or had foresight to work on remote connectivity earlier. They were lucky and suffered just a few weeks of disruption. And others weren't and lost months of productivity.

On the flip side I also remember all the delay anouncements that came out around that time. And a lot of them did lean into WFH as an excuse. Watching that from inside the industry, when I knew some of these were already behind, and public release was making it sound like the game would be on time if not for the pandemic, that did get a little silly. And a lot of places that lost a month or two realistically, were pushing projects back by 6mo or more. I'm not upset if people were spared crunch, but we should just normalize being honest about schedule slips. Nothing ever ships on time and without crunch. Lets just be honest about it and avoid the crunch.

[Schaufel]

Criminals acting like criminals.

Took our money, made false promises, took off and laying in the sun on our expenses. Message is clear, I await nothing anymore. Even if now any statement or promise is made, it's too late. Damage done, unfixable.

This will not go unpunished and will follow anyone involved for the rest of their career.

Feel free to comment in disbelief, you wise guys.

 

Edited May 14 by Schaufel

[Scarecrow71]

52 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Normally, upgrading this isn't a problem, but if you're in a large tech center, like Seattle, at the start of the pandemic lockdown, and suddenly every business and many residences need a service upgrade, while ISPs themselves are also operating under lockdown... Yeah, that took months to sort. That's kind of how being a game dev was then.

Man, you are just saying a lot of the stuff on my mind today!

Unless you were already lucky enough to have a WFH setup, and you had the expected internet bandwidth to handle doing so, you were kinda hosed at the start of the pandemic.  There were a lot of people in all kinds of industries that found themselves now needing to work from home, and it took a long time for companies to get their employees set up.  In a normal situation this would be difficult; imagine trying to do it when nobody can really go anywhere and people were afraid to meet strangers outside, let alone go into their houses to set equipment up.

On the reverse side of this, a lot of companies rescinded WFH when the pandemic ended, so now you've got to traipse all that equipment and stuff back into the office and get set up there again.  Much faster than at home, but still some downtime while this happens.

[HebaruSan]

1 hour ago, Schaufel said:

laying in the sun on our expenses.

If you run the numbers, they probably lost money. 70 people is not a small team, 5+ years is not a short time, and Seattle software developer salaries are not cheap.

[herbal space program]

15 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

If you run the numbers, they probably lost money. 70 people is not a small team, 5+ years is not a short time, and Seattle software developer salaries are not cheap.

Given the anemic sales in EA, they almost certainly lost money, and the notion that this was a deliberate swindle by TT to cash in on vaporware  from the start  is pretty silly.  At worst, they knew after a string of disappointing progress reports that the game would likely never be everything that was promised and that they would probably have a hard time even breaking even on its developments cost, let alone making any kind of actual profit. The half-baked EA release was probably more a finger in the air to see how many people were even still interested in buying the game than it was a deliberate attempt to rip people off. Unfortunately, the answer they got was a resounding Bronx cheer, and even the arguably much better game that was represented by the FS update did very little to resuscitate sales. At that point, they probably decided that this thing was a dyed-in-the-wool turkey and would never turn a profit, at least if they stuck with the slow, bloated, mismanaged, and technically underqualified team they had.

Even with all that, I still have some hope that they might try down the road to put the title  in the hands of some kind of pared down team of fixers who are expert in physics engines, to see if they can get it working well enough to support  a bunch of colonies content that is likely already waiting in the wings. Then they'll slap a 1.0 on it and hope that modders will come along to fill in enough missing parts to make the stock game more worth buying.  Interstellar and multiplayer will probably go by the board entirely unless a whole lot more people buy in on a colonies-only 1.0, and then I imagine they would be rolled out as DLC.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, herbal space program said:

Given the anemic sales in EA

I don't know where this is coming from. Lowest estimates I've seen are 240k, with a lot of reporting pointing to 500k+. It's probably not on the high end of these, but even at 240k, we're talking ~$10M in revenue. This is very not bad for EA.

T2 still spent several times rhat on KSP2 already. In fact, if KSP2 was on EA sales budget from the time EA came out, they'd be running out right about now. I don't know if that's a factor in timing or just coincidence, but it does make the situation feel a tiny bit less unfair.

Though, only a tiny bit. Intercept isn't an indy, and T2 took on responsibility of seeing the project through. So I'm still waiting for the Earnings Call this Thursday to hear how they explain it.

[herbal space program]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

I don't know where this is coming from. Lowest estimates I've seen are 240k, with a lot of reporting pointing to 500k+. It's probably not on the high end of these, but even at 240k, we're talking ~$10M in revenue. This is very not bad for EA.

I'll admit I'm just repeating what I've read here, so I was not aware of the actual estimates, which are actually somewhat more than I thought. Still, "anemic" is a somewhat subjective term, and that's still only around 10% as many copies as KSP1 sold, so a lot of KSP1 fans have clearly taken a pass until now. And even if it sold 500k copies, as you pointed out they still probably haven't recouped all their development costs yet with that big team.  But given KSP1's numbers, there could still be a pretty big latent market out there that is waiting for some actual new content and better performance reports before buying in.  Impressions about initial sales notwithstanding, I'm in the camp that says that is not out of the question and might represent a sufficient rationale for them not to just walk away. Others are obviously pretty convinced that won't happen.

[jost]

9 hours ago, Schaufel said:

This will not go unpunished and will follow anyone involved for the rest of their career.

In which universe c-level gets punished for missmanagement? 

Or do you mean the developers, comunity management and remaining people of IG? 

Nate works at PD now and I doubt that he started a carribian vacation on his first day there.

Concerning developers and community management: Why should people loose their basis of income due to a failed EA Video game? Especially ( like community management ) if they can not really be blamed?

 

It's not something like blowing up a nuclear power plant or even VW diesel gate.

It never ceases to amaze me what problems gamers have.

If such a thing is troubling you you are better off than most people in any country in this World. No reason to feel bad but also no reason to be mad

Edited May 15 by jost

[AVaughan]

2 hours ago, jost said:

Nate works at PD

Source?

It's not that I think you are wrong, just that I hadn't heard that information, and Nate is the last person I want to see 'saved' from the layoffs.

 

[Fizzlebop Smith]

14 minutes ago, AVaughan said:

Source?

It's not that I think you are wrong, just that I hadn't heard that information, and Nate is the last person I want to see 'saved' from the layoffs.

 

The LinkedIn profile has changed status from IG to PD there's links somewhere. 

[K^2]

7 hours ago, herbal space program said:

And even if it sold 500k copies, as you pointed out they still probably haven't recouped all their development costs yet with that big team.

There is no question that EA hasn't covered development costs. At an absolute minimum, KSP2 needs to be available on consoles to have a chance of making the money back, and I would argue needs a differentiator, like colonies ready and working, to do so. Which is a strong incentive to release 1.0 at some point in the future.

My only point here was that $10M+ is by no means poor performance for Early Access. Imagine if you saw a game on Kickstarter take $10M. We'd be talking about it as an overwhelming success, even if we're comparing against games that have had demo on Steam at the time of KS.

4 hours ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

The LinkedIn profile has changed status from IG to PD there's links somewhere. 

I don't know if we have any sort of confirmation that his profile changed, or if he always had PD listed on Linkedin. Currently, his profile lists work at PD since Feb 2020, id est, immediately after leaving Star Theory. No mention of Intercept Games.

You can change these things retroactively. Unfortunately, I'm only seeing a May 2nd capture on Web Archive as well, so I don't know if he just always had it listed as PD, or if he changed it at some point on or before May 2nd.

It does look like the same info is coming up in some 3rd party scrapers, but again, I have no idea how frequently these are updated.

 

It is possible that Nate has set his profile to Private Division before Intercept was properly announced and never bothered to update. He might actually be affected by layoffs and studio closure, same as everyone else there. Unless someone has a screenshot from before May 2nd showing Linkedin page with Intercept Games listed, I don't think we should put too much stock in this.

[BrobDingnag]

Well, at least everything will be made clear tomorrow. Either they’ll be forced to announce the end of development, which will confirm that development is done, or they’ll say absolutely nothing, which will confirm that development is done. Not much longer to wait.

[Skorj]

I doubt KSP will even come up in the earnings call, though maybe in the Q&A if there's analyst who's a fan.  The big news will be any details on when GTA6 will release, as that's the money printer for T2.