So now we're being gaslit? T2 Boss Spoke Out

[VlonaldKerman]

By not officially shuttering the studio, they are preserving option value. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have any actual plans for it.

[Canopus]

Sounds all very grim, makes me glad i held off on buying KSP2

[Skorj]

For clarity: Private Division works with both independent studios in a pure publisher-studio relationship, and the T2-owned studios Roll7 and IG.  The April action by T2 seems to have been to close the in-house studios.  Fans of Roll7 are facing the same mystery, lack of communication, and corpo-speak. 

I believe that what's going on was largely unrelated to the struggles of KSP2. T2 just decided to simplify their corporate structure to make life easier for executives, as corporations do from time to time, and so just closed all the small shops they had.  However, for legal reasons, those studios can't be officially closed, so they'll forever remain "open" in name only, with any remaining work done by a support team at PD to make sure any minimum legal requirements are met.

It's not just common but the norm for AAA publishers to buy small studios with passionate fanbases, ignore the games that made those studios successful, then close them a few years later.   It's baffling to me why this is normal, but it's not just in gaming that it happens.

[FloppyRocket]

The game industry is incredibly mismanaged.

[kerbiloid]

On 5/18/2024 at 10:59 PM, PDCWolf said:

2k Marin has remained "opened" for 11 years after all its members got fired

So, just waiting for the 2035 necroposting news.

Wait...  Oh, ...!

Spoiler

Not much time for playing then.

Maybe, that's what T2 actually means...

[PDCWolf]

12 hours ago, FloppyRocket said:

The game industry is incredibly mismanaged.

The general figure of manager, or group lead, started as a way to have a person in common a team could deal with without directly talking to each other, and that would oversee and organize the progress towards the different goals a team might have. Nowadays every manager position is just a megalomaniac narcissist interested in the preservation of his position even after convincing higher ups that they do not need to have any knowledge about the skills required for the tasks they manage, or that they need to be above other managers in a hierarchical structure, which somehow also needs other managers to coordinate managers.

Now, you add publicly traded companies that seek shareholder profit maximization, and gaming being the most profitable media out there (making more than music and movies combined, and even more than adult entertainment), and yeah, you've got a recipe for disaster. And that's just one way the well is poisoned. There's many reasons AAA companies have been consistently failing to produce good games in recent years. KSP2 is just another victim of the current zeitgeist.

However, I'll sustain it's not "mismanaged" per se, we're just on the wrong side of what they're managing for. They're managing projects to make fast profit, whilst we expect good games, and they certainly do not align. This is not to say that good games don't make a profit, but rather the business mentality is to make the most widely accepted product possible to increase sales, using the least effort and resources possible to increase profit. And that model certainly has a much harder time at producing good games, and heavily favors monetization, yearly releases, DLC, GaaS and so on.

On the other hand, it's a simple truth that you can't have a good game whilst also having wide reception and critical acclaim. You can only have two of those. The best games tend to have smaller audiences (or outright happened at a time when the gaming market was much smaller), and generally not that good critical acclaim, as a good chunk of those critics would not fit the target audience. We also have the other cases, where widely accepted games are destroyed by critics, and where critics and wide audiences love a game but accept that it's a mediocre product at best.

[dprostock]

Bah, video games were ruined the day they came out from a page instead of on a CD. It's easier to pack junk and sell it quickly with a click than it is to try to pass it off at an actual brick-and-mortar store. Imagine "Early Access" and shelves filled with the KSP2 fiasco filling up CD cases that no one will ever buy. Today's world makes it easy to deceive. 

[Bej Kerman]

3 hours ago, dprostock said:

Bah, video games were ruined the day they came out from a page instead of on a CD. It's easier to pack junk and sell it quickly with a click than it is to try to pass it off at an actual brick-and-mortar store. Imagine "Early Access" and shelves filled with the KSP2 fiasco filling up CD cases that no one will ever buy. Today's world makes it easy to deceive. 

When did the video game industry crash happen? I forget

[Scarecrow71]

3 hours ago, dprostock said:

Bah, video games were ruined the day they came out from a page instead of on a CD. It's easier to pack junk and sell it quickly with a click than it is to try to pass it off at an actual brick-and-mortar store. Imagine "Early Access" and shelves filled with the KSP2 fiasco filling up CD cases that no one will ever buy. Today's world makes it easy to deceive. 

I guess you never heard of the ET game for Atari then.  There is literally an urban legend that Atari bought up all unsold copies, dropped them in a landfill, and ran over the pile with tractors until they looked like the garbage they were.  Decades after its release it is still considered to be the worst video game ever made.  EVER MADE.  Your argument about there being a boatload of unsold CDs holds no water simply based off this one game, let alone the thousands of others that were horrible and haven't been sold ever.

And that doesn't take into account the now non-existent secondary market for hardware and the games.  We're on...what generation console now?  What has happened with all the unsold previous gen consoles and games?  Do you think that the companies only printed what would ever be sold?

Deception in today's world only seems easier to pull off thanks to social media and the 24 hour news cycle.  Deceiving people is not a new thing; Barnum and Bailey are quoted as saying "You can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time".  And that was more than 100 years ago.

[dprostock]

2 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I guess you never heard of the ET game for Atari then.  There is literally an urban legend that Atari bought up all unsold copies, dropped them in a landfill, and ran over the pile with tractors until they looked like the garbage they were.  Decades after its release it is still considered to be the worst video game ever made.  EVER MADE.  Your argument about there being a boatload of unsold CDs holds no water simply based off this one game, let alone the thousands of others that were horrible and haven't been sold ever.

And that doesn't take into account the now non-existent secondary market for hardware and the games.  We're on...what generation console now?  What has happened with all the unsold previous gen consoles and games?  Do you think that the companies only printed what would ever be sold?

Deception in today's world only seems easier to pull off thanks to social media and the 24 hour news cycle.  Deceiving people is not a new thing; Barnum and Bailey are quoted as saying "You can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time".  And that was more than 100 years ago.

Exactly, you only certify what I maintain.

If you failed, you had to physically bury the failure with all the corpses that participated in the failure and declare bankruptcy.

The industry with a CD had to secure recording material, the recorder, the printers, the ink, the logistics, the packaging and the distribution.

A lot of money invested to make a mess.

All of that is behind us. Now it's easier to hire a page that makes the sales, fill a virtual space in less than an hour, offer an "Early Access" at just $50 and capture that money. Before the reviews come out and the shoppers start howling, you find yourself on a beach in Taithi sipping a daikiri.  

"Early Access" in a crap? Wow, they already gave me the money, I sold what I could, I have no losses from unrealized sales of physical products, I don't have to bury anything and everyone is happy... in the Corporation.

They would have read the fine print of the contract when they bought it, especially the one that says that "Early Access" doesn't mean that the game will ever be finished or that there will be any maintenance.

Does that imply that you no longer "charge the inks" to Nate Simpson? It's like that! He was hired as a showman to do what he did and was paid well. 

 

20 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

When did the video game industry crash happen? I forget

You should get out of the jar where you live from time to time. The KSP2 study fiasco isn't the only one. 

[Bej Kerman]

13 minutes ago, dprostock said:

You should get out of the jar where you live from time to time. The KSP2 study fiasco isn't the only one. 

And I the binks go the mile to really truly do. What? "KSP 2 study fiasco"? I know those words but I have no idea where "study" came from or what you're trying to say.

[K^2]

2 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I guess you never heard of the ET game for Atari then.

Is it strange that of all the ET-related flashbacks, I had this one? Yeah, I remember when G4 was actually airing this on TV.

Is this really what early 2000s TV looked like? I'm always surprised when I look up older footage I remember seeing live.

 

2 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

There is literally an urban legend that Atari bought up all unsold copies, dropped them in a landfill, and ran over the pile with tractors until they looked like the garbage they were. 

It's part true! They unearthed the landfill in 2014, but some more digging (both literal and metaphorical) revealed that it wasn't Atari trying to buy-back and literally bury the E.T., but rather they just dumped the unsold stock from a Texas plant that had to be closed, which included a mix of games, but E.T. was a fairly significant chunk of that. About 10%, reportedly, and given how many titles Atari was pumping out at the time, the fact that 10% were just E.T. is frankly an impressive statement. Investigation was part of the Atari: Game Over documentary.

Atari 2600, from where it came from, to its hardware, to all the absolutely wild games, from timeless classics, to garbage, to games that one does not mention in a polite company for a list of awful reasons, is such an amazing arc in the history of video games, that I think any end less dramatic than the 1983 crash would have felt anti-climatic. And the sheer wide-eyed panic of Nintendo you can still see in the elements of the NES design, both external and on the board, is absolutely awe inspiring. To fail so hard as a gaming business as to bring down the entire industry across two continents, and to force Nintendo who were releasing games on floppies in Japan , literally letting people to "rent" games at a kiosk by writing a new game to a floppy, to invent the CIC... All with a piece of hardware that released the same year as Star Wars. Some failures are so epic as to become their own legends.

[Skorj]

6 hours ago, dprostock said:

Bah, video games were ruined the day they came out from a page instead of on a CD. It's easier to pack junk and sell it quickly with a click than it is to try to pass it off at an actual brick-and-mortar store. Imagine "Early Access" and shelves filled with the KSP2 fiasco filling up CD cases that no one will ever buy. Today's world makes it easy to deceive. 

Kids these days.  Video games "came out from a page" long before CDs were invented.  You typed the source code in line-by-line from pages of the gaming or coding magazine you bought.  Now you kids get off my lawn, I have clouds to yell at.

[K^2]

Just now, Skorj said:

You typed the source code in line-by-line from pages of the gaming or coding magazine you bought.

Oh, gods, that's a blast from the past. Although, I think a more exciting way that code came from magazines was using flexi-discs, typically known as vinyl data.

Speaking of which, while in US people usually think of C64 when they think about BASIC listings and games from tape/vinyl, in Japan this was yet another Famicom expansion. Family Basic came with a cartridge containing a BASIC interpreter and sprite sheets, a keyboard expansion, and the keyboard had the audio jacks to connect to a tape recorder. And yeah, they had magazines with game listings which you could type out and play on your Famicom system. It's kind of upsetting that neither the FDS nor Family Basic ever came to the NES. But again, Nintendo were terrified of another games market crash, and avoided anything that could let US studios make more games like fire.

[Scarecrow71]

@K^2 @Skorj

You mean...

[Lisias]

On 5/20/2024 at 9:05 PM, Skorj said:

Kids these days.  Video games "came out from a page" long before CDs were invented.  You typed the source code in line-by-line from pages of the gaming or coding magazine you bought.  Now you kids get off my lawn, I have clouds to yell at.

No kidding.

People are comparing oranges with tangerines - they look alike but are not similar.

The Video Games crash from 1984 fueled the Computer Games industry, and that were the golden times for the computer nerds willing to make some serious money from their parent's cellar (some of them, literally).

However, the Computer Games also crashed some time later - or, at least, part of it.

At that golden times for the Computer Games, the dominant architecture were the 8 bits. ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, you name it. Essentially everything orbited the 6502 or the Z80. Even when the IBM launched the "half" 16 bits architecture with the IBM PC/PC-XT, most of the Computer Games market lingered with the 8 bit machines because they were significantly cheaper and more capable (in video and sound) than the bleak PC from IBM.

But eventually the 16 bits came. The 68000 became relatively cheap, not being used only by the 40K USD HP 300 super minis but also by the sub 1.000 Amiga and Atari ST, and the PC finally got some useful sound cards and the VGA standard and the 286, with the 386 just around the corner.

And the 8 bit computer games market just collapsed in a very, very ugly way - from the golden era from the early 80s to the deepest circle of hell in the late 80s - less than a decade.

A perfect example was SQIJ - https://www.eurogamer.net/the-story-behind-the-worst-game-ever-made

I quoted some interesting paragraphs from the article:

Quote

According to the coder, CRL had failed to supply a copy of the Commodore 64 game he was supposed to be converting - a fairly critical item, one would assume. "I finally got it at the end of January - but on disc, and I had no disc drive. So I only ever saw the game at CRL's offices." Undeterred, the publisher sent Creighton a copy of Sqij's map and began to pester him for the conversion. "I had one month left. At that point I also had my exams creeping up on me and the pressure was building. All combined, I thought sod it, I'm not doing it." CRL, however, would not take no for an answer, and Creighton's ambition of creating a fast, machine code conversion disappeared overnight. In order to meet the deadline, he used a programming extender package <...>"

And the best part:

Quote

Whatever its origins, Sqij! was clearly unplayable, even back in 1987. The Power House included the game as part of an eight-game compilation a few months later, and it remained unchanged, sharing space with other classics such as Slingshot, Cyrox and Hercules. Did the publisher not realise the game was unplayable? In the chaotic world of 8-bit development in the late Eighties, the rush to re-use product was intense - CRL itself was enduring a turbulent phase, so it's quite possible Sqij! evaded playtesting. But surely someone loaded it up before it was published? Evidently not, or they plainly didn't care.

Quote

Creighton himself is unsurprisingly cynical over the whole affair. "At £1.99 the game wholesaled for 75p, payment was 10p per unit and you were offered either £500 or £1000 outright at least. I never worked out how many games you needed to sell to get the grand, probably in the region of 13 thousand copies. For a laugh I rang CRL to ask for payment, and was told Sqij! had sold a massive 250 copies, and that I was due £25." The coder never even received this not-exactly-life-changing amount. "No surprise there then! But to be honest I never expected it to get published. I was so fed up with it I never even bothered to compile the game." Yes, pay £1.99 for Sqij! and anyone with half a pixel of programming nous got some nice Laser BASIC code thrown in. "I was 15," says Creighton, "and unaware that it was even possibly illegal.

Can anyone see any resemblance with what's happening nowadays?

On a side note, a hell of a journey into computer game history is to find, load, play and study Apple II games in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It's absolutely amazing how the same hardware rendered so differently games in style and complexity. The Apple II wasn't exactly the best option for gaming, but it was the oldest that lingered enough to have 20 years of development history in games to study from.

Edited May 22 by Lisias
Historical mistake corrected.

[K^2]

19 minutes ago, Lisias said:

And the 8 bit computer games market just collapsed in a very, very ugly way - from the golden era from the early 80s to the deepest circle of hell in the late 80s - less than a decade.

You say that, but the best selling 8 bit game of all time came out in 1996 with 46M copies sold, and no PC game has yet reached these numbers. 8 bit games continued to be made and sold very successfully well into the 16 and even 32 bit eras.

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, Scarecrow71 said:

@K^2 @Skorj

You mean...

I'm not who you tagged but I owned AND hand-entered the code for EVERY SINGLE GAME in BOTH of those books.

I also entered a lot of games from Compute!

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2018/11/first-encounter-compute-magazine-and-its-glorious-tedious-type-in-code/

[Scarecrow71]

26 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

I'm not who you tagged but I owned AND hand-entered the code for EVERY SINGLE GAME in BOTH of those books.

I also entered a lot of games from Compute!

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2018/11/first-encounter-compute-magazine-and-its-glorious-tedious-type-in-code/

I did the same thing.  I remember not knowing what half the commands meant, but I still coded them.  Set me on the path to be the automation jockey I am today.

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Nowadays every manager position is just a megalomaniac narcissist interested in the preservation of his position even after convincing higher ups that they do not need to have any knowledge about the skills required for the tasks they manage, or that they need to be above other managers in a hierarchical structure, which somehow also needs other managers to coordinate managers.

A natural consequence of the modern HR nonsense like awaiting from everyone "leadership skills" (mindless narcissism), "soft skills" (reckless verbiage), "team qualities" (shifting of responsibility and whistleblowing).

[Skorj]

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

You say that, but the best selling 8 bit game of all time came out in 1996 with 46M copies sold, and no PC game has yet reached these numbers. 8 bit games continued to be made and sold very successfully well into the 16 and even 32 bit eras.

Pretty sure a few PC games passed 46M copies before the biggest games moved to free.  Bejeweled for one.  But still, 46M was earth-shaking in the 90s. 

[K^2]

37 minutes ago, Skorj said:

Pretty sure a few PC games passed 46M copies before the biggest games moved to free.

Plenty of games available on PC and other platforms have sold more across the platforms, but I haven't been able to confirm anything over the PUBG's 42M on PC (75M total), which is a somewhat outdated stat, but the game's also free-to-play, so I'm not even sure if that should count. Minecraft and SIMS games definitely have fewer than 40M on PC, but again, easily surpass the mark across all platforms.

[Skorj]

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

Plenty of games available on PC and other platforms have sold more across the platforms, but I haven't been able to confirm anything over the PUBG's 42M on PC (75M total), which is a somewhat outdated stat, but the game's also free-to-play, so I'm not even sure if that should count. Minecraft and SIMS games definitely have fewer than 40M on PC, but again, easily surpass the mark across all platforms.

Lineage from 1998 racked up ~50M.  Not sure how much of that was Mac though.  If you count Runescape as a PC game, it's had 300M accounts, but not sure they count as sales, and I'm not sure how many of those are from the browser-based days.  It's surprising how hard it is to track down numbers - historians are going to have a challenge.

[Superfluous J]

Oh I realized I commented in this thread and never addressed the OP.

No. At best we are being lied to.