Shadowzone's findings on KSP2 history

[J.Random]

24 minutes ago, calabus2 said:

community engagement here dropped significantly after EA

The engagement didn't just drop after EA, it was going down for years. I can't say that it happened because of CMs and mod team's actions, but I saw more than enough of "I got into an argument with a shill, got a warning and didn't bother acknowledging it, just abandoning the forum" comments on Reddit. Somebody really wanted to create an echo chamber.

Edited May 26 by J.Random

[calabus2]

1 hour ago, J.Random said:

The engagement didn't just drop after EA, it was going down for years. I can't say that it happened because of CMs and mod team's actions, but I saw more than enough of "I got into an argument with a shill, got a warning and didn't bother acknowledging it, just abandoning the forum" comments on Reddit. Somebody really wanted to create an echo chamber.

Correct. And there was a single mod here that facilitated the culture of "be positive or be gone". I even commented months ago that if the devs and Nate wanted real feedback they should engage the reddit sub instead of this corporate controlled forum. Dead silence  and a temp ban

Edited May 26 by calabus2

[MechBFP]

22 minutes ago, J.Random said:

The engagement didn't just drop after EA, it was going down for years. I can't say that it happened because of CMs and mod team's actions, but I saw more than enough of "I got into an argument with a shill, got a warning and didn't bother acknowledging it, just abandoning the forum" comments on Reddit. Somebody really wanted to create an echo chamber.

Breaking the rules and then complaining about there being an echo chamber is literally this:

 

Lots of critical people on this forum have posted here for years without issue. Take a guess how they accomplished this?

Edited May 26 by MechBFP

[Temporal Wolf]

56 minutes ago, WatchClarkBand said:

I wanted the game to succeed. I'm generally not the type of person who takes extreme pleasure in the failures and pain of others.

I think my largest frustration is the number of times I said "Folks, if we do Thing X, then Bad Thing Y will happen. We need to do Z instead," and other people replied with "no, we always do Thing X, we'll just fix it later," or some equivalent, and sure enough, Bad Thing Y happened.

Do I feel vindicated? No. But I am aware that upon exiting myself and Jeremy, nothing really changed much, so perhaps that was another case of doing X when someone should have done Z.

Oof I feel this in my bones. "You're paying me to be the person who gives you this warning... I can lead you to water, I can't force you to drink."

"No, we're carrying on."

Guess I'll write it in the ticket/an email then so it's clear I was overruled.

[J.Random]

24 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

Breaking the rules

It would be a good point, if the rules weren't written in such a way that they can be applied arbitrarily. For example, it may be argued that you just broke 2.2 d and n. And me pointing it out could be viewed as 3.2/3.3 violation. And if it comes to that, I will get a premoderation or straight up ban for this discussion. You won't. Guess why?

Edited May 26 by J.Random

[Skorj]

1 hour ago, WatchClarkBand said:

I wanted the game to succeed. I'm generally not the type of person who takes extreme pleasure in the failures and pain of others.

I think my largest frustration is the number of times I said "Folks, if we do Thing X, then Bad Thing Y will happen. We need to do Z instead," and other people replied with "no, we always do Thing X, we'll just fix it later," or some equivalent, and sure enough, Bad Thing Y happened.

Do I feel vindicated? No. But I am aware that upon exiting myself and Jeremy, nothing really changed much, so perhaps that was another case of doing X when someone should have done Z.

 

4 minutes ago, Temporal Wolf said:

Oof I feel this in my bones. "You're paying me to be the person who gives you this warning... I can lead you to water, I can't force you to drink."

"No, we're carrying on."

Guess I'll write it in the ticket/an email then so it's clear I was overruled.

The most sanity-preserving thing I learned mid-career was that my job was to raise the red flags, not to be a martyr to them.  In most jobs, it would take about 6 months to gain credibility, though I'd learned to phrase it as "if we do X, then Bad Thing Y will happen, what's your plan for that?" as sometimes the team would surprise me with a mitigation or work-around.  Normally after about 6 months there were enough Ys that the engineers would start coming to me, and eventually management would come around.  When that didn't happen, I'd just change jobs, no point in going down with the ship after pointing out the icebergs.

Honestly, that's my best advice to engineers with just a few years in the field.  If you think a lot of bad decisions are being made around you, take notes and commit yourself mentally to a position (even if its not your place to speak out).  You'll learn a lot by how events play out.  If you're often wrong, then that's an amazing learning experience.  If you're consistently right change jobs: get out while the getting is good and there's no time pressure.

[Skorj]

17 hours ago, LittleBitMore said:

yet again, it is Nate's job to dream, and the programmers' jobs to tell him "no I don't think that's super reasonable". Nate was never the tech guy, it was not in the job description to think about code practicality

Nate (and those typically in his role) is an enthusiastic evangelist for his vision, full of passion.  Your typical coder is a conflict-adverse introvert.  Passionate evangelists will steamroll conflict-adverse introverts like they're not even there, unless the company puts structural procedures in place to prevent it.  I'm guessing either IG didn't, or there was just a bucket of technically impossible demands slopped at the team by T2.  Perhaps both.

[Westinghouse]

26 minutes ago, Skorj said:

When that didn't happen, I'd just change jobs, no point in going down with the ship after pointing out the icebergs.

That's good advice in general, it's not smart to stick around in a dysfunctional or toxic work environment.

But what if you had joined the dev team out of genuine passion and love for the original and were determined to help make a worthy sequel? In that case I imagine you would have stuck it out. But how incredibly frustrating would it be to watch a franchise you love be ruined from awful decision making from above.

The topic has been done to death at this point, but I wonder how many people within the dev team ever challenged Nate on his apparent insistence that wobbly rockets are somehow fun? Or other poor design choices he made. It would have been beyond infuriating to have to be overruled by Nate insistent on pushing his own vision of KSP and him being supported by management saying stuff like "because Nate is the creative idea genius....we need to trust his vision!"

Edited May 26 by Westinghouse

[Maxsimal]

As much as I loved the Kerbal franchise - and wish it had succeeded and live on, I feel like the best thing is to put it all behind me at this point.

Edited May 26 by Maxsimal

[Temporal Wolf]

30 minutes ago, Skorj said:

 When that didn't happen, I'd just change jobs, no point in going down with the ship after pointing out the icebergs.

That's why you write down your objection, with reasoning, somewhere it will be preserved.

Then you can tap the sign when they start looking for blame.

"It must be frustrating to be proven right like this over and over..." from a PM is a quote I'll forever cherish. They didn't stop making bad decisions, but such is life, you can only control yourself.

[never_do]

I am not in the gaming industry, just normal software dev. And I don't know much about how it works in the gaming industry.

But let's say I have a company A which is interested in a contract from B. I pitch the stuff and get the project. And afterwards I am like: "I have no idea how to do any of this, can I talk to the people who did this before?".

That is so braindead mismanagement I am unable to comprehend this. Maybe for some weird reason this is normal in gaming but they should have clarified that before.

And then I go like "Hey, we will be doing the stuff you wanted and much more, like multiplayer. We don't even want more money".

And after all of that stuff hits the fan I am like "booo, they didn't help us and didn't give us more money". How on earth does that work? Is gaming industry some magical place with other rules?

Edited May 26 by never_do

[K^2]

50 minutes ago, Skorj said:

Nate (and those typically in his role) is an enthusiastic evangelist for his vision, full of passion.  Your typical coder is a conflict-adverse introvert.  Passionate evangelists will steamroll conflict-adverse introverts like they're not even there, unless the company puts structural procedures in place to prevent it.  I'm guessing either IG didn't, or there was just a bucket of technically impossible demands slopped at the team by T2.  Perhaps both.

Nah, it's really not what it looks like when experienced game developers are in a room, regardless of the discipline. a) We all want to make a cool thing. b) We all know what it took to get to our senior roles. There is no steamrolling. No matter how passionate and amazing the vision is, when I say, "I hate to be that person, but I don't think we have the resources," the discussion pivots and we start talking about what we can deliver, and whether we can get more resources. Same thing happens if the limiting factors come from the art or design sides, because they have their own challenges and their own limitations.

There are exceptions. There are studios with awful toxic cultures where they think they can throw enough people and enough crunch at the problem. I've seen that at Blizz and I've heard this of certain projects at R* for example. But at mid-size or indy, we all know each other. You aren't assigning nameless resources. There's a Gantt chart with everyone's names on it, and you know how much time each person is going to spend against their tasks, and how things are going to land. And no matter how impassionate the creative director is, it's not their first game. They know what the lines on the chart mean.

The only way you get steamrolling is if the creatives are expecting to fall on the same level of experience from the tech counterparts, and that experience isn't there. The charts aren't made, or are made with made up time estimates that have no bearing on reality, and that's when the creatives might say, "So we're going with all of that?" hear no protests, and keep going. But it's not because they overwhelmed the voices of reason with their oratorical skills. It's because there were no voices of reason.

 

Outside of generic management duties and knowing your trade, there are three things a good tech director has to bring to the table. Knowing where the limits of your team are, based on team's composition and time available; knowing when to speak up if the limits are exceeded - not against someone, but in support of the project, because you will be heard; and knowing how to communicate the limitations to the creative and design teams in a way that lets all of you together work on a compromise or a workaround.

There are other nice-to-haves, like being able to mentor and grow your team, but at the end of the day, that's a responsibility that can be shared with the leads. The above is non-negotiable. If you don't have a person who can handle this within the scope of the given project, that project's doomed.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Maxsimal said:

As much as I loved the Kerbal franchise - and wish it had succeeded and live on, I feel like the best thing is to put it all behind me at this point.

I beg your pardon to disagree. I think the most interesting times are still to come.

Obviously, I'm unsure if they are going to be the best times - but they are going to be interesting nevertheless.

[K^2]

11 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Obviously, I'm unsure if they are going to be the best times - but they are going to be interesting nevertheless.

Kerbal Kart. Maybe not literally, but we're getting some sort of a Kerbal Kart, I just know it. I don't know where that falls on your personal good vs interesting chart, but it's the only way T2 can do an inexpensive, moderately safe release that keeps the public interested in the little green beings from planet Kerbin at this point, and if there is any intention at all to come back to the franchise inside the company, they kind of have to.

Personally, I don't hate it. So long as it's not a loot box nightmare, I'm perfectly happy to see a silly game with Kerbal IP stuck to it just 'cause, and especially if the theme is fitting, and few things make more sense to my image of Kerbals than them racing a bunch of go karts tuned in a homebrew sort of way with safety not even second.

 

Edit: Tinfoil hat moment. What if Intercept did get a small team already working on a "safe" spinoff title? We know they were cooking and hiring. All we really know about the Intercept Games is that 70 people were let go, which is roughly the size of the KSP2 team. If they hired enough for the unnamed project to keep going, maybe that's still there? What if the Intercept Games isn't officially closed, because Intercept Games still has a crew of 10-15 people who were and continue to work on the spin-off game?

No, I know that seems pretty unlikely, but if the game's simple enough, and they were getting close to the release, they might have been spared. I guess, if there's any chance at all, we'll hear something about that soon.

Edited May 26 by K^2
A tinfoil hat fell on my head.

[Westinghouse]

12 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Kerbal Kart. Maybe not literally, but we're getting some sort of a Kerbal Kart, I just know it. I don't know where that falls on your personal good vs interesting chart, but it's the only way T2 can do an inexpensive, moderately safe release that keeps the public interested in the little green beings from planet Kerbin at this point, and if there is any intention at all to come back to the franchise inside the company, they kind of have to.

Personally, I don't hate it. So long as it's not a loot box nightmare, I'm perfectly happy to see a silly game with Kerbal IP stuck to it just 'cause, and especially if the theme is fitting, and few things make more sense to my image of Kerbals than them racing a bunch of go karts tuned in a homebrew sort of way with safety not even second.

 

Edit: Tinfoil hat moment. What if Intercept did get a small team already working on a "safe" spinoff title? We know they were cooking and hiring. All we really know about the Intercept Games is that 70 people were let go, which is roughly the size of the KSP2 team. If they hired enough for the unnamed project to keep going, maybe that's still there? What if the Intercept Games isn't officially closed, because Intercept Games still has a crew of 10-15 people who were and continue to work on the spin-off game?

No, I know that seems pretty unlikely, but if the game's simple enough, and they were getting close to the release, they might have been spared. I guess, if there's any chance at all, we'll hear something about that soon.

The government notice stated 'office closure', didn't it? That almost certainly means the whole Intercept Studio is gone. No separate tiger team kept over to produce the spin off game.

Also, Take Two/Private Division are a game publisher, not a development house. They don't really want all the overheads and hassle involved with owning studios - office rents, salaries, insurance, hardware costs, HR issues. They probably never even wanted Intercept Games in the first place but ended up lumped with it on their books when someone at PD decided to take the game away from Star Theory and bring it in house.

That's not to say T2 wouldn't want a 'Kerbal Kart' type game, but they can outsource that to any cheap game studio anywhere in the world to produce.
The reason Intercept Games were working on it was it was likely a means to keep all the art team and the music composer occupied while the software team wrestled with KSP2.

[BrobDingnag]

28 minutes ago, K^2 said:

...T2 can do an inexpensive... So long as it's not a loot box nightmare...

Get ready to buy Kerb Kards for in-game currency (different cards for funds, science, and reputation, of course)

[K^2]

29 minutes ago, Westinghouse said:

The government notice stated 'office closure', didn't it?

Good call. I didn't realize WARN even differentiates, but apparently the type submitted can be closure or layoffs, and Take Two notice for Seattle was submitted with a "closure" type.

Which really makes the way the question about it during the earnings call was answered even weirder. If you've submitted official gov't paperwork electing to put "closure" as the reason, why be coy about it when asked by shareholders?

[Esme]

I don't understand why anyone in the community is mad at Nate.  Did he make some bad decisions? Sure. But the bad decisions that he made were not the ones that effectively killed KSP, 2 it was the idiocy imposed on the devs by the higher-ups., all the secrecy, not letting the KSP1 devs talk to the KSP2 devs, etc. IMO the problem is that TTI has Management that regard coders as interchangeable  office-workers rather than as skilled artists - and being a skilled coder really is an art, due to the complexities involved in coding. Anyway, from what Shadowzone said in his video, I can only shake my head in wonder at the level of incompetence in the  TTI Management that they can take a much loved franchise like KSP, with a generally intelligent and well-informed community that nokws what it wants, and posts about it in these forums, then go and ignore the community, and make hiring, and working conditions guaranteed to result in failure and annoy/upset the community..  If anyone should be fired, it's the management above Nate for dooming the project to fail by their idiotic decisions.  It's that management that lost TTI $70 million, not the devs.

[Maxsimal]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

I beg your pardon to disagree. I think the most interesting times are still to come.

Obviously, I'm unsure if they are going to be the best times - but they are going to be interesting nevertheless.

Unless T2 lets go of it, I don't think that's the case for the KSP franchise.  For other projects that - yes.  And I was not referring to other projects when it comes to letting go of the KSP franchise - I do think there are interesting things on the horizon for a KSP successor.

[Maxsimal]

1 hour ago, Esme said:

I don't understand why anyone in the community is mad at Nate.  Did he make some bad decisions? Sure. But the bad decisions that he made were not the ones that effectively killed KSP, 2 it was the idiocy imposed on the devs by the higher-ups., all the secrecy, not letting the KSP1 devs talk to the KSP2 devs, etc. IMO the problem is that TTI has Management that regard coders as interchangeable  office-workers rather than as skilled artists - and being a skilled coder really is an art, due to the complexities involved in coding. Anyway, from what Shadowzone said in his video, I can only shake my head in wonder at the level of incompetence in the  TTI Management that they can take a much loved franchise like KSP, with a generally intelligent and well-informed community that nokws what it wants, and posts about it in these forums, then go and ignore the community, and make hiring, and working conditions guaranteed to result in failure and annoy/upset the community..  If anyone should be fired, it's the management above Nate for dooming the project to fail by their idiotic decisions.  It's that management that lost TTI $70 million, not the devs.

When I worked on KSP1, every design was vetted by the leads group as feasible, and I had a strong understanding of what was reasonable even before I began, both from discussion with engineering leads and having been a former systems engineer and being a lead & systems designer on multiple previous projects.  Beyond that, I also considered the needs of a variety of different player types, trying to envision features that would please them best without breaking the bank on dev costs.

When the design was written, it included various amounts of scoping at the level of the entire design - what features could be cut if we didn't hit them - and within each documented feature - stretch goals that I'd hope we meet that even if they were not met, would not invalidate the entire feature.  I tried to include features where if the engineers were behind, the artists could just work on something that did not need engineering time to inject into the game, and vice versa if the art team was behind, to introduce a level of elasticity to the scheduling.  Of course, this was coupled by great effort from the dev team, and them working with me to understand the scope & effort behind each feature involved.

This is a good general principle for any level of work on building a game - not putting the cart before the horse, validating assumptions on what you can and can't do, and building off of work you've decided is a key early priority for technical and/or gameplay reasons and then moving on from there.    This is something I learned to do from working in the industry for a couple of decades and seeing the good, the bad and the ugly on development processes at a range of studios.

You can introduce huge inefficiencies to the overall development process when you deviate from good game design & development practices.  You can have developers complete work that needs to be thrown away or heavily modified later because you put the cart before the horse, or bet on something being finished and had your art team work on it while the engineering team didn't get to it.  You can create designs that please a small portion of your target audience, or just yourself, that don't work for a broader audience and can't be tested until the last minute when its too late to adjust them. 

Beyond that - you can burn out your staff by whipsawing them between different targets or making off-the-cuff adjustments due to poor design & planning.   You can drive engineers up the wall because while as a designer you work in a realm of possibilities and and aesthetic ideas, engineers have to work in a realm where no amount of grand viisionary work changes 30FPS into 60FPS.  You can lower the morale of your art team by having to throw away assets they spent man months making because they end up not making it into the build.

When you do introduce those morale problems - then you can either address by adopting better practices and fixing root cause.  Or you can try to address them by shoving aside 'trouble makers' who raise the why are we doing this concerns in favor of staff with a more positive attitude - even if they're not as talented - often because they're less experienced and don't know where the source of the problem comes from.  People to whom you can just say 'Hey, do what I want because I'm the leader here, I have way more experience than you.'

As KSP's lead designer - I felt responsible for helping the team hit sprint milestones on time, even if I was not the person writing the code or creating the assets, and I was proud that by and large, we constantly hit those targets update after update - a 3 week slip was afaicr the largest slip we'd done - about 10% of our average version update time.  Even if I wanted bigger and better things - the list of what I would have added just to the breaking ground DLC if I could have done anything I wanted by itself would have consumed years of additional dev time - knowing what was good enough and could be done efficiently was a key part of my job.

This is in general what the person at the top of the design hierarchy should be doing - and if they're not doing that, the production staff and technical leadership should be empowered to push back and set those goals right.

Further - it's about hiring & mentoring competent staff to work under and with you - people who push back against you when you get something wrong so you can correct it at the easy 'I fixed this in a document' stage vs at the very expensive 'it's been built and QA is telling me it sucks' stage.  It's not about having your personal vision of each feature making it into the game - it's about getting the best possible game into the hands of the fans.



Of course, I am not commenting WHATSOEVER on what happened on KSP2.  I'm talking about my experience on KSP1 and on other work at other studios.   I'm just saying that the job of design leadership isn't just bluesky visionary work, and building my own personal vision of a project - though having a good vision is important.   It's about making sure that the game as envisioned matches the resources available, and that those resources are best utilized efficiently, both to make sure the eventual product is as good as possible for the broadest range of fans, and that the project makes its development costs back and then some, and so the whole team can be proud of the work they've accomplished without feeling burned out by the experience.   I feel proud of the work I did on KSP1 even if I didn't get every I idea I had into it - and I hope my former coworkers do as well.

This is true for every level of designer as well - one of the most negative things I've seen in the industry is when the top of the design hierarchy - whether they're titled as design director, creative director - heck, sometimes the exectuve producer arrogates this priviledge to themselves - when they decide they're just the blue sky person, the idea person, the person who drops a little nugget of creativity onto the team and expects them to execute around it, and  where they don't want their creativity bounded by the earthly concerns of lesser mortals.  Again, not saying this happened on KSP2, just saying that someone at the top like that doesn't get to not have responsibility for a project just because they're 'the idea guy' and its other people's job to build their vision or not.

Edited May 27 by Maxsimal

[moeggz]

20 hours ago, Esme said:

If anyone should be fired, it's the management above Nate for dooming the project to fail by their idiotic decisions.  It's that management that lost TTI $70 million, not the devs.

I agree management has a much larger share of the blame than Nate (or T2. Everyone likes to talk about how easy it should be for large companies to throw away their money and be happy with delayed and over budget projects, until someone you are paying is behind schedule and wants more of your money. Now also imagine you just lost a billion dollars in the prior year and they want even more of your money.)

 

20 hours ago, Esme said:

I don't understand why anyone in the community is mad at Nate.

 

Because he lied to us. We may differ in view in how much (some or not at all) of the blame is on him. Personally, the fact that much of this is still here say makes me less interested in playing the blame game. Thats hard when you were in the room, nearly impossible for outsiders. 
 

But the timeline of events in Shadowzone’s video seems pretty rock solid, parts being collaborated by ex employees who are willing to post publicly. Going by the timeline as presented and nearly universally accepted then we must agree Nate knowingly and purposefully lied to the community. Was he at fault for why the game was where it was at the end? To what degree we may never know. But we know he lied.
 

These lies include:

The state of multiplayer (it’s so fun! When in reality it was soft canceled shortly after launch) 

EA is for feedback! It’s the Kerbal way! (It was always about money and they never once actually wanted our feedback, look at wobble and font.)

We don’t want to alienate old players! (They very much wanted the new audience more, things liked by the old fans were thrown away if they were obstacles to a wider audience. Like occlusion for satellites or progression metrics beyond science points.)  

And the big one, we’re fully funded! (They were on thin ice and knew it from before the EA launch.)

As I’ve said in previous comments, this does not make you a bad person. I’m not wishing ill will on anyone. I’m in a financially secure enough position if I was asked to lie to a customer I would find new employment. Thats easy for me to say in my position but harder for others. I can’t judge others who can’t make the same decision and still be confident they can provide for their families. 
 

So him lying for his employer doesn’t make him a bad person, and doesn’t mean I wish him any ill will. I still hope he can provide for those he cares for. 
 

But it would be rather ill advised to buy any product being sold by the guy who now is known to be willing to lie to get you to buy products. As such, I’m not buying anything from him again, and nothing from T2 again as they have absolutely disrespected this community in the non communication following the closure.
 

If that means you think I’m mad at him, then I hope you can follow my reasoning. I personally don’t think I’m mad at him, just not willing to give him any more of my money.

19 hours ago, Maxsimal said:

just saying that someone at the top like that doesn't get to not have responsibility for a project just because they're 'the idea guy' and its other people's job to build their vision or not.

These are wise words and apply to many industries. Thank you for sharing your insights, and I hope those entering new careers listen to what you have to say, whether they will be the ideas guy or the practical engineer, or wear both hats.

Edited May 27 by moeggz
Formatting

[Westinghouse]

Something I would like to know more about, maybe @ShadowZone will cover it in his upcoming multiplayer video, is the lack of playtesting during development.

Bang at the 30:00 minute mark in his video, he mentions IT failing to provide the requested machines for testing to ensure the game would be be performant for regular customers on release.

.....but every one of those devs had a windows PC at their desk. What was to stop them just opening the latest build and playtesting it themselves?

There's plenty of evidence that they simply weren't playing and testing their own game. Not just the painfully sluggish EA release, but things like the maneuver tool being so clunky. Whoever implemented that clearly wasn't testing it to ensure it was performing robustly - it has so many UI issues with camera zoom and graphic position, not to mention the SOI bug.

What SZ refers to with Star Theory and Intercept not hiring people with existing knowledge of KSP, leads to the question of whether the Devs even bothered to play the game they were being paid to develop. There's plenty of evidence most of the team weren't players of the original game, many would have been hired never having heard of Kerbal Space Program. The two CM's didn't even play the game which resulted in their attempts to hype and market the game ringing inauthentic ("you should buy this great game that we don't actually play ourselves ...").

Intercept clearly knew about the problem, Nate introduced the 'Rocketry 101' tutorials to help his own team learn to play their own game. It seems ridiculous to me that professional developers had to be encouraged to play the very game they were being paid to develop.

Playtesting your own game is an absolute fundamental of game development, there's no way around that. If you're not playtesting your own product, you're basically working blind. I wonder if their inability early on to hire people familiar with KSP caused their downfall more than anything.

[MechBFP]

21 minutes ago, Westinghouse said:

I wonder if their inability early on to hire people familiar with KSP caused their downfall more than anything.

That can have its own problems of creating tunnel vision, so having people not familiar with it is definitely good as well to keep a healthy mix of perspectives and ideas.

But yes having virtually no one was incredibly detrimental without a doubt. The amount of absolutely obvious issues that made it to QA in the first place, and then QA also missed, time and time again was just plain unacceptable. 

[NH4Cl Enthusiast]

2 hours ago, Maxsimal said:

This is true for every level of designer as well - one of the most negative things I've seen in the industry is when the top of the design hierarchy - whether they're titled as design director, creative director - heck, sometimes the exectuve producer arrogates this priviledge to themselves - when they decide they're just the blue sky person, the idea person, the person who drops a little nugget of creativity onto the team and expects them to execute around it, and  where they don't want their creativity bounded by the earthly concerns of lesser mortals.  Again, not saying this happened on KSP2, just saying that someone at the top like that doesn't get to not have responsibility for a project just because they're 'the idea guy' and its other people's job to build their vision or not.

Thank you for writing down your thoughts, it was a very good read with lots of perspective on leadership roles in general, not just relating to games industry spesifically. Especially the last line is what encapsulates a lot of the responsibility you have when you're in a leadership position. The higher you go, the more you lose the privilege of saying it's someone else's job to do this or that. You need to know your limits and especially you need to recognize what it is that you don't know and be humble about that. Most of all if you choose to commit to doing something you're not sure can be achieved, then it's 100% on you if that fails. And even if something just goes wrong and there was nothing you could have done about it, as a leader it's still your responsibility and nobody else's. Sometimes things go bad in multiple ways (which was clearly the case with KSP2) and all you have left is to choose the manner in which you fail. It can be incredibly unfair at times but it comes with the role.

As for Nate, I'm a little less harsh on him now after watching the video but I think he should have known he was going to fail and choose a better way to go about it. But he chose dishonesty over integrity and in the end it doesn't matter how much of the failure can be attributed to him, everyone who wears the title of a director or a manager is at least partially responsible, fair or not. After all the real damage was suffered by everyone in the studio who lost their jobs in an already precarious job market. 

[cocoscacao]

3 hours ago, moeggz said:

being sold by the guy who now is known to be willing to lie to get you to buy products

Uh... ain't that the truth for every salesman?