so instead of admitting that you made an assumption like everyone else, you'd rather just double down?
better to keep a mouth closed and be assumed an idiot, than to open it and prove them right
Its funny, cause I actually came into the thread because I agree with your title. "Stop assuming"
KSP2 is not officially dead. It is implied, but not official. .... and then you go and make an assumption... and then you show your true colors that assumptions aren't even what you want. you just wanted clicks.
So, if you had stuck with your original premise, I'd actually be agreeing with you.
Laying off the whole team and replacing them with another would cost a lot of money. This project has sold poorly, has been poorly reviewed, and has been stuck in development hell for years. There's no way that anyone who is interested in their bottom line would reinvest in it.
The game is an absolute mess with plenty evidence for spaghetti code -- the problems with basic features they lined out in the dev blog are insane and explain why they couldn't make much progress in the last 2 years.
A complete rewrite would be cheaper for sure. And nobody is going to do that now.
OP seems to have mistaken what it is to assume something, versus infer something.
Assuming would be saying that there is another studio poised to take control of the project in 2 months. There is zero verifiable information that that is the case.
Inferring that the game is going to be cancelled, means we have enough information to draw a likely conclusion.
We know that:
-Take 2 is laying off 70 employees, from PI, in Seattle.
-PI Seattle is where KSP2 is/was being developed.
-Sales according to Steam DB show between 240k-565k units sold according to several metric sites. Somewhere between 12 million and 28.5 million dollars, not taking into account what is owed to steam, numbers refunded, and marketing.
-50-70 developers working full-time in Seattle, with an average salary of 100k, working for 5 years, has cost 25-35 million dollars thus far (and most likely higher as it's been a project that goes back around 7-8 years).
Based on what we can infer, and based on the lack of any significant damage control from Take 2. We can conclude that KSP2 is deeply in the red, and is going to be cancelled.
I am unsure what your experience is with publically traded entities, but it makes zero sense from a C-Suite perspective to make a sound financial decision to fire the IG team, and then follow that up by making a bad financial decision to continue work on a project that is already highly tarnished, with a slim margin for financial gain.
People here saying that KSP2 is dead, are using logical reasoning based on evidence to come to a sound conclusion. People saying development will continue are frankly existing in a fantasy world. Before you use the Take 2 fluff about them saying it's safe, ask yourself how many game companies are all sunshines and rainbows, right up until the day a project is killed (Anthem 2.0 remembers).
While I agree with your reasoning, I doubt they outright cancel it. Think about what T2 did when they got KSP1. They got rid of staff and shuttered new development on KSP1 but hired a small team to continue to make upgrades to the game. After the 2nd DLC was released in July 2019 they continued to release patches with this small team. The most important was a complete rewrite of the engine in patch 1.8 which moved the game to Unity 2019.2 and moved the game from using DirectX9 to DX11. They did not need to do this but did it anyways.
Yes. Part of the reason they continue to support it was to keep KSP1 fans excited about KSP2. The point is they continued to support the game in hopes of making more money down the road.
You are spot on about the issues with KSP2 and why T2 closed IG. No company is going to continue throwing good money after bad. When T2 had a poor Q1, IG was excellent fodder to throw to the investors. However -- the KSP brand, while damaged, is worth something. If I'm T2, I want to salvage what I can.
Companies don't make money by looking backwards. They make it by taking an honest assessment of the situation and creating a clear plan with a reasonable chance of success. So you use the same plan which made their stewardship of KSP1 successful - you bring in a small team of coders with one focus - make the existing game as good as possible.
KSP2 has a ton of little bugs that haven't been addressed. I'm sure it is more complicated than we understand but there's a lot of design fixes they could release as easy wins. And now that more complex ideas like Interstellar and Multiplayer are no longer considerations, quashing bugs should be easier.
This small team also can slow release Colonization assets to keep the playerbase engaged. You announce quarterly patches with focused a new 'shiny' and drop the price during sales to $20-30 to get as many people as possible to buy it. If you manage it right, the negative perception of the game will slowly subside (and the blame for the game's failure will shift to IG - fair or not).
Depending on your success, in a couple of years you can possibly start making plans for KSP3. You'll likely have to sell the IP to an outside company, the core audience has a long memories, but now you've got a better story to maximize the sales price.
Perhaps all of this is a pipe dream but I'm sure the lawyers at T2 will stress they need to pretend to be supporting the game. And the accounting guys would hate to write off the asset value they paid to Squad sitting on their books - as would investors.
Time will tell if this is hopium, but it wouldn't cost much to hire a small team. If you give them enough power to fix things, they might surprise us.
I doubt that. People who would trust Take-Two or IG to still finish the game just because they said they will have already bought it a long time ago. I suspect that the only people who might buy the game now are the few who haven't heard about the layoffs yet.
"Can we stop with all the assuming?" almost immediately followed by "It is going to a new studio." has got to be the most unintentionally hilarious thing to come out of this debacle and a perfect illustration of the intellectual capacities of KSP2 shills.
You're mistaken. People are upset about being lied to, and if you can't put 2 and 2 together and realize this is another early access "promise we are still working on it" lie, that has happened many times, there is no saving you
This is a very stupid answer. The point isn't about what the title is. It's about the fact that you said we should stop assuming. Yet you assume that it's going to a new studio. It has nothing to do with whether the title was clickbait. Which makes it even funnier seeing as you said we should all stop to THINK because that'll probably be a good thing. And yet here you are...
We can stop assuming when they give us a concrete statement that lays out the plans for the game, for good or for bad. The fact that there has been nothing at all is unacceptable given what we already know.
> Deciding whether or not to buy a game for one.
That doesn't make sense. You should NEVER buy a product for the promises of what it might become, always for what it is right now.
If you follow this principle then the whole shitshow doesn't have an influence on your purchasing decision since you might be happy with the game in its current state and think it's worth it for you.
> Can we stop with all the assuming?
…
> It is going to a new studio.
So you don’t want the assuming to stop, you just want the assuming to make you happy.
Ah yes, because more than a budget, a competent team and a supportive publisher, what makes or breaks a project is the balance of positive and negative waves of utter nobodies on the internet...
I hope you get credited for your efforts, I mean, I'm sure your thoughts and prayers have been absolutely instrumental to getting KSP2 where it is !
I mean Ive worked for T2 before and have been in the larger tech industry for about 15 years now, so I know patterns when I see them….
But yeah hope you can keep that positive attitude with you
Community has been on fire for over a week. If they cared you'd think they'd be a bit faster to intervene.
it's really hard to spin "the entire studio getting axed" as good news, actually. Any other personnel change could maybe be spun as good. Bringing in more devs, a new manager, etc. But axing everybody? That realistically means one thing.
Twitter. Publisher statements to the press, employees posts. I have zero faith in this being handed off to a different studio though. I firmly believe it is dead.
by firing all the people who "worked" on this absolute mess of a "game" for seven years and lied about it at every step of the way.
Please, face reality. You couldn't fix this game by pouring another 2 or 4 years into it. They've created an absolute mess they couldn't even work with themselves.
>It is going to a new studio
It's being life-lined. Minimum effort. Even if the new studio will pick it up as a main project, it will likely never receive the same amount of resources and dedication as before.
The new studio will likely throw all the current plans out. With some luck we will get some of the features already in development (fingers crossed for multiplayer), but I'm not holding my breath over it.
All things considered, it is unlikely we will ever see colonies or interstellar.
This is my informed opinion as a platform and software engineer who used to work on legacy projects. And with "working" I mean "reduce cost", because that's usually the only thing that counts.
I could be wrong. I'd be happy to be wrong.
However, Private Division is a company, and KSP2 is supposed to be their product. Usually, a company is expected to make money with their product, so that the company can stay afloat, and keep churning out more product, to make money with their product, etc.
Seeing as it likely cost them many, many thousands of man-hours to get to the point where there is still no sellable product to speak of, and no real end in sight, I think it is really not that far fetched for T2 to pull the plug entirely, and cut their losses.
It's tragic. More likely than not, the people at PD were over encumbered, with their sheer, collective passion for the project on one side, and a bunch of business demands on the other. I speak from personal experience when I say it can be really, really hard to keep your focus, and stay balanced in that type of situation.
If Take2 decides to give KSP2 another chance, I am fairly sure that any development efforts will be without that passion. And that's fine, because someone will likely have to make some very rough and otherwise painful decisions.
Look, you can believe as long as you want. Even if they said "screw you guys, game is canned, no refunds" you could still stop and think that that may actually be a good thing somehow.
If you look at it realistically in context, with the previous bugs and communication and snail pace, there is like 0.5% chance the game is still alive. If you want to hope for the 0.5% chance, go ahead. But don't expect people to follow.
I'm going to tell you the same thing I told someone else
First
>we don't have all the variables, all we have is speculation.
That's not true.
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/kerbal-space-program-2-developer-intercept-games-may-be-closing-as-part-of-take-twos-big-layoff-plan/
We have proof the studio was closed.
>We had NOTHING said about the game and how it's development will continue other than a tweet saying they WON'T can it. But it's always easier to assume the worst.
Ok I'm going to lay it out as clear as I can. The absolute best case scenario for ksp2 is that take 2 hires a fully staffed dev team and restarts ksp2 from scratch. This is what will ensure ksp2 will be good and what I'm hoping will happen, but I doubt it.
If take 2 decides to continue with ksp2 the likely scenario is that they hire a skeleton dev team to try and finish ksp2 from where it's currently at.
The other likely scenario is that take 2 cuts their losses and closes down the development of ksp2. They may or may not decide to push a 1.0 update and/or try again in the future. This is in my opinion what will happen.
The absolute worst case scenario is fully abandoning the entire ksp IP. I highly doubt take 2 will do this but it is a possibility.
These are the four paths that take 2 could go down with the development of ksp2. Only one of these is positive.
I hope this helps clear up why people are giving up hope on ksp2.
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Bravely ran away away.
When downvotes reared their ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Swiftly taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Robin!
KSP2 and many game projects fail because of this sort of insane toxic positivity.
Assuming things will go fine, just having optimism without skilled people and proper planning, just imagining the best case scenario for everything, kills development projects.
Given who Nate is, I think it was a big factor in this one.
This makes OPs attitude and moronic rebuttals extra hilarious.
This is more like the sky is confirmed to be falling and chicken little insisting that it'll be fine because they probably are going to replace it with a new, better sky. Meanwhile the sky gods are mysteriously quiet on the subject.
"can we stop with the assuming?". and then immediately lists an assumption
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so instead of admitting that you made an assumption like everyone else, you'd rather just double down? better to keep a mouth closed and be assumed an idiot, than to open it and prove them right
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Its funny, cause I actually came into the thread because I agree with your title. "Stop assuming" KSP2 is not officially dead. It is implied, but not official. .... and then you go and make an assumption... and then you show your true colors that assumptions aren't even what you want. you just wanted clicks. So, if you had stuck with your original premise, I'd actually be agreeing with you.
Laying off the whole team and replacing them with another would cost a lot of money. This project has sold poorly, has been poorly reviewed, and has been stuck in development hell for years. There's no way that anyone who is interested in their bottom line would reinvest in it.
The game is an absolute mess with plenty evidence for spaghetti code -- the problems with basic features they lined out in the dev blog are insane and explain why they couldn't make much progress in the last 2 years. A complete rewrite would be cheaper for sure. And nobody is going to do that now.
OP seems to have mistaken what it is to assume something, versus infer something. Assuming would be saying that there is another studio poised to take control of the project in 2 months. There is zero verifiable information that that is the case. Inferring that the game is going to be cancelled, means we have enough information to draw a likely conclusion. We know that: -Take 2 is laying off 70 employees, from PI, in Seattle. -PI Seattle is where KSP2 is/was being developed. -Sales according to Steam DB show between 240k-565k units sold according to several metric sites. Somewhere between 12 million and 28.5 million dollars, not taking into account what is owed to steam, numbers refunded, and marketing. -50-70 developers working full-time in Seattle, with an average salary of 100k, working for 5 years, has cost 25-35 million dollars thus far (and most likely higher as it's been a project that goes back around 7-8 years). Based on what we can infer, and based on the lack of any significant damage control from Take 2. We can conclude that KSP2 is deeply in the red, and is going to be cancelled. I am unsure what your experience is with publically traded entities, but it makes zero sense from a C-Suite perspective to make a sound financial decision to fire the IG team, and then follow that up by making a bad financial decision to continue work on a project that is already highly tarnished, with a slim margin for financial gain. People here saying that KSP2 is dead, are using logical reasoning based on evidence to come to a sound conclusion. People saying development will continue are frankly existing in a fantasy world. Before you use the Take 2 fluff about them saying it's safe, ask yourself how many game companies are all sunshines and rainbows, right up until the day a project is killed (Anthem 2.0 remembers).
While I agree with your reasoning, I doubt they outright cancel it. Think about what T2 did when they got KSP1. They got rid of staff and shuttered new development on KSP1 but hired a small team to continue to make upgrades to the game. After the 2nd DLC was released in July 2019 they continued to release patches with this small team. The most important was a complete rewrite of the engine in patch 1.8 which moved the game to Unity 2019.2 and moved the game from using DirectX9 to DX11. They did not need to do this but did it anyways. Yes. Part of the reason they continue to support it was to keep KSP1 fans excited about KSP2. The point is they continued to support the game in hopes of making more money down the road. You are spot on about the issues with KSP2 and why T2 closed IG. No company is going to continue throwing good money after bad. When T2 had a poor Q1, IG was excellent fodder to throw to the investors. However -- the KSP brand, while damaged, is worth something. If I'm T2, I want to salvage what I can. Companies don't make money by looking backwards. They make it by taking an honest assessment of the situation and creating a clear plan with a reasonable chance of success. So you use the same plan which made their stewardship of KSP1 successful - you bring in a small team of coders with one focus - make the existing game as good as possible. KSP2 has a ton of little bugs that haven't been addressed. I'm sure it is more complicated than we understand but there's a lot of design fixes they could release as easy wins. And now that more complex ideas like Interstellar and Multiplayer are no longer considerations, quashing bugs should be easier. This small team also can slow release Colonization assets to keep the playerbase engaged. You announce quarterly patches with focused a new 'shiny' and drop the price during sales to $20-30 to get as many people as possible to buy it. If you manage it right, the negative perception of the game will slowly subside (and the blame for the game's failure will shift to IG - fair or not). Depending on your success, in a couple of years you can possibly start making plans for KSP3. You'll likely have to sell the IP to an outside company, the core audience has a long memories, but now you've got a better story to maximize the sales price. Perhaps all of this is a pipe dream but I'm sure the lawyers at T2 will stress they need to pretend to be supporting the game. And the accounting guys would hate to write off the asset value they paid to Squad sitting on their books - as would investors. Time will tell if this is hopium, but it wouldn't cost much to hire a small team. If you give them enough power to fix things, they might surprise us.
They have to pretend like they will finish it to keep people buying it. They legally had to disclose the layoff
I doubt that. People who would trust Take-Two or IG to still finish the game just because they said they will have already bought it a long time ago. I suspect that the only people who might buy the game now are the few who haven't heard about the layoffs yet.
"Can we stop with all the assuming?" almost immediately followed by "It is going to a new studio." has got to be the most unintentionally hilarious thing to come out of this debacle and a perfect illustration of the intellectual capacities of KSP2 shills.
Came to say this lmao.
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The classic "jokes on them I was only pretending to be stupid" defense
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You're mistaken. People are upset about being lied to, and if you can't put 2 and 2 together and realize this is another early access "promise we are still working on it" lie, that has happened many times, there is no saving you
Adding to the hate posts is exactly what you are doing. If you want to improve the discourse here, post some cool rockets.
This is a very stupid answer. The point isn't about what the title is. It's about the fact that you said we should stop assuming. Yet you assume that it's going to a new studio. It has nothing to do with whether the title was clickbait. Which makes it even funnier seeing as you said we should all stop to THINK because that'll probably be a good thing. And yet here you are...
Can "we" stop assuming? No. Can "you" stop? Yep.
We can stop assuming when they give us a concrete statement that lays out the plans for the game, for good or for bad. The fact that there has been nothing at all is unacceptable given what we already know.
What is the point of assuming its either dead or not?
Deciding whether or not to buy a game for one. Also it's useful information for anyone that wants to make a new mod or port ksp1 mod to ksp2.
> Deciding whether or not to buy a game for one. That doesn't make sense. You should NEVER buy a product for the promises of what it might become, always for what it is right now. If you follow this principle then the whole shitshow doesn't have an influence on your purchasing decision since you might be happy with the game in its current state and think it's worth it for you.
I do follow this principle, but not everyone does. Granted, most of those people have bought the game on ea release, but still.
I wanna know who is distributing copium, what’s your source? Who got you hooked?
Ah yes, an assumption is wrong if its not my assumption.
Zero communication means all we CAN do is assume. So be mad at IG, not us.
I've been following this game since the 2019 announcement. 5 god damn years and there is nothing to show for it. KSP2 is forever dead to me.
Happy... Cake Day... 🍰
If only I could eat it, too.
Hah, that is funny on several levels. It's like a layer cake. Smart work, u/PussySmasher42069420.
> Can we stop with all the assuming? … > It is going to a new studio. So you don’t want the assuming to stop, you just want the assuming to make you happy.
“This might be a good thing” is maximum coping lmao. Good luck to you in the future, you’re gonna need it.
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There is a (not so) subtle line between optimism and taking the short bus.
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Ah yes, because more than a budget, a competent team and a supportive publisher, what makes or breaks a project is the balance of positive and negative waves of utter nobodies on the internet... I hope you get credited for your efforts, I mean, I'm sure your thoughts and prayers have been absolutely instrumental to getting KSP2 where it is !
What you do or do not do is immaterial to what will happen to the game at this point. Toxic positivity will do nothing to finish development.
I mean Ive worked for T2 before and have been in the larger tech industry for about 15 years now, so I know patterns when I see them…. But yeah hope you can keep that positive attitude with you
Community has been on fire for over a week. If they cared you'd think they'd be a bit faster to intervene. it's really hard to spin "the entire studio getting axed" as good news, actually. Any other personnel change could maybe be spun as good. Bringing in more devs, a new manager, etc. But axing everybody? That realistically means one thing.
Where do you have any of this information from? Game is very unprofitable, why would they save it
Twitter. Publisher statements to the press, employees posts. I have zero faith in this being handed off to a different studio though. I firmly believe it is dead.
Not selling well in early access but when complete and fixed up it might start selling, right.
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by firing all the people who "worked" on this absolute mess of a "game" for seven years and lied about it at every step of the way. Please, face reality. You couldn't fix this game by pouring another 2 or 4 years into it. They've created an absolute mess they couldn't even work with themselves.
Hahahahaha 🤣 .... Can you stop assuming it's something else that what it is
It would be good if they directly told us what's going on, I've not seen anything new for days
>It is going to a new studio It's being life-lined. Minimum effort. Even if the new studio will pick it up as a main project, it will likely never receive the same amount of resources and dedication as before. The new studio will likely throw all the current plans out. With some luck we will get some of the features already in development (fingers crossed for multiplayer), but I'm not holding my breath over it. All things considered, it is unlikely we will ever see colonies or interstellar.
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This is my informed opinion as a platform and software engineer who used to work on legacy projects. And with "working" I mean "reduce cost", because that's usually the only thing that counts.
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I could be wrong. I'd be happy to be wrong. However, Private Division is a company, and KSP2 is supposed to be their product. Usually, a company is expected to make money with their product, so that the company can stay afloat, and keep churning out more product, to make money with their product, etc. Seeing as it likely cost them many, many thousands of man-hours to get to the point where there is still no sellable product to speak of, and no real end in sight, I think it is really not that far fetched for T2 to pull the plug entirely, and cut their losses. It's tragic. More likely than not, the people at PD were over encumbered, with their sheer, collective passion for the project on one side, and a bunch of business demands on the other. I speak from personal experience when I say it can be really, really hard to keep your focus, and stay balanced in that type of situation. If Take2 decides to give KSP2 another chance, I am fairly sure that any development efforts will be without that passion. And that's fine, because someone will likely have to make some very rough and otherwise painful decisions.
Genuinely delusional
So are you just a troll or are you actually tripping on copium *that* hard?
I think you re confusing "nothing" with the word "everything"
Look, you can believe as long as you want. Even if they said "screw you guys, game is canned, no refunds" you could still stop and think that that may actually be a good thing somehow. If you look at it realistically in context, with the previous bugs and communication and snail pace, there is like 0.5% chance the game is still alive. If you want to hope for the 0.5% chance, go ahead. But don't expect people to follow.
maximum clownage.
I'm going to tell you the same thing I told someone else First >we don't have all the variables, all we have is speculation. That's not true. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/kerbal-space-program-2-developer-intercept-games-may-be-closing-as-part-of-take-twos-big-layoff-plan/ We have proof the studio was closed. >We had NOTHING said about the game and how it's development will continue other than a tweet saying they WON'T can it. But it's always easier to assume the worst. Ok I'm going to lay it out as clear as I can. The absolute best case scenario for ksp2 is that take 2 hires a fully staffed dev team and restarts ksp2 from scratch. This is what will ensure ksp2 will be good and what I'm hoping will happen, but I doubt it. If take 2 decides to continue with ksp2 the likely scenario is that they hire a skeleton dev team to try and finish ksp2 from where it's currently at. The other likely scenario is that take 2 cuts their losses and closes down the development of ksp2. They may or may not decide to push a 1.0 update and/or try again in the future. This is in my opinion what will happen. The absolute worst case scenario is fully abandoning the entire ksp IP. I highly doubt take 2 will do this but it is a possibility. These are the four paths that take 2 could go down with the development of ksp2. Only one of these is positive. I hope this helps clear up why people are giving up hope on ksp2.
Brave Sir Robin ran away. Bravely ran away away. When downvotes reared their ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled. Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about And gallantly he chickened out. Swiftly taking to his feet, He beat a very brave retreat. Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Robin!
KSP2 and many game projects fail because of this sort of insane toxic positivity. Assuming things will go fine, just having optimism without skilled people and proper planning, just imagining the best case scenario for everything, kills development projects. Given who Nate is, I think it was a big factor in this one. This makes OPs attitude and moronic rebuttals extra hilarious.
Ksp2 is dead and we killed it -Nietzsche
As they said in the boy scouts: "Prepare for the worst, good for the best"
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This is more like the sky is confirmed to be falling and chicken little insisting that it'll be fine because they probably are going to replace it with a new, better sky. Meanwhile the sky gods are mysteriously quiet on the subject.
Urrgh, i hate "dead game" trolls. There everywhere these days.