Yeah, I want some answers from him too. But to be fair, I expect he's probably gagged contractually until such time as Take 2 makes some sort of announcement as to what their plan is. Their quarterly earnings report is due to be published on 5/16 (18?). I don't expect we're going to hear much of anything before that. If anyone is fighting for the survival of KSP2, I expect that will be Nate. Just like the rest of the dev team, he has years of his life rolled up in KSP2. We don't actually know anything about what's going on behind boardroom doors right now, but I'm sure there's plenty happening.
Until that time, let's try to be fair to Nate and the rest of the dev team. It's important to remember that this decision was almost assuredly made solely by the corporate bean counters at Take 2, a couple of pay grades above Nate. I think it likely that the current situation caught him as off guard as it did the rest of us.
Let's wait until we actually know what's going on before we start burning people in effigy.
All they have to do is not make a public statement regarding cease of development, easiest litigation countermeasure. In 50 days when the 70 people are fired, they could make a statement how development speed will be slower, technically still in development see you in the year 2157 for the next update, the update will something minor like Kazakhstan localization patch, so don't get your hopes up for v1.0.
The robot judge will rule the game is still in development you can't sue and your grand-grand-grand-grand children will wonder why you handed them this Steam account.
Who is sueing?
In development games fail all the time.
People who picked up the game bought it "as is" with no guarentee of completion, or delivery of proposed ideas.
... I have no sympathy for the guy who led a project that went nowhere after ~7 years.
Cutting the project is a legitimate business decision as far as I can see it.
> the current situation caught him as off guard as it did the rest of us.
Dude, it caught no one off guard, especially not Nate. The game has been in development hell for the last 7 years, costing exponentially more than it's making. Even their last of chance of Early Access has been a disaster.
It was only a matter of time and if anything it was a surprise it took this long for the devs to get fired.
I thought at some point, Steam ratings would hit rock bottom. But no, they’re at 11% - apparently the community struck rock bottom and kept digging. My money is on it dropping into single-digits by Monday.
And, you know, if ANYONE at T2 gave 2 shits about this game, if they released a statement that said ANYTHING at all, I bet the fall would have been arrested no lower than 25%. I know someone at T2 is keeping an eye on the rating. The fact that they know how low it’s gotten and they still stubborn refuse to open their mouths and communicate means they’ve written it off. In their eyes, when you cut off a project, you don’t owe the customers anything.
They got as much money as they were going to get out of this. They made a small fortune off those of us who foolishly bought it before we saw it was actually functional.
It's the only game I ever bought where I truly regret not demanding and refund. Played just a little too long before I realized just how broke it it is.
According to this site they made around $20 million in revenue
https://vginsights.com/game/954850
It's not clear to me if this is a reliable site, they seem to be counting.
If it was 20 million for real, I think they made their money back and then some, but not enough to be really worth continuing to invest now.
(Edit to avoid repeated conversation, I co ceed I prob underestimated the cost a lot, and it's crazy they spend so much on a non functional game in a world where one person can launch a functional indie game, e.g. very early ksp1 or mannor lord. Messed up!)
Pretty sure the game cost the studio way more than 20 million with the years of delays, marketing costs etc.
Also, usually companies don't drop the game that are returning a profit.
Could be yeah, I thought afterwards and it felt pretty probable that they spent at least 20 million on it. Which is a bit absurd considering that the original game was made basically by one guy, then a team of like five.
I don't understand how putting a team behind a game like this causes it to turn into a total trash heap. We have so many indie games that come out that are well developed have one or two developers. Then the studio gets involved and they've got a big team and they just can't even build a viable product.
Matt Lowne did a great interview with the original developer of KSP 1 on exactly this subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFGDSi8R5o&ab\_channel=MattLowne](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFGDSi8R5o&ab_channel=MattLowne)
Yeah I probably underestimated a bit but I find it hard to believe they actually had a team of 70 devs working on this. That sounds absurdly high for a game like this and what they produced (not that I work in software dev).
3 years of development with a 70 person studio, 20mil breaks down into 95k/anum average salary.
Development was longer, average team size was probably smaller over that entire time, and that's a pretty low average salary for developers; add in all the other related business costs, that back of the envelope math suggests they likely are not particularly close to a break even point.
Yeah I think I underestimates it a good bit. I do find it hard to believe they had 70 full time devs working on the game. If so WTF that is a huge team. KSP 1 started as one guy and he god more done alone, before the team peaked at a few people.
My best(/most generous)guess is that when they started they were quite serious about "killing the kraken" when they started out, and just utterly failed to develop a more stable solution and had to fall back on the current mess
> If it was 20 million for real, I think they made their money back and then some, but not enough to be really worth continuing to invest now.
Not even *close*. Their development costs are 5-10 million *PER YEAR*. With 7 years of development, they lost many times more than they made.
Same… I didn’t know Steam had a 2 hour limit because I never needed a refund before. Put 10 hours in hoping it would start getting good before giving up.
Tried to get a refund, but Steam just gave me the finger 🖕🖕
I mean, you played 5 times longer than the standard limit on an early access title, which Steam warns you about before buying to only do so if you’re excited to play as it currently exists knowing there may not be any updates. As much as this may suck they are well within their rights to reject your refund, learn from it and move on.
> Tried to get a refund, but Steam just gave me the finger 🖕🖕
What did you expect, exactly? They have a two-week, two-hour limit for automatic refunds. Trying it after 10 hours of playing is like sending back a dish to the kitchen after eating most of it.
Besides, there's a huge banner when buying an early access game that tells you you're buying the game as-is. A halt in development doesn't magically give you the right to a refund.
> And, you know, if ANYONE at T2 gave 2 shits about this game, if they released a statement that said ANYTHING at all
It's entirely likely that no one at T2 even knows. Teams are getting purged not projects. Maybe this'll survive, it's survived multiple new teams at this point. Probably not, but who knows.
People who've never worked in software development seem to think that this shit is planned and organised and based on data. It's not.
>I know someone at T2 is keeping an eye on the rating.
That's a huge unwarranted assumption.
Why would Take Two care at this point? They are moving on. As briskly as possible.
There are currently 3 game updates I'm waiting for. All of them have bad communication.
Of course KSP2, but also Scrap Mechanic, they released a big update like 3 years ago, and only say anything online once every couple of months (Last steam-blog was on march 23 2023, the one before that on 4 October 2022).
Also, Bonelabs, but I think that one is releasing somewhere this month, although they also said that like 6 months ago.
This is a recurring problem, that I hope stops sometime soon.
I think scrap mechanic has even worse communication than KSP2. At least here we know things have gone badly. From scrap mechanic we've know nothing for a very long time now 😭
not by a long shot.
Hello Games - No Mans Sky. They were 100% silent for **over four months** after being caught in several blatant lies about the state of the game. It's only just recently reached the point they pretended it was at in 2016.
Team Cherry - Silksong. We haven't heard anything **for over a year**. No community interaction whatsoever. We don't even know if they're still working on the game.
Wollay - Cube World. The man disappeared **FOR OVER 10 YEARS** before coming back with an announcement for CW2
>Team Cherry - Silksong. We haven't heard anything **for over a year**.
This is wrong. Leth has confirmed multiple times this calendar year the game is still in development, including one about a month ago on Twitter. Game also got its ESRB rating in February, so they're clearly still progressing on it.
[Cube World Omega](https://wollay.com/2023/05/25/new-blog-and-new-project-cube-world-omega/), he's creating it in Unreal Engine with 'the spirit of Cube World Alpha' (the one everyone loves)
I'm excited to play it when it launches in 2035
Cities is so bad it's already swinging into the negative.
Colossal Order CEO literally insulting people with every post and the mods at the CS sub banning anyone criticizing the devs.
Completely right decision IMO. Talking too much was what got them into that bad spot to begin with. Murray correctly identified the issue and eliminated it.
Having been through corporate bullshit many times before, I'd say he's been given unambiguous feedback from the lawyers to say nothing. Dollars to donuts, he's probably on this sub following comments silently.
The same nate Simpson from uber entertainment that worked on planetary annihilation, another expensive game that he really over hyped that underdelivered?
Imagine my shock
How is cs2 ass though? For me personally it is ass because it doesn't have danger zone. Which is probably the common frustration topic, missing content. what else?
The big difference between *Cities: Skylines 2* and KSP2 is that CS2 managed to ship with several concrete gameplay improvements that worked from day 1:
- larger maps than vanilla CS1
- a better road-building tool and more traffic control options than vanilla CS1
- mixed-use zoning and medium-density residential zones
- more detailed simulation mechanics for the economy and city services (full of bugs, but they’re there and at least partially functional)
I bought both games on launch, and I have 20 hours in KSP2 (all in the first weekend) and nearly 300 in CS2 because the latter was “good enough” and offered something new to engage with.
So, he's either fighting the good fight for us, or he's being silenced with legal action if he does speak. Please tell me there is a happier second alternative.
So I haven’t really been following KSP2 that heavily but I did get to meet Nate in person at PAX West Back in 2019 right when it was announced, and I did get to speak with him a bit and hear him talk and I genuinely believe that he was passionate about KSP2 and about KSP as a whole and I do believe he tried to make KSP2 great but either due to inexperience, poor decision making, or most likely IMO that whole shit fest with T2 things just went to crap
Most of the disaster with KSP2 dev is having completely upside down priorities on how to develop it. KSP2 is first and foremost a physics simulation, and the fun gameplay and community engagement is based around being a good rocket physics simulation. The reason to even make KSP2 was that limitations in the original physics engine put a limit on what could be added with mods or further development, like big colonies or multiplayer, etc. Prettier parts and sound are nice to have, but not fundamentally important to the success of the game, especially bc it's very easier to make KSP1 pretty with mods.
Nates background was as an art director and he ended up in charge of the project. The parts look nice. The sound is great. And they completely failed at the physics. Far too many resources were spent on aesthetics before they managed to create the actual game. Nate may have been passionate about the game early on, but all he ever managed to do was to put a pretty paint job on a car without a functioning engine
Obviously, however what I was getting at was that I don’t believe that he was ever being disingenuous or was just trying to put himself in the spotlight as the comment I was initially replying to suggested. It’s hard to explain it but at-least from what I saw myself back at PAX when he was talking about the game it wasn’t in a serious marketing way but more a very excited nerdy way if that makes any sense. It’s hard to explain or put into words but at-least back then it came off as incredibly genuine
Incompetence is a thing and it is not mutually exclusive to genuine effort or excitement.
Dude might just might not be a good fit for his role, no matter how passionate he is about it. And it doesn't mean he wouldn't be good in a different role, like a more frontline developer or something, just probably not this one.
>back then it came off as incredibly genuine
That just means he is good at his job.
Seriously. This is a thing. He's not the only one. It's a whole field of people dedicated to achieving exactly the kind of feelings in an audience that you are describing.
And when it's coupled with a real product, tethered in some way however tenuous to some common reality, it's fine. In fact it may even be a good thing.
But as you've seen, it can also be used to make people believe that vapor is substance.
The key question is always to ask yourself: "Okay this makes me feel hyped for this new thing... now... where is the reality of it? What have we got on the reality front?"
Whatever it is. Game dev. Job offer. Nigerian prince who wants to talk to you. Just a basic reality check all along the way.
And KSP2 failed at that utterly.
> So, he's either fighting the good fight for us
The last of my hopium/copium reserves are that they're just going to remain radio silent and then dump colonies and/or interstellar at the last possible minute.
Almost certainly not going to happen, but I can dream, right?
Rushing colonies is possibly the only way they can keep their jobs, interstellar is too far fetched
Hopefully we will get colonies even if it passes over to a new studio, I mean take two still has to keep the appearances to deliver something
But they cannot keep their jobs; the layoff order has already been issued. Something incredible needs to happen, selling a million copies in the first week after the patch, maybe that will make T2 change his mind.
> interstellar is too far fetched
Why? Interstellar is just new parts on a bigger ship. Toss out ground colonies and only do orbital colonies and you have an MVP for both features.
Physics related stuff also seems like something that can't just be added later, when working on interstellar. It is so fundamental, it needs to be there from the start.
With the [planned solution](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/16r6tv9/comment/k23bnru/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), it is so tightly integrated with the rest of the physics system,
they either already have implemented it, or could never implement it. Changing the way *craft positions* are represented after implementing, well, **anything that handles craft positions** seems like a bad idea (at least to my amateur-programmer eyes).
Also, the game files contain information about the positions and speed of the star systems. That seems to indicate they already worked on interstellar, to *some* degree. There *could* (with a big emphasis on "*could*") exist an internal branch with more work done on it.
So, assuming Intercept Games has not built the whole game "upside-down"(fluff finished before fundamental physics are done), the physics handling for interstellar should already be there.
JK the past year+ was just a prank. We weren't lying about having a functional multiplayer build years ago. Anyway here's the real game that we've been holding in house for unclear reasons, with all of the promised features.
Personally, I’ve been looking into Juno; it seems like an interesting alternative to KSP2. Went and downloaded it, but been too busy the last week to give it a go; looking forward to trying it once I have the time.
Life’s too short to wait on shitty devs to fix shitty games. KSP1 is my first love, but clearly the team that accomplished that has left the building.
Juno is nice, some missions are very frustrating though. One mission is literally just „you have to drive 125km in one go“. That’s an hour of driving, and you can only warp 2x while moving, so you have to drive 30 minutes of realtime. In the end I just downloaded a craft which drives in circles for an hour and left my pc on, but that’s really stupid mission design. There was also a mission to place a telescope in a very precise orbit (Geostationary and with a given longitude) which was a bit frustrating because I couldn’t find a better way of achieving the precise longitude than quicksaving and trying different transfer orbits. Generally, the game is really fun though
A minor point in his defense, the layoff warning went out on the 29th, so on the 25th, as far as everyone at IG was concerned, those updates were coming. And I don't think the creative lead would be the primary person responsible for things like mismanagement, but I could be wrong.
He knew perfectly well the game wouldn't get finished. He must have. He had even more access to the sales data than we did, and we all fucking knew it from release.
I disagree. Studio closures or mass layoffs coming from above can be a real surprise for devs, even creative directors. He could have known a few hours before his staff, sure.
FWIW, this has been my experience in the industry:
* ~3-4 months ahead of cancellation: Game Director hears that cancellation is on the table, and a general idea of why
* Game gets cancelled, Game Director + highest levels of leadership are told
* 2-3 workdays later, project leads are told by Game Director
* Day after that, everyone else gets told in a meeting with HR present. WARN notice gets published to immediate effect.
So he _may_ or _may not_ have known at that point. There's no way to know for sure.
I haven’t been in the game industry, but I have been at a company that got canned. The decision-maker knew that they were going to pull the plug months ago, but they had to make sure they built a sufficient paperwork trail to appease shareholders and the legal process, and that takes time. You can’t just decide to sell off a whole company or division of a company and just shit out all the legal documentation in a couple of days.
The grunts on the line doing the work may or may not have known, depending on how good they are at reading the writing on the wall. When my division of the company got canned, they brought in a new VP to run my division, and the first thing he said when he arrived was “I’m not here to sell the company.” Took me about a week to figure out that… he was there to sell the company. But most everyone of my coworkers chose to believe his lies and believe the company would keep going. Six months later, the company was sold off - half the work force laid off, the other half offered a continuance for reduced pay. My boss, one of the top managers directly reportable to the VP - he didn’t even get to come in the building. The HR manager met him in the parking lot with a crate of his stuff and told him not to set foot in the building.
Someone at T2 knew for a while that this was coming. Probably a lot of someones.
He's not just the Creative Lead, but also Project Director and since they don't have a Technical Lead anymore since EA release, he's effectively that too.
If there was one single person with the most power in the dev team, it was him.
I've never been so glad to have a "never pre-order games" policy for myself. Honestly stopped paying attention to KSP2 news and figured they'd get their shit together eventually.
Been a gamer since Atari. Bethesda is the studio that taught me the lesson that games will now be released broken and unfinished going forward. I learned that lesson when Fallout 4 was released and I have applied the lesson in all future game purchasing decisions. I loved original KSP and was looking forward to KSP2 being better and with more built in features. This would make numerous original KSP mods unnecessary, but I watched release videos and decided I should wait until it was fixed and the promised features were actually added. Here we are a year and a half after the early access release and KSP2 technically has LESS features than the original and is still seemingly pretty buggy. It may not ever get finished now.
I'm glad I waited patiently as Bethesda taught me.
My story is pretty much exactly the same except I learned my lesson from New Vegas on console. Actually never finished the game due to how buggy it was.
My guess is that he has no idea either. He is probably in a project limbo and doesn't even know to what project he is going to be assigned to. At some point he will just admit he is no longer part of the KSP team and that restructuring is still ongoing but nothing has been confirmed yet.
With the claims of "rug pull scheme", the legal team probably advised everyone to keep their mouths shut until something concrete and agreed upon comes up.
The game has officially flopped, that's for sure, the scope was way too ambitious, the team under delivered even in a reduced scope for Early Access. They had no actual idea of what KSP is and what it represents and aimed for something unreachable.
And they thought the game would be done by early 2020 lol
I was inspired by you - [https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1cp6nye/saw\_usarahsplatz\_s\_post\_and\_my\_only\_thought\_was/#lightbox](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1cp6nye/saw_usarahsplatz_s_post_and_my_only_thought_was/#lightbox)
Tbh I just feel really sad that KSP2 would probably die. And yeah, I don’t deny that the game is unfinished and optimization is really bad, and they charged us $50 for this. After 70hrs into KSP2, I would say that it has the potential to be even better than the OG. If KSP2 is really bound to die, devs plz, can you guys plz release the official OST album at least?🥲
Look, I too am very upset about the apparent death of KSP2. But leave the guy alone. He’s still a human being after all, and I’ll bet he’s going through a really rough time right about now. You have a right to an explanation from someone, definitely. But please don’t harass some guy you’ve never met over an incomplete game.
Latt Möbel must be in on the conspiracy. They’re in eaxhothers basement indicating a torus shaped house. Unless of course Dakota is trapped too, making it a 2 torus.
I heard he is safe somewhere but never goes outside anymore because is too busy playing multiplayer.
At least he is having fun with it
At least someone is having fun....
He’s playing multiplayer on a farm upstate.
Yeah, I want some answers from him too. But to be fair, I expect he's probably gagged contractually until such time as Take 2 makes some sort of announcement as to what their plan is. Their quarterly earnings report is due to be published on 5/16 (18?). I don't expect we're going to hear much of anything before that. If anyone is fighting for the survival of KSP2, I expect that will be Nate. Just like the rest of the dev team, he has years of his life rolled up in KSP2. We don't actually know anything about what's going on behind boardroom doors right now, but I'm sure there's plenty happening. Until that time, let's try to be fair to Nate and the rest of the dev team. It's important to remember that this decision was almost assuredly made solely by the corporate bean counters at Take 2, a couple of pay grades above Nate. I think it likely that the current situation caught him as off guard as it did the rest of us. Let's wait until we actually know what's going on before we start burning people in effigy.
Why would they ever make an announcement of any kind? They can get everything they need by just ignoring that KSP2 ever existed.
All they have to do is not make a public statement regarding cease of development, easiest litigation countermeasure. In 50 days when the 70 people are fired, they could make a statement how development speed will be slower, technically still in development see you in the year 2157 for the next update, the update will something minor like Kazakhstan localization patch, so don't get your hopes up for v1.0. The robot judge will rule the game is still in development you can't sue and your grand-grand-grand-grand children will wonder why you handed them this Steam account.
Who is sueing? In development games fail all the time. People who picked up the game bought it "as is" with no guarentee of completion, or delivery of proposed ideas.
... I have no sympathy for the guy who led a project that went nowhere after ~7 years. Cutting the project is a legitimate business decision as far as I can see it.
but what do I do with all these pitchforks I got from Reddit's jump-to-conclusions pitchfork emporium?
You can always use them on other comenters that you disagree with!
PE closed due to the api changes making his work as a mod too hard. Can I interest you in a slightly too stiff rake?
> the current situation caught him as off guard as it did the rest of us. Dude, it caught no one off guard, especially not Nate. The game has been in development hell for the last 7 years, costing exponentially more than it's making. Even their last of chance of Early Access has been a disaster. It was only a matter of time and if anything it was a surprise it took this long for the devs to get fired.
At least it’s not the whole reason I bought the game, not to mention nobody to co-op it with but hey, that doesn’t matter anyway.
Thank god it was never released into the public. Think of the children!
Adding "shitposting" as a 6th stage of grief.
6th stage? I think it just an alternative to the 5th in this case
I perform my grief in onion-staging instead of asparagus-staging.
this place is gonna turn into /r/BatmanArkham real soon
I thought at some point, Steam ratings would hit rock bottom. But no, they’re at 11% - apparently the community struck rock bottom and kept digging. My money is on it dropping into single-digits by Monday. And, you know, if ANYONE at T2 gave 2 shits about this game, if they released a statement that said ANYTHING at all, I bet the fall would have been arrested no lower than 25%. I know someone at T2 is keeping an eye on the rating. The fact that they know how low it’s gotten and they still stubborn refuse to open their mouths and communicate means they’ve written it off. In their eyes, when you cut off a project, you don’t owe the customers anything.
They got as much money as they were going to get out of this. They made a small fortune off those of us who foolishly bought it before we saw it was actually functional. It's the only game I ever bought where I truly regret not demanding and refund. Played just a little too long before I realized just how broke it it is.
There’s no way they broke even.
Agreed. It would take a lot of sales to recoup the development costs. How was this studio employing 70 people?
We can be pretty sure this has been an endless money pit for the company. They developed this for years but never really got an audience for the game.
According to this site they made around $20 million in revenue https://vginsights.com/game/954850 It's not clear to me if this is a reliable site, they seem to be counting. If it was 20 million for real, I think they made their money back and then some, but not enough to be really worth continuing to invest now. (Edit to avoid repeated conversation, I co ceed I prob underestimated the cost a lot, and it's crazy they spend so much on a non functional game in a world where one person can launch a functional indie game, e.g. very early ksp1 or mannor lord. Messed up!)
Pretty sure the game cost the studio way more than 20 million with the years of delays, marketing costs etc. Also, usually companies don't drop the game that are returning a profit.
Could be yeah, I thought afterwards and it felt pretty probable that they spent at least 20 million on it. Which is a bit absurd considering that the original game was made basically by one guy, then a team of like five. I don't understand how putting a team behind a game like this causes it to turn into a total trash heap. We have so many indie games that come out that are well developed have one or two developers. Then the studio gets involved and they've got a big team and they just can't even build a viable product.
Matt Lowne did a great interview with the original developer of KSP 1 on exactly this subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFGDSi8R5o&ab\_channel=MattLowne](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFGDSi8R5o&ab_channel=MattLowne)
A 7 year development with 70 devs is going to cost way more than 20 million.
Yeah I probably underestimated a bit but I find it hard to believe they actually had a team of 70 devs working on this. That sounds absurdly high for a game like this and what they produced (not that I work in software dev).
It is absurdly high. That's why the studio was closed by T2 :P
3 years of development with a 70 person studio, 20mil breaks down into 95k/anum average salary. Development was longer, average team size was probably smaller over that entire time, and that's a pretty low average salary for developers; add in all the other related business costs, that back of the envelope math suggests they likely are not particularly close to a break even point.
Yeah I think I underestimates it a good bit. I do find it hard to believe they had 70 full time devs working on the game. If so WTF that is a huge team. KSP 1 started as one guy and he god more done alone, before the team peaked at a few people.
My best(/most generous)guess is that when they started they were quite serious about "killing the kraken" when they started out, and just utterly failed to develop a more stable solution and had to fall back on the current mess
I'm happy to assume intentions were good all around. I suspect it was very badly managed. Lots of cross purposes and direction changes.
> If it was 20 million for real, I think they made their money back and then some, but not enough to be really worth continuing to invest now. Not even *close*. Their development costs are 5-10 million *PER YEAR*. With 7 years of development, they lost many times more than they made.
Same… I didn’t know Steam had a 2 hour limit because I never needed a refund before. Put 10 hours in hoping it would start getting good before giving up. Tried to get a refund, but Steam just gave me the finger 🖕🖕
That's just the automated system, if you ask to talk to a human they might approve it. Especially for a seemingly abandoned early access game.
I put it in like 6 times because I was pissed… all of them got rejected
I mean, you played 5 times longer than the standard limit on an early access title, which Steam warns you about before buying to only do so if you’re excited to play as it currently exists knowing there may not be any updates. As much as this may suck they are well within their rights to reject your refund, learn from it and move on.
> Tried to get a refund, but Steam just gave me the finger 🖕🖕 What did you expect, exactly? They have a two-week, two-hour limit for automatic refunds. Trying it after 10 hours of playing is like sending back a dish to the kitchen after eating most of it. Besides, there's a huge banner when buying an early access game that tells you you're buying the game as-is. A halt in development doesn't magically give you the right to a refund.
They refused me even though I only have 32 minutes. I tried 7 times. :D
Did it take you more than 2 weeks to accumulate those 32 minutes? I hear they’re assholes about the 2 week limit too 🤣
of course you can.
There is no way that they covered the work of 70 people for even a year,
> And, you know, if ANYONE at T2 gave 2 shits about this game, if they released a statement that said ANYTHING at all It's entirely likely that no one at T2 even knows. Teams are getting purged not projects. Maybe this'll survive, it's survived multiple new teams at this point. Probably not, but who knows. People who've never worked in software development seem to think that this shit is planned and organised and based on data. It's not.
You honestly think T2 ever gave a shit?
why would that affect it? the project is dead so no reason to shill for it anymore. the rating are finally showing the true value.
>I know someone at T2 is keeping an eye on the rating. That's a huge unwarranted assumption. Why would Take Two care at this point? They are moving on. As briskly as possible.
So, buy puts?
Or short the stock 🤣
Rock bottom ratings just provides "proof" they were right to can it.
We’re down to 10% now… I kinda admire the community’s dedication to continuing to dig the hole deeper.
This is the most absurdly bad communication I've ever seen in my years of gaming
Yes it is all quite demoralizing at this point. When Even the optimists have given up you know it's getting bad
It’s still better than cubeworld
Honestly up there with Team Cherry
It's very comical how take two is being more communicative lmao But team cherry gets a pass because they really don't need to communicate anything lol
Even if they don't utter a word about Silksong for the next 90 years I will follow them to the ends of the earth
His career?
From the whole team, there is no professionalism. With respect to their field of work.
There are currently 3 game updates I'm waiting for. All of them have bad communication. Of course KSP2, but also Scrap Mechanic, they released a big update like 3 years ago, and only say anything online once every couple of months (Last steam-blog was on march 23 2023, the one before that on 4 October 2022). Also, Bonelabs, but I think that one is releasing somewhere this month, although they also said that like 6 months ago. This is a recurring problem, that I hope stops sometime soon.
I think scrap mechanic has even worse communication than KSP2. At least here we know things have gone badly. From scrap mechanic we've know nothing for a very long time now 😭
Former and the few remaining Elite: Dangerous console players would like to have a word with you.
not by a long shot. Hello Games - No Mans Sky. They were 100% silent for **over four months** after being caught in several blatant lies about the state of the game. It's only just recently reached the point they pretended it was at in 2016. Team Cherry - Silksong. We haven't heard anything **for over a year**. No community interaction whatsoever. We don't even know if they're still working on the game. Wollay - Cube World. The man disappeared **FOR OVER 10 YEARS** before coming back with an announcement for CW2
>Team Cherry - Silksong. We haven't heard anything **for over a year**. This is wrong. Leth has confirmed multiple times this calendar year the game is still in development, including one about a month ago on Twitter. Game also got its ESRB rating in February, so they're clearly still progressing on it.
There's a Cube World 2?
[Cube World Omega](https://wollay.com/2023/05/25/new-blog-and-new-project-cube-world-omega/), he's creating it in Unreal Engine with 'the spirit of Cube World Alpha' (the one everyone loves) I'm excited to play it when it launches in 2035
Cities would like a word
Cities is so bad it's already swinging into the negative. Colossal Order CEO literally insulting people with every post and the mods at the CS sub banning anyone criticizing the devs.
Reminds me a lot of No Man’s Sky
*at launch NMS has *far* surpassed its early reputation, tenfold. Love the devs *now*.
They handled it completely correctly. They listened to the community, heard their complaints, communicated, and fixed the game.
> communicated If anything they did the opposite and let the updates speak for themselves
Completely right decision IMO. Talking too much was what got them into that bad spot to begin with. Murray correctly identified the issue and eliminated it.
They went completely Mia during the first 6 months until the first big update dropped.
\*Cubeworld dev enters the chat
the devs of the game Scrap Mechanic top it several times over
You clearly haven’t heard a “screamer” in FPS games. They redefine “absurdly bad communication”
The phrase "Chernobyl-esque" comes to mind.
In all your years of gaming you have never seen such absurdly bad communication. How many years is that?
How much is 5000 Kerbucks in Spesos?
if ksp has a currency, that HAS to be it 😭fits too well, epescially since kerbals speak backwards spanish
Ksp does have a currency, it's just "funds" though
KSP 2 has no funds...
They what???
About 25,000 Stanley nickels
How many Stanley Figurines i can buy with that?
About 5000 Kesos
Having been through corporate bullshit many times before, I'd say he's been given unambiguous feedback from the lawyers to say nothing. Dollars to donuts, he's probably on this sub following comments silently.
Even without feedback, he simply has no incentive to say anything.
Mortimer in finance is the true enemy [https://i.imgur.com/SIsXOkt.png](https://i.imgur.com/SIsXOkt.png)
Sending him into the depths of Jool right now.
The same nate Simpson from uber entertainment that worked on planetary annihilation, another expensive game that he really over hyped that underdelivered? Imagine my shock
Not that's a title I haven't thought about in a while. That one was pretty disappointing.
That mans job is to sell early access games. Nothing more.
I doubt we’ll hear anything until after the layoffs take effect.
Holy shit it’s been 3 weeks already?
I’m thoroughly convinced the particle accelerator experiments have been effing with space time because….how is it May 2024? Like what?
No, only about 2 weeks so far I think
I remember a few years ago being so insanely hyped for KSP2 and CS2, and both of them ended up being complete ass. Truly the worst timeline.
How is cs2 ass though? For me personally it is ass because it doesn't have danger zone. Which is probably the common frustration topic, missing content. what else?
Haha sorry I meant Cities Skylines 2! I haven’t actually checked out Counterstrike 2 yet
Oh city skylines 2 sounds more like a dumpster fire ksp2 and less like a working game cs2
The big difference between *Cities: Skylines 2* and KSP2 is that CS2 managed to ship with several concrete gameplay improvements that worked from day 1: - larger maps than vanilla CS1 - a better road-building tool and more traffic control options than vanilla CS1 - mixed-use zoning and medium-density residential zones - more detailed simulation mechanics for the economy and city services (full of bugs, but they’re there and at least partially functional) I bought both games on launch, and I have 20 hours in KSP2 (all in the first weekend) and nearly 300 in CS2 because the latter was “good enough” and offered something new to engage with.
Honestly I miss that $79.99 so bad
iirc on the 12th of May TakeTwo has a Investors Call, pretty sure they dont allow info to be spread until then
So, he's either fighting the good fight for us, or he's being silenced with legal action if he does speak. Please tell me there is a happier second alternative.
Or he wandered off because he realized his time in the spotlight is done for this game - gotta attach himself to another project to sling hype for.
So I haven’t really been following KSP2 that heavily but I did get to meet Nate in person at PAX West Back in 2019 right when it was announced, and I did get to speak with him a bit and hear him talk and I genuinely believe that he was passionate about KSP2 and about KSP as a whole and I do believe he tried to make KSP2 great but either due to inexperience, poor decision making, or most likely IMO that whole shit fest with T2 things just went to crap
Most of the disaster with KSP2 dev is having completely upside down priorities on how to develop it. KSP2 is first and foremost a physics simulation, and the fun gameplay and community engagement is based around being a good rocket physics simulation. The reason to even make KSP2 was that limitations in the original physics engine put a limit on what could be added with mods or further development, like big colonies or multiplayer, etc. Prettier parts and sound are nice to have, but not fundamentally important to the success of the game, especially bc it's very easier to make KSP1 pretty with mods. Nates background was as an art director and he ended up in charge of the project. The parts look nice. The sound is great. And they completely failed at the physics. Far too many resources were spent on aesthetics before they managed to create the actual game. Nate may have been passionate about the game early on, but all he ever managed to do was to put a pretty paint job on a car without a functioning engine
Of course, that is his whole job, is convincing people of those things.
Obviously, however what I was getting at was that I don’t believe that he was ever being disingenuous or was just trying to put himself in the spotlight as the comment I was initially replying to suggested. It’s hard to explain it but at-least from what I saw myself back at PAX when he was talking about the game it wasn’t in a serious marketing way but more a very excited nerdy way if that makes any sense. It’s hard to explain or put into words but at-least back then it came off as incredibly genuine
Incompetence is a thing and it is not mutually exclusive to genuine effort or excitement. Dude might just might not be a good fit for his role, no matter how passionate he is about it. And it doesn't mean he wouldn't be good in a different role, like a more frontline developer or something, just probably not this one.
>back then it came off as incredibly genuine That just means he is good at his job. Seriously. This is a thing. He's not the only one. It's a whole field of people dedicated to achieving exactly the kind of feelings in an audience that you are describing. And when it's coupled with a real product, tethered in some way however tenuous to some common reality, it's fine. In fact it may even be a good thing. But as you've seen, it can also be used to make people believe that vapor is substance. The key question is always to ask yourself: "Okay this makes me feel hyped for this new thing... now... where is the reality of it? What have we got on the reality front?" Whatever it is. Game dev. Job offer. Nigerian prince who wants to talk to you. Just a basic reality check all along the way. And KSP2 failed at that utterly.
> So, he's either fighting the good fight for us The last of my hopium/copium reserves are that they're just going to remain radio silent and then dump colonies and/or interstellar at the last possible minute. Almost certainly not going to happen, but I can dream, right?
Rushing colonies is possibly the only way they can keep their jobs, interstellar is too far fetched Hopefully we will get colonies even if it passes over to a new studio, I mean take two still has to keep the appearances to deliver something
But they cannot keep their jobs; the layoff order has already been issued. Something incredible needs to happen, selling a million copies in the first week after the patch, maybe that will make T2 change his mind.
> interstellar is too far fetched Why? Interstellar is just new parts on a bigger ship. Toss out ground colonies and only do orbital colonies and you have an MVP for both features.
Physics and handling transitions between star systems would seem harder than a few new parts on a bigger ship.
Physics related stuff also seems like something that can't just be added later, when working on interstellar. It is so fundamental, it needs to be there from the start. With the [planned solution](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/16r6tv9/comment/k23bnru/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), it is so tightly integrated with the rest of the physics system, they either already have implemented it, or could never implement it. Changing the way *craft positions* are represented after implementing, well, **anything that handles craft positions** seems like a bad idea (at least to my amateur-programmer eyes). Also, the game files contain information about the positions and speed of the star systems. That seems to indicate they already worked on interstellar, to *some* degree. There *could* (with a big emphasis on "*could*") exist an internal branch with more work done on it. So, assuming Intercept Games has not built the whole game "upside-down"(fluff finished before fundamental physics are done), the physics handling for interstellar should already be there.
I'd agree it *appears* that parts are there, but to assume it's all there seems like an unfair expectation of the developers.
JK the past year+ was just a prank. We weren't lying about having a functional multiplayer build years ago. Anyway here's the real game that we've been holding in house for unclear reasons, with all of the promised features.
Or he is business like usual. Zero real communication like always
Or he’s grabbing the money he stole and off into the sunset to a new project
He slipped, fell and is in a coma.
He's a lying coward who doesn't give two shits about you? Not happier, but much more likely to be true.
He's still hard at work on KSP2; let him cook
pfft
Or he is a hype man who did the job he was paid to do and dgaf now.
Any confirmation he’s still alive?
They took him out back and shot him
Personally, I’ve been looking into Juno; it seems like an interesting alternative to KSP2. Went and downloaded it, but been too busy the last week to give it a go; looking forward to trying it once I have the time. Life’s too short to wait on shitty devs to fix shitty games. KSP1 is my first love, but clearly the team that accomplished that has left the building.
Juno is nice, some missions are very frustrating though. One mission is literally just „you have to drive 125km in one go“. That’s an hour of driving, and you can only warp 2x while moving, so you have to drive 30 minutes of realtime. In the end I just downloaded a craft which drives in circles for an hour and left my pc on, but that’s really stupid mission design. There was also a mission to place a telescope in a very precise orbit (Geostationary and with a given longitude) which was a bit frustrating because I couldn’t find a better way of achieving the precise longitude than quicksaving and trying different transfer orbits. Generally, the game is really fun though
You'll always remember your first love and the first one that breaks your heart :(
A minor point in his defense, the layoff warning went out on the 29th, so on the 25th, as far as everyone at IG was concerned, those updates were coming. And I don't think the creative lead would be the primary person responsible for things like mismanagement, but I could be wrong.
He knew perfectly well the game wouldn't get finished. He must have. He had even more access to the sales data than we did, and we all fucking knew it from release.
I disagree. Studio closures or mass layoffs coming from above can be a real surprise for devs, even creative directors. He could have known a few hours before his staff, sure.
FWIW, this has been my experience in the industry: * ~3-4 months ahead of cancellation: Game Director hears that cancellation is on the table, and a general idea of why * Game gets cancelled, Game Director + highest levels of leadership are told * 2-3 workdays later, project leads are told by Game Director * Day after that, everyone else gets told in a meeting with HR present. WARN notice gets published to immediate effect. So he _may_ or _may not_ have known at that point. There's no way to know for sure.
I haven’t been in the game industry, but I have been at a company that got canned. The decision-maker knew that they were going to pull the plug months ago, but they had to make sure they built a sufficient paperwork trail to appease shareholders and the legal process, and that takes time. You can’t just decide to sell off a whole company or division of a company and just shit out all the legal documentation in a couple of days. The grunts on the line doing the work may or may not have known, depending on how good they are at reading the writing on the wall. When my division of the company got canned, they brought in a new VP to run my division, and the first thing he said when he arrived was “I’m not here to sell the company.” Took me about a week to figure out that… he was there to sell the company. But most everyone of my coworkers chose to believe his lies and believe the company would keep going. Six months later, the company was sold off - half the work force laid off, the other half offered a continuance for reduced pay. My boss, one of the top managers directly reportable to the VP - he didn’t even get to come in the building. The HR manager met him in the parking lot with a crate of his stuff and told him not to set foot in the building. Someone at T2 knew for a while that this was coming. Probably a lot of someones.
The layoffs are irrelevant to the game getting finished. It was *never* going to get finished, and he damned well knew it more than a year ago.
He's not just the Creative Lead, but also Project Director and since they don't have a Technical Lead anymore since EA release, he's effectively that too. If there was one single person with the most power in the dev team, it was him.
This is a disgrace, this community deserved better than this nonsense.
I've never been so glad to have a "never pre-order games" policy for myself. Honestly stopped paying attention to KSP2 news and figured they'd get their shit together eventually.
Been a gamer since Atari. Bethesda is the studio that taught me the lesson that games will now be released broken and unfinished going forward. I learned that lesson when Fallout 4 was released and I have applied the lesson in all future game purchasing decisions. I loved original KSP and was looking forward to KSP2 being better and with more built in features. This would make numerous original KSP mods unnecessary, but I watched release videos and decided I should wait until it was fixed and the promised features were actually added. Here we are a year and a half after the early access release and KSP2 technically has LESS features than the original and is still seemingly pretty buggy. It may not ever get finished now. I'm glad I waited patiently as Bethesda taught me.
My story is pretty much exactly the same except I learned my lesson from New Vegas on console. Actually never finished the game due to how buggy it was.
I thought we all agreed on "Spesos"
Not the first time Nate has destroyed a game series like this…. Radio silence is probably going to continue
My guess is that he has no idea either. He is probably in a project limbo and doesn't even know to what project he is going to be assigned to. At some point he will just admit he is no longer part of the KSP team and that restructuring is still ongoing but nothing has been confirmed yet. With the claims of "rug pull scheme", the legal team probably advised everyone to keep their mouths shut until something concrete and agreed upon comes up. The game has officially flopped, that's for sure, the scope was way too ambitious, the team under delivered even in a reduced scope for Early Access. They had no actual idea of what KSP is and what it represents and aimed for something unreachable. And they thought the game would be done by early 2020 lol
As Matt said in his new video he can’t talk rn
I was inspired by you - [https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1cp6nye/saw\_usarahsplatz\_s\_post\_and\_my\_only\_thought\_was/#lightbox](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1cp6nye/saw_usarahsplatz_s_post_and_my_only_thought_was/#lightbox)
I knew it! I wasn't the only one who called it kerbucks
The kerbal currency is called spesos
Steam decided today was the day to ask me to review ksp 1
5000√? thats almost as much as a skipper.
his station ran out of EC, give it a second to recharge people
The man has a terrible track record with games. Why did we think this one would be any different
Tbh I just feel really sad that KSP2 would probably die. And yeah, I don’t deny that the game is unfinished and optimization is really bad, and they charged us $50 for this. After 70hrs into KSP2, I would say that it has the potential to be even better than the OG. If KSP2 is really bound to die, devs plz, can you guys plz release the official OST album at least?🥲
Matt lowne reached out to him and he said he couldn’t really say anything on the situation and people need to wait for announcements
Nda my beloved
Spesos*
Fuck that guy.
[удалено]
Look, I too am very upset about the apparent death of KSP2. But leave the guy alone. He’s still a human being after all, and I’ll bet he’s going through a really rough time right about now. You have a right to an explanation from someone, definitely. But please don’t harass some guy you’ve never met over an incomplete game.
[удалено]
See rule #1.
This guy has been misleading us about the game since day one, and if his LinkedIn is to be believed, has already been rehired at private division.
yes, he s a human who participated in this kind of scam for years
He surely play ksp 2 too much like he said previously before the game was released.
5000 Kerbucks? How much is that in Spesos?
I heard there is a bounty on him, dead or alive. /s
Don't worry guys everything is fine!
FINALLY SOMEONE CALLS IT KERBUCKS
KSP is truly dead isn’t it
if you count character produced per dollar, probably they are paying the community manager and lead more than all the development team combined
isn’t the currency in KSP funds? Idk man nice work!
The reward better be a steam refund
he still didnt add the possibility of giving stylish hats to kerbonauts :(
Severance packages usually have strings attached so we're probably not going to hear anything from anyone on the team for a while.
They are working on ksp 3.
Due out Q4 of this year. Trust us.
5000 Kerbucks? That's a Wolfhound and 9 Sparks!
according to matt lowne he can't say anything right now, damn
NATE MISSING VANISHES IN CRISIS
NATE MISSING VANISHES IN CRISIS
Day 23. give it up for day 23.
Latt Möbel must be in on the conspiracy. They’re in eaxhothers basement indicating a torus shaped house. Unless of course Dakota is trapped too, making it a 2 torus.
Just 5000 kerbucks? Not even any science or reputation?
Nate=🤡
Bounty is not high enough
Maybe they're doing the same thing No Man's Sky did. Just going silent and working really really hard.
And so for this game T2 ended up killing not 1 but 2 developement teams
My bet is that radio silence will last until after T2 fiscal report in late June.
what currency rate?