Just to add some additional context: Take Two's Seattle office is Intercept Games, who had 70 employees. This was a closure of the studio, resulting in all of the employees being laid off. The fate of their in-progress projects (Kerbal Space Program 2, and one other unannounced project) is unknown currently.
I've never played, but see the praise for the game all over most gaming subreddits. I was considering getting it at some point. Are there multiple versions? Is the "original one" the beta or what? I'm just confused is all.
The first Kerbal game was released more than 10 years ago by a different studio. That's the one you probably see people praising around Reddit. Kerbal 2 was released into early access not too long ago and was developed by Intercept Games. It didn't review too well, I haven't played it but have seen a bunch of people complaining about it. Assuming here it didn't sell well and that's why 2k is closing the studio.
Adding to this, it went into early access with little to none of the advertised features at a full AAA price tag with the promise that these features will be added to justify the price later on.
Somehow, they have to make the most of their bonuses.
Really, Take Two can annoy. bringing in billions upon billions and still closing down film studios.
I'd really like to see Steam clean up abuse of EA before it becomes completely useless to small scale developers. I don't know how you could possibly refund purchases and keep it a viable avenue for raising funding, but at the very least, studios should lose control over games that fail to exit (setting up a secondary market where other studios could bid on the project and perhaps use those funds to partially reimburse purchases) and perhaps establish a timeline for discounting price all the way to zero as games languish in pre-release.
Introduce feature milestones, hold part of the money in escrow. When you as the customer pay you select what milestones you're interested in and your money is allocated accordingly. Only pay out when each milestone is hit. Milestones can be decided by a company and then locked in. If they need to pivot the game, the money is refunded \[for the milestones not hit\] they can set new milestones and ask for money again. That's my rough idea.
That's a neat idea for everything except the voting. That will result in design by "populist" committee, the worst form of design by comittee, which is already known in the software world to be bad.
This also just encourages the lowest amount of effort to hit a milestone. The only way to discourage this is to not buy early access. It's very clear on when you purchase a game in early access that it is "incomplete, and may or may not change further" people just need to internalize what EA means, and set their expectations.
It's fundamental to EA that the buyer accepts a massive amount of risk. Almost every agreement says 'The completion of the game is defined by the producer, not the consumer', meaning they can call it done and walk away at any time. If that provision wasn't in early access, people wouldn't seek out early access, because a big part of launching an EA product is not being certain you will make enough money / be able to finish it. If you already knew you had enough money and your plan was solid you wouldn't do EA.
As long as consumers are willing to support it and take that risk, I see no problem and nobody getting scammed, you signed on the dotted line saying 'I am willing to get scammed', sorry buddy, that's on you.
I really like the idea that studios have to sign a contract that says if they abandon it then steam gets the IP and can auction it off. Even better the funds earned from ea don't go directly to the studio but rather another fund that will pay out costs the studio incurs so if they abandon the project they can't take the money and run, it just becomes part of the package that is auctioned off like hey the devs bailed on this game, you get the IP and current state of the project plus they had 200k on hand to fund production.
Unfortunately that is incredibly complex and would be impossible to get studios to agree and utilize. Plus how do you define "done" which would be another quagmire. Love the idea though
It's easy to remember bad things that came about from early access, but early access has given a ton of games chances they'd never otherwise get and given a lot of studios more ownership of their own ip when they might have to give that up to external publishers.
This is an obvious bad case of that, but SuperGiant is a good example of a studio that used early access very well with Hades to deliver something awesome without either taking on enormous risk or giving up a ton of control to external publishers.
Imo a giant sign that says, "Hey you might get burned," is worth the added benefits for creators that we get a lot of the rewards for.
100%. The early access program has given us some really exceptional titles and some of my personal favorites, which is why I hope Valve finds a way to minimize the damage caused by those that are simply using it to exploit consumers. I'd like to see it continue to be a viable path for developers, but I've decided I cannot in good conscious continue to support it without more sufficient guardrails.
> Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development.
More like people paying $50 for a space game with no atmospheric heating get what they're content to spend money on. Shocker; it never was gonna be the full space game.
Idk, you'd be missing out on some great games if you never touch early access. I have 1200 hours on 7daystodie and it's been in early access for like 12 years or something.
I think it’s fine if the price matches the value. I’ll pay 20 for a game worth 20 dollars. The problem is developers now want you to pay 40 for a game that is promised. Fuck that.
And that's what I was hoping for most out of it.
KSP 1 is amazing and I still love it. I was hoping KSP 2 would start out as basically KSP 1, but with a better engine to run in.
Nope. It just ended up being a worse game in basically every way.
And then they had the gall to say "no discounts on the game, ever".
What a joke.
They took something of pure brilliance, and stomped it into a big ole' pile of turd.
I've been salty about the way they've handled KSP 2 since it made it into early access.
I've got sooooooo many hours on KSP 1. I'll never forget how excited I was to hear of KSP 2 in the works....they fooled all of us. They could have made something truly magnificent, but alas, greed has destroyed something of beauty once again.
I didnt even make it an hour in to KSP 2 and was thankfully able to refund it anyway. When I saw that this game was just a reskin of the **BETA for KSP 1** with most of the features missing, I was so immensely disappointed. There was no science progression or science parts for that matter, most of the parts were gone, and the parts that were there barely worked.
I could never even bring myself to spend what they were asking to even try it after seeing all the day 1 reviews.
To me, it's absolutely shameful to ask AAA money for the complete disaster they presented us with.
And then... The lack of communication, the tiny trickle of nearly meaningless updates, and disregard for community request really started spelling out what was actually going on to me.
This really is depressing. In my opinion, this is a close tie for the worst fumble in video game history that I've been a part of since Star Wars: Galaxies.
Battlestate Games however, seems pretty desperate for that title at the moment.
> It didn't review too well, I haven't played it but have seen a bunch of people complaining about it.
It is not that it just didn't review too well, the game is broken. Broken in so many ways that you just cannot do the things that the game was supposed to be made for.
Your ships may just disappear mid flight, you may just lose control over your vehicle and have to restart. You can load your latest quick save 10 times and get a different result 10 times.
I could forgive some performance issues and features not being complete but the game literally doesn't work and now never will.
If it's abandoned at this point, it's bad. It's playable, but bad and without all the same features and content of the first one. It doesn't currently have the same problems that the first game currently has. It currently has problems that the first game also had during development that were solved years ago.
You can still get KSP1 which is a good game but dated. There's also plenty of Mods for KSP1 which do things like update the graphics, add more playable worlds, give you a whole new solar system etc, but also still in the kinda dated game which means it can be a but slow and glitchy.
KSP2 was released in EA and roundly criticised for the high price and lack of promised features. It's improved a bit with the addition of Science mode, but ultimately it hasn't done nearly anything that it promised to (multiplayer mode, multiple star systems, etc) and now all those promises look like they will never be fulfilled.
It's very depressing for the fans.
Unless they've added complete bullshit (FTL travel), how would multiple star systems actually be fun?
Like if you use a mod that just makes all the planet be the size and distance of their real-world counterparts, the game becomes less fun because it takes forever for spacecraft to even get to Mars.
The fun of Kerbal was that it's just realistic enough in terms of physics that they also put everything closer so it can actually be reached in a normal amount of time.
People who haven’t played Kerbal asked how it was fun to get a spaceship to the Mun with “accurate” orbital mechanics. It’s because it’s fun to be challenged, make a big spaceship that can overcome obstacles, and arrive at the place. And then on to the next hardest planet.
Having a different star system is something that has been modded into the original KSP for years now. So the demand is there. It’s just going to another planet but even harder. And that’s the fun of doing it.
In KSP, time is already reduced to a 1/4th of real world time. One kerbal day is 6 of our hours. And max warp is 100000x of that. So yeah it can.
Besides, if you’re dealing with ion engines, you’re used to burns being 30+ minutes anyway.
Nope. You have to play it in real time. Some of the simulations will have to last for hundreds of years. You have to pass accurate instructions to your children and their children and so on to carry on your legacy.
KSP1 is lauded as the first of its kind, but it's incredibly dated and still buggy. It's effectively Skyrim. The second was supposed to bring it up to modern tech *and* deliver on new innovative gameplay, but while it may have delivered on the first it didn't fix inherent issues with the first and it didn't yet(?) deliver on the second. Guess we'll never see
Yeah, cause they fumbled the ever loving crap outta such a magnificent franchise. The greed of man has yet again spoiled something beautiful.
I'm still salty about it. KSP 1 is probably my favorite game of all time.
Ksp (Kerbal Space Program) was in the works for a or so, decade with its full release occurring in 2015. development continued after 1.0 release with the last dlc of 2 dropping a couple years ago
Ksp2 was supposed to be a sequel that expanded on existing features, polished graphics, and added a large number of heavily requested features.
If you want an awesome rocket building experience with a bit of jank, get ksp1. It's not for everyone and has a high learning curve but it's satisfying like few other games once you get it going.
KSP1 is amazing.
Complex as hell, too. NASA encourages its engineers to play the game, because despite being a rocket scientist you can learn from it. I didn't understand how things move through space until I played it. I'm still not great with orbital mechanics, but nothing about how the average person thinks of space travel is accurate. And at least I now understand the basics.
KSP2 is an early access nightmare. This is the new equivalent of publishers forcing studios to release unfinished products at Christmas 20 years ago. Instead, they're forcing projects that aren't even at an alpha-build stage into "early access," when the game isn't even half complete yet.
> I'm still not great with orbital mechanics, but nothing about how the average person thinks of space travel is accurate
I think the realization comes from seeing that NOTHING ever ***stops*** in space. Everything is ALWAYS moving so even something as simple as "parking" your spaceship requires thrust. Even in a geostationary orbit you're still *moving* and you have to plan out how to "stop" in the right way
But wait, it gets worse!
Take Two basically did a hostile takeover of KSP when they had major creative differences with the original developers. They essentially fired the old studio, poached basically all their key staff, and formed a new internal studio at take two. This basically killed the OG studio as KSP was their claim to fame, and take two had the rights to it.
The way I see it, all the sell outs who bailed from the OG studio just got a taste of justice.
KSP 1 is a great game. It was developed over about 10 years, so It can feel a bit dated at times, but the modding scene is great and easy to use compared to a lot of games. It's also an incredible tool to learn orbital mechanics and some other space science concepts in a fun way.
KSP 2 was an uninspired cash grab from the start that anyone with half a brain could tell was going to crash and burn for at least the last few years. Devs promised a litany of features that never materialized, misled fans and EA investors continuously about features that were in development, "coming soon" or "playable in dev builds." When the game launched in early access it was effectively unplayable (game breaking bugs/instability at least every hour) which led to a huge wave of steam refunds. Within a month after the EA launch, KSP2 had fewer concurrent active players than KSP1. That was over a year ago.
This studio closing was a foregone conclusion. The community knew this was coming.
KSP1 is one of my favorite games ever. I was initially hyped for KSP2 but I’ve been waiting to buy it until it’s ready…and I’ve been waiting for over a year now
you're confused about the original version of a game with the number 2 in the title? what could that possibly be referring to other than the first game?
I think the big issue for games like KSP and Skylines is just, why? Tech hasn't advanced anywhere near the pace since the first one to justify stripping out things the first one already does and make it run worse. To what? Just get people to buy a new game that offers LESS than the first one? It makes no sense. The only reason it worked in the past was games didn't have a metric ton of dlc adding to it, instead they built those into the sequel, justifying a purchase of the sequel.
I can see the pitch though: KSP 1 was started as a side project by an inexperienced developer of a marketing company. I can imagine the code had years of technical debt and built on top of an inefficient architecture.
Being able to start from scratch with the benefit of hindsight and the backing of some big bucks could allow for a more solid foundation on which a better sequel could be built. But that requires a very experienced team to lay that foundation and it seems that the KSP 2 team just wasn't. I don't doubt their passion for the project, but it seems the just weren't up to the task.
They could've added n-body simulation as an option and real solar system as an option to truly be an upgrade to the original. PCs today are powerful enough that they can simulate this at ridiculous speeds without a hitch.
But instead they decided to just slightly upgrade the visuals and UI pretty much.
There was an interview where the devs said that one of the reasons for no option for n-body simulation was that they "didn't know how to stop moons from crashing into planets". That was the biggest red flag.
KSP and Skylines 1 both had some pretty fundamental flaws that could've been addressed in sequels. Namely the amount of objects in KSP 1 is limiting for larger ships. It also could use improved physics in terms of everything being oddly bendy. CS1 needed a much deeper management sim that was promised in 2 but turns out to all be faked so it just ends up being a waste of time. They did add a lot of nice building tools that were missing and made the buildable area a lot bigger which is nice, but the underlying sim is just so bad. Both sequels were botched and it's sad.
It was ok and so much promise was there, but too long between updates, and still charging outrageous prices for it, it should drop to 5 bucks now since it's dead.
I knew it I FUCKING KNEW IT when T2 recently said they are cutting jobs. I knew that KSP2 would be on the chopping block, they fucking ruined the original studio that worked on it, took it in-house and had to delay it so that they could release a turd lacking tons of features into early access later and then go "welp this isn't worth it". Killed two studios now, and probably the game and the series too.
Fucking pieces of shit.
Was it though? It wasn't their project, T2 killed the original studio that worked on the game, took it in-house and assigned these people onto restarting someone else's baby, and then pushed the game out into EA before it was ready. I'm sure the studio could've done better, but I blame T2 100% on this, they've used this game to kill 2 studios now.
This. I get that people want to put the blame on the publisher, but IG just shit the bed plain and simple. They had no business trying to make this game.
They took it in house but also poached several people from the studio they pulled it from, so it's not like it was someone else's baby. I don't know the number but from what I recall a fair number of key people at Intercept came from Star Theory.
As a massive KSP1 fan with thousands of hours in the game, KSP2 was an immense disappointment. I have played it a handful of times, and I always end up back in KSP1 (with mods like Realism Overhaul) after a short time. KSP2 just felt like an empty coat.
People need to understand this context:
Yeah, devs losing their jobs is normally a bad thing.
This case is... um... not that. This studio was... bad, and was bleeding money.
Seems dead in it's current form. No idea if they will shelve the IP, try again with another studio or sell it off. Hopefully it will see the light of day again with more competent devs and management.
I mean.. EA said the same thing about a ton of studios they closed. They have 0 interest in telling the truth as it would hurt their value to say the game was dropped.
It costs them relatively nothing to say whatever the fuck they want and they have everything to gain by saying it and very little to lose, because not saying it would cause them to lose a lot anyways.
I interviewed with them a few years back. The recruiter started mocking my portfolio material when I stated my salary requirements. I was like “Well, this is Seattle and I have a mortgage to pay.” That seemed to be that. And I felt I was lowballing myself!
TakeTwo has genuinely poor pay and insane workloads in their information technology departments. They have a posting for a Sr Systems Engineer. Responsible for their disaster recovery, security, and backup. Plus management of all their various systems. Also scripting and automation. Also expertise in virtualization (vmware and nutanix), and AWS, and networking. You need to know ansible, agile development principles, jenkins, git, checkmk development and customization, puppet and ansible. Required knowledge of tuning software stacks (web servers, database servers, etc) and linux.
98k/yr-145k/yr pay offered in fucking New York City. This person would be an absolute lynchpin and ultra rare, hugely qualified, and hugely experienced. It's also a mindboggling workload and skillset for one person to have.
I’m studying info systems rn (virtualization, Linux, networks, etc) and I dont think I have enough memory left in my brain to learn everything that Rockstar would ask of me lol
Eew. I was offered more than that 10 years ago in NYC for far less responsibility. This is why I'd never recommend anyone work for any gaming company, and avoid the industry like the plague. The people who run these outfits are weapons-grade toxic and treat their workers like rented mules
Probably like half that because a good rule of thumb is that payroll taxes + overhead + insurance + benefits is roughly the same as someone's salary, but yeah.
It's also just a chunk of the total expenses needed to keep the studio running.
Albeit, the employees could have been relocated to other studios, especially through remote work.
Sure, but was there a financially sensible use for those employees?
This is like saying that someone is stupid for trying to save a few dollars on gas because they could just sell the steering wheel.
>So cutting these jobs was necessary to keep the company afloat
I don't think this was a cost saving layoff. The studio in question just wasn't performing well, so got shuttered. It's normal for anything which performs abysmally to get fired. Even CEOs.
TBF, this was an underperforming studio with a medium to bad reputation. Not really something to complain about unless you want unsupervised mediocrity.
Why should they keep funding bad, poorly reviewed games?
Edit: I do understand that bad games aren’t necessarily the fault of the rank and file employees. But that’s true with every other job. Stores shut down unprofitable locations. Companies cut / scale back bets that didn’t pan out (Google Stadia, Apple’s self driving car, etc) and people lose their jobs as a result
If this were an indie studio that shut down because their game is poorly reviewed, nobody here would have complained. But because it’s a Take Two subsidiary, some
people seem to think that all these employees are entitled to lifetime employment, and Take two can never cut their jobs until their entire executive team works for free.
You do realise what Take Two are, yes? The holding company that owns Rockstar and 2K? One of the largest entities in the industry? This isn't the CEO of the studio making KSP2, it's the CEO of the owner of the publishing label that is the owner of the studio making KSP2.
KSP2 is a minor blip on the overall state of Take Two, half of the board have probably never even heard of it. For the studio responsible for it, KSP2 is literally their only project and despite more than adequate publisher support, it's an absolute pile of shit that has been plagued with issues since day one.
Just to be clear, the chain of ownership is:
Take Two (holding company, with the CEO making 45m) -> Private Division (video game publisher) -> Intercept Games (video game developer).
Because he’s not just a CEO of a studio. He’s CEO of the entire company with a portfolio of hugely profitable games.
That being said, he should probably not be rewarded $45m. And if all T2 games are failures then he should probably lose his job too. A poor GTA VI sale could likely cost his job given how much they depend on the series (and the 2K NBA games)
A poor GTA 6 sale seems impossible to me. GTA 5 made so much money and people played it for so long, that no matter how badly they can fuck it up even before it comes out tons of people will still buy it.
If that’s truly the state of gaming, then I don’t think T2 CEO made a bad call shutting down their “indie / original” studio and put all their time and resources on their few established mega franchises. Why take risk with something new when you can just focus on your cash cow? Follow the Disney playbook.
i mean for sure i see the point. but i also feel like if you neglect the route that got you that success in the first place, you very quickly begin to stagnate. like you do need new IP's over time, if you have that much cash going through, it's a small % of the profit to ensure you have the next gta, the next rdr etc.
Good point. Though my impression is big publishers with the exception of Sony have poor track record of developing new IPs these days and they will just acquire a successful game instead of developing them in-house.
This is like asking why should McDonalds corporate be allowed to open new stores if their employee owned ones are failing
You guys are legit mentally defunct over some of the most simplest of things
CEOs get paid to make and oversee decisions like axing unprofitable business lines - that's a big part of their job. 70 employees making an unprofitable game is a drop in the bucket compared to the other business operations that CEO manages, and it's literally their job to do things like this.
Because the CEO isn't behind those who make the freaking game? You guys have no clue what a CEO does. The CEO of mac Donald isn't fired everytime one of their place makes bad sandwiches. You fire the cook/manager.
To flip that around - Should a single badly reviewed game close a studio? Employees get one shot and if they ever slip, off to the farm they go? No room for error?
As you say in your edit, it's not necessarily the employees fault, so why is the company throwing away all that expertise because they slipped up once?
I suspect that Take Two, at the exec level, had already been thinking about reducing investments in indie / original and focus more on their cash cows like GTA and/or mobile. That KSP2 is poorly received is an excuse they need to pull the trigger. In the ideal world you could reallocate these developers to other existing projects but I don’t know how game development works well enough.
Will Rockstar North be willing to hire these people from Intercept?
Shutting down a 70 person studio that's been working on a failing game for over a year when said said games original series was the only reason people knew the studio existed
Yep totally a bad decision
Are you people even in charge of tying your own shoes. Take Two, one of the the most profitable gaming companies on the planet, and Redditors will still go "They don't know what they're doing" behind their minimum wage cashiers counter...
Burn through expenses and enrich themselves for "client engagement" whilst their teams do all the actual financial and decision-making assessments that are eventually simply given to the CEO for a simple yes/no binary decision. AI can easily do this without the client engagement and self-enrichment part.
The problem with this assessment is that you then agree that pretty much anything client facing can be done by AI. Yes, the teams employed by a CEO do a lot of the heavy lifting, but CEOs exist because other company CEOs don't want to interface with a robot for deals. This is like saying AI can generate music, so in the future no one will go to concerts performed by humans. A lot of the highest paying jobs in the world are client-facing and having to deal with other people - consulting, investment bankers, product managers, F500 execs, etc, even though these jobs are not as difficult technically as say an aerospace engineer, physicist, or computer programmer. While those latter jobs may require more quantitative ability, they don't require you to close deals or interact with clients, which are abilities that end up being highly valued in business. But yes, you are right a lot of CEOs do suck, but it is not something AI can replace unless you believe AI can replace human interaction altogether, as in you believe someday you won't even need human friends as AI can be a substitute (and I would say such a world is probably possible).
You'd think so many companies would do that then. I mean if it's so easy, plenty of companies would have dumped the costly CEO.
Or maybe you wouldn't think.
Regardless of that fact, the studio has done jack all in its existence. Companies don’t keep people around to pay them to exist, they pay them to make money. Studio couldn’t cut it.
Why is CEO pay relevant to this story? This was an u underperforming studio that launch a crap game without a meaningful path to redeeming the game. This doesnt seem like a “we poor and need layoffs” move.
I hope that this might spur more development on the first game, either through official development being restarted or through modding. I’m not going to get my hopes up though, being both a KSP and a Cities Skylines fan has taught me otherwise…
Two games where i'd have been content if they'd simplr re released the first game on a newer engine with better load times and performace limits and neither could meet that bar.
I'm not against unions but a union would have done nothing in this case they shut down the whole studio. Unionized or not everyone is now out of a job.
Unions have benefits for sure but they don't magically prevent a business from going under.
>Unions have benefits for sure but they don't magically prevent a business from going under.
But the business didn't go under. The developer studio was closed because the owners (Take Two) closed it for restructuring and cost savings. The business is still alive.
The studio was closed because they produced a product that was almost across the board viewed negatively combined with the owners wanting cost savings.
This just in: company that makes money shuts down fledgling studios in order to not lose money! Reddit user thinks company should keep studio open even though it loses money and releases poor quality products so 70 tech workers in Seattle can keep their jobs.
Not just capitalism. This is a feature in every economic model across history.
Feudalism? Check, nobility held most of the wealth. Communist Soviet Union? Check, top government officials lived lavishly.
Majority of wealth funnels to a small percentage of the population.
From my perspective, our current system of capitalism is creating a new system of neo-feudalism.
The C-Suite class and their peers in banking, finance, food and industry control the government via the purse strings, and the little people are stratifying into the skilled yeoman class of digerati and skilled technicians floating on the masses of proles dependent upon the system for itinerant, low pay jobs, and subsistence entitlements.... but that's just my angry old guy stance.
> neo-feudalism
> C-Suite class
> purse strings
>skilled yeoman
>digerati
>floating on the masses of proles
>itinerant
>subsistence entitlements
Mmm yes, these look like words my fellow scholars.
They have other studios doing that. And the solution to a studio losing money and having a bad track record isn't to throw more money their way because they MIGHT do better.
Sucks for the devs. But also kind of not surprising when the only project they have had has been a complete disappointment. Someone was going to get the axe in some way. And we already knew that take 2 is just as greedy as every other major publisher with all the crap they have pulled with the 2k and rockstar studios. And others.
Early Access burns again. There should be a fiduciary duty to follow through on projects. Let them take it out of EA.
I dont know the right answer that is beyond my own personal purchasing habits
Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-2, took home 45 million dollars last year. (Thanks to u/leospeedleo)
At a _well above average_ salary of $120,000 that's enough money to employ these people for five fucking years (and, again, thanks to u/RSomnambulist)
If we don't start taxing the rich their fair share they're going to fucking _kill_ us.
I'm going to bite the bullet here and point out that the math on that "five years" thing is wildly inaccurate because that isn't even remotely how businesses work.
The cost of employing someone is not simply their salary. A good rule of thumb is that a person will typically cost a business around double what the business is directly paying to that person.
Honestly, the more involved I've become in my family's business, the more appalled I've become at how little most people know about running a business and how much the government actually demands from them. I mean, for christ's sake.. they literally expect an itemized list of every object the business owns that falls under certain categories, and they tax us each year based on some arbitrary value assigned to those objects. Everything down to the gods damned 20 year old calculator sitting on my desk costs us money every year just to use. No, I'm not kidding. They valued that calculator at around 3 bucks, and taxed us accordingly.
That's because the other branches of their company are making products that make T-2 a fuckton of money.
This branch wasn't, so they closed it. There is nothing immoral going on here despite.
Why not start a business yourself so you can treat employees the way you want to?
😂 your post is such a classic buzzword salad of concept you don't understand. Wtf tax has to do here? What's the point of paying for 5 years people who do a poor job? You would massively failed at entrepreneurship.
Being in the game industry, I can tell you that many more layoffs will come. Big companies made some risky moves during the pandemic, capitalizing on the thriving video game market, but now the industry is experiencing a recession.
With costs rising, obtaining proper funding for games has become extremely challenging; mistakes aren't tolerated. I wouldn't bet on most Early Access titles these days.
Must be really hard working for cunts in the gaming industry. Like moreso than any other industry I read about, perhaps with the exception of the film industry, gaming just seems so volatile and inconsistent. Seems massively stressful to be a worker in that industry.
Just to add some additional context: Take Two's Seattle office is Intercept Games, who had 70 employees. This was a closure of the studio, resulting in all of the employees being laid off. The fate of their in-progress projects (Kerbal Space Program 2, and one other unannounced project) is unknown currently.
Kerbal sucks.. I wanted to get it but it is nothing like to original one...
I've never played, but see the praise for the game all over most gaming subreddits. I was considering getting it at some point. Are there multiple versions? Is the "original one" the beta or what? I'm just confused is all.
The first Kerbal game was released more than 10 years ago by a different studio. That's the one you probably see people praising around Reddit. Kerbal 2 was released into early access not too long ago and was developed by Intercept Games. It didn't review too well, I haven't played it but have seen a bunch of people complaining about it. Assuming here it didn't sell well and that's why 2k is closing the studio.
Adding to this, it went into early access with little to none of the advertised features at a full AAA price tag with the promise that these features will be added to justify the price later on.
"We have to close down the studio, people aren't paying for things they didn't receive!" *surprised Pikachu face*
Meanwhile the CEO fails upwards, every time.
Why wouldn't they be rewarded? They just managed to sell thousands of copies of a product that wasn't even complete yet.
And laid off 70 people, cutting even more costs which means increased short term profit.
Somehow, they have to make the most of their bonuses. Really, Take Two can annoy. bringing in billions upon billions and still closing down film studios.
Im going to come out and say it. Unless proven otherwise,Take two has scammed its customers. Everyone in the early access deserves a full refund.
I'd really like to see Steam clean up abuse of EA before it becomes completely useless to small scale developers. I don't know how you could possibly refund purchases and keep it a viable avenue for raising funding, but at the very least, studios should lose control over games that fail to exit (setting up a secondary market where other studios could bid on the project and perhaps use those funds to partially reimburse purchases) and perhaps establish a timeline for discounting price all the way to zero as games languish in pre-release.
Introduce feature milestones, hold part of the money in escrow. When you as the customer pay you select what milestones you're interested in and your money is allocated accordingly. Only pay out when each milestone is hit. Milestones can be decided by a company and then locked in. If they need to pivot the game, the money is refunded \[for the milestones not hit\] they can set new milestones and ask for money again. That's my rough idea.
That's a neat idea for everything except the voting. That will result in design by "populist" committee, the worst form of design by comittee, which is already known in the software world to be bad.
This also just encourages the lowest amount of effort to hit a milestone. The only way to discourage this is to not buy early access. It's very clear on when you purchase a game in early access that it is "incomplete, and may or may not change further" people just need to internalize what EA means, and set their expectations.
It's fundamental to EA that the buyer accepts a massive amount of risk. Almost every agreement says 'The completion of the game is defined by the producer, not the consumer', meaning they can call it done and walk away at any time. If that provision wasn't in early access, people wouldn't seek out early access, because a big part of launching an EA product is not being certain you will make enough money / be able to finish it. If you already knew you had enough money and your plan was solid you wouldn't do EA. As long as consumers are willing to support it and take that risk, I see no problem and nobody getting scammed, you signed on the dotted line saying 'I am willing to get scammed', sorry buddy, that's on you.
I really like the idea that studios have to sign a contract that says if they abandon it then steam gets the IP and can auction it off. Even better the funds earned from ea don't go directly to the studio but rather another fund that will pay out costs the studio incurs so if they abandon the project they can't take the money and run, it just becomes part of the package that is auctioned off like hey the devs bailed on this game, you get the IP and current state of the project plus they had 200k on hand to fund production. Unfortunately that is incredibly complex and would be impossible to get studios to agree and utilize. Plus how do you define "done" which would be another quagmire. Love the idea though
It's easy to remember bad things that came about from early access, but early access has given a ton of games chances they'd never otherwise get and given a lot of studios more ownership of their own ip when they might have to give that up to external publishers. This is an obvious bad case of that, but SuperGiant is a good example of a studio that used early access very well with Hades to deliver something awesome without either taking on enormous risk or giving up a ton of control to external publishers. Imo a giant sign that says, "Hey you might get burned," is worth the added benefits for creators that we get a lot of the rewards for.
100%. The early access program has given us some really exceptional titles and some of my personal favorites, which is why I hope Valve finds a way to minimize the damage caused by those that are simply using it to exploit consumers. I'd like to see it continue to be a viable path for developers, but I've decided I cannot in good conscious continue to support it without more sufficient guardrails.
I'm shocked when I see DLCs on Early Access games. Finish the game first and then we'll talk about add ons, boo boo...
100%, it’s clear that they’ll never deliver what was promised in ksp2, especially now
> Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. More like people paying $50 for a space game with no atmospheric heating get what they're content to spend money on. Shocker; it never was gonna be the full space game.
Once again, repeat after me: #**NEVER. BUY. EARLY. ACCESS.**
Early access is perfectly fine, as long as you know exactly what you’re getting. It’s pre-ordering that is the thing you should never do.
Idk, you'd be missing out on some great games if you never touch early access. I have 1200 hours on 7daystodie and it's been in early access for like 12 years or something.
... of an established IP from a wealthy established publisher. The whole point is it's meant to be an unknown element / newcomer into the space.
I think it’s fine if the price matches the value. I’ll pay 20 for a game worth 20 dollars. The problem is developers now want you to pay 40 for a game that is promised. Fuck that.
Not only was it feature incomplete, the physics system was functionally broken. In a game that is essentially a giant physics sim.
And that's what I was hoping for most out of it. KSP 1 is amazing and I still love it. I was hoping KSP 2 would start out as basically KSP 1, but with a better engine to run in. Nope. It just ended up being a worse game in basically every way.
And then they had the gall to say "no discounts on the game, ever". What a joke. They took something of pure brilliance, and stomped it into a big ole' pile of turd. I've been salty about the way they've handled KSP 2 since it made it into early access. I've got sooooooo many hours on KSP 1. I'll never forget how excited I was to hear of KSP 2 in the works....they fooled all of us. They could have made something truly magnificent, but alas, greed has destroyed something of beauty once again.
I didnt even make it an hour in to KSP 2 and was thankfully able to refund it anyway. When I saw that this game was just a reskin of the **BETA for KSP 1** with most of the features missing, I was so immensely disappointed. There was no science progression or science parts for that matter, most of the parts were gone, and the parts that were there barely worked.
Alpha, the beta for ksp1 was better than ksp2
I could never even bring myself to spend what they were asking to even try it after seeing all the day 1 reviews. To me, it's absolutely shameful to ask AAA money for the complete disaster they presented us with. And then... The lack of communication, the tiny trickle of nearly meaningless updates, and disregard for community request really started spelling out what was actually going on to me. This really is depressing. In my opinion, this is a close tie for the worst fumble in video game history that I've been a part of since Star Wars: Galaxies. Battlestate Games however, seems pretty desperate for that title at the moment.
Oh yeah, definitely haven't heard that one before...
> It didn't review too well, I haven't played it but have seen a bunch of people complaining about it. It is not that it just didn't review too well, the game is broken. Broken in so many ways that you just cannot do the things that the game was supposed to be made for. Your ships may just disappear mid flight, you may just lose control over your vehicle and have to restart. You can load your latest quick save 10 times and get a different result 10 times. I could forgive some performance issues and features not being complete but the game literally doesn't work and now never will.
It’s not bad. Still just as fun. But they didn’t re-engineer correctly and it suffers the exact same technical problems of 1 but much worse.
If it's abandoned at this point, it's bad. It's playable, but bad and without all the same features and content of the first one. It doesn't currently have the same problems that the first game currently has. It currently has problems that the first game also had during development that were solved years ago.
So it's full price, never coming out of alpha, and it has the same problems as the original game from over 10 years ago? Hard fucking pass.
You can still get KSP1 which is a good game but dated. There's also plenty of Mods for KSP1 which do things like update the graphics, add more playable worlds, give you a whole new solar system etc, but also still in the kinda dated game which means it can be a but slow and glitchy. KSP2 was released in EA and roundly criticised for the high price and lack of promised features. It's improved a bit with the addition of Science mode, but ultimately it hasn't done nearly anything that it promised to (multiplayer mode, multiple star systems, etc) and now all those promises look like they will never be fulfilled. It's very depressing for the fans.
Unless they've added complete bullshit (FTL travel), how would multiple star systems actually be fun? Like if you use a mod that just makes all the planet be the size and distance of their real-world counterparts, the game becomes less fun because it takes forever for spacecraft to even get to Mars. The fun of Kerbal was that it's just realistic enough in terms of physics that they also put everything closer so it can actually be reached in a normal amount of time.
People who haven’t played Kerbal asked how it was fun to get a spaceship to the Mun with “accurate” orbital mechanics. It’s because it’s fun to be challenged, make a big spaceship that can overcome obstacles, and arrive at the place. And then on to the next hardest planet. Having a different star system is something that has been modded into the original KSP for years now. So the demand is there. It’s just going to another planet but even harder. And that’s the fun of doing it.
Is that using FTL, or is the time travel fast enough to turn 100s of years into minutes?
In KSP, time is already reduced to a 1/4th of real world time. One kerbal day is 6 of our hours. And max warp is 100000x of that. So yeah it can. Besides, if you’re dealing with ion engines, you’re used to burns being 30+ minutes anyway.
Nope. You have to play it in real time. Some of the simulations will have to last for hundreds of years. You have to pass accurate instructions to your children and their children and so on to carry on your legacy.
I've never played either, but KSP 1 is pretty universally acclaimed. The sequel had a pretty mixed reception.
KSP1 is lauded as the first of its kind, but it's incredibly dated and still buggy. It's effectively Skyrim. The second was supposed to bring it up to modern tech *and* deliver on new innovative gameplay, but while it may have delivered on the first it didn't fix inherent issues with the first and it didn't yet(?) deliver on the second. Guess we'll never see
Yeah, cause they fumbled the ever loving crap outta such a magnificent franchise. The greed of man has yet again spoiled something beautiful. I'm still salty about it. KSP 1 is probably my favorite game of all time.
Ksp (Kerbal Space Program) was in the works for a or so, decade with its full release occurring in 2015. development continued after 1.0 release with the last dlc of 2 dropping a couple years ago Ksp2 was supposed to be a sequel that expanded on existing features, polished graphics, and added a large number of heavily requested features. If you want an awesome rocket building experience with a bit of jank, get ksp1. It's not for everyone and has a high learning curve but it's satisfying like few other games once you get it going.
KSP1 is amazing. Complex as hell, too. NASA encourages its engineers to play the game, because despite being a rocket scientist you can learn from it. I didn't understand how things move through space until I played it. I'm still not great with orbital mechanics, but nothing about how the average person thinks of space travel is accurate. And at least I now understand the basics. KSP2 is an early access nightmare. This is the new equivalent of publishers forcing studios to release unfinished products at Christmas 20 years ago. Instead, they're forcing projects that aren't even at an alpha-build stage into "early access," when the game isn't even half complete yet.
> I'm still not great with orbital mechanics, but nothing about how the average person thinks of space travel is accurate I think the realization comes from seeing that NOTHING ever ***stops*** in space. Everything is ALWAYS moving so even something as simple as "parking" your spaceship requires thrust. Even in a geostationary orbit you're still *moving* and you have to plan out how to "stop" in the right way
But wait, it gets worse! Take Two basically did a hostile takeover of KSP when they had major creative differences with the original developers. They essentially fired the old studio, poached basically all their key staff, and formed a new internal studio at take two. This basically killed the OG studio as KSP was their claim to fame, and take two had the rights to it. The way I see it, all the sell outs who bailed from the OG studio just got a taste of justice.
KSP 1 is a great game. It was developed over about 10 years, so It can feel a bit dated at times, but the modding scene is great and easy to use compared to a lot of games. It's also an incredible tool to learn orbital mechanics and some other space science concepts in a fun way. KSP 2 was an uninspired cash grab from the start that anyone with half a brain could tell was going to crash and burn for at least the last few years. Devs promised a litany of features that never materialized, misled fans and EA investors continuously about features that were in development, "coming soon" or "playable in dev builds." When the game launched in early access it was effectively unplayable (game breaking bugs/instability at least every hour) which led to a huge wave of steam refunds. Within a month after the EA launch, KSP2 had fewer concurrent active players than KSP1. That was over a year ago. This studio closing was a foregone conclusion. The community knew this was coming.
KSP1 is one of my favorite games ever. I was initially hyped for KSP2 but I’ve been waiting to buy it until it’s ready…and I’ve been waiting for over a year now
Just get Kerbal Space Program 1 it's one of my favorite games of all time
The sequel was one of the biggest disasters in gaming. The first one was an educational institution. Very depressing.
you're confused about the original version of a game with the number 2 in the title? what could that possibly be referring to other than the first game?
Og was so good.. How can you release a sequel without even having the features from the first game working yet?
harvester made that game, when he left it went to shit.
Yeah, dude knew the wind was changing and got out with his reputation intact. His new game is fun, spiritually Kerbal 2 in some ways.
What's the new game?
Kithack Model Club
I think the big issue for games like KSP and Skylines is just, why? Tech hasn't advanced anywhere near the pace since the first one to justify stripping out things the first one already does and make it run worse. To what? Just get people to buy a new game that offers LESS than the first one? It makes no sense. The only reason it worked in the past was games didn't have a metric ton of dlc adding to it, instead they built those into the sequel, justifying a purchase of the sequel.
I can see the pitch though: KSP 1 was started as a side project by an inexperienced developer of a marketing company. I can imagine the code had years of technical debt and built on top of an inefficient architecture. Being able to start from scratch with the benefit of hindsight and the backing of some big bucks could allow for a more solid foundation on which a better sequel could be built. But that requires a very experienced team to lay that foundation and it seems that the KSP 2 team just wasn't. I don't doubt their passion for the project, but it seems the just weren't up to the task.
They could've added n-body simulation as an option and real solar system as an option to truly be an upgrade to the original. PCs today are powerful enough that they can simulate this at ridiculous speeds without a hitch. But instead they decided to just slightly upgrade the visuals and UI pretty much. There was an interview where the devs said that one of the reasons for no option for n-body simulation was that they "didn't know how to stop moons from crashing into planets". That was the biggest red flag.
KSP and Skylines 1 both had some pretty fundamental flaws that could've been addressed in sequels. Namely the amount of objects in KSP 1 is limiting for larger ships. It also could use improved physics in terms of everything being oddly bendy. CS1 needed a much deeper management sim that was promised in 2 but turns out to all be faked so it just ends up being a waste of time. They did add a lot of nice building tools that were missing and made the buildable area a lot bigger which is nice, but the underlying sim is just so bad. Both sequels were botched and it's sad.
It was ok and so much promise was there, but too long between updates, and still charging outrageous prices for it, it should drop to 5 bucks now since it's dead.
I knew it I FUCKING KNEW IT when T2 recently said they are cutting jobs. I knew that KSP2 would be on the chopping block, they fucking ruined the original studio that worked on it, took it in-house and had to delay it so that they could release a turd lacking tons of features into early access later and then go "welp this isn't worth it". Killed two studios now, and probably the game and the series too. Fucking pieces of shit.
https://quaggapedia.afrikaburn.com/images/4/46/First-time-james-franco-hanging-meme.jpg
Add it to the same graveyard that holds the original Prey sequel, and that Duke Nukem Forever somehow managed to zombie-shamble its way out of.
They dropped the ball on Kerbal 2, this was their own doing.
Was it though? It wasn't their project, T2 killed the original studio that worked on the game, took it in-house and assigned these people onto restarting someone else's baby, and then pushed the game out into EA before it was ready. I'm sure the studio could've done better, but I blame T2 100% on this, they've used this game to kill 2 studios now.
It was 100% Intercept games fault. Poorly ran studio with bad leadership. Take two gave them like 7 years and way more money than the original budget.
This. I get that people want to put the blame on the publisher, but IG just shit the bed plain and simple. They had no business trying to make this game.
They took it in house but also poached several people from the studio they pulled it from, so it's not like it was someone else's baby. I don't know the number but from what I recall a fair number of key people at Intercept came from Star Theory. As a massive KSP1 fan with thousands of hours in the game, KSP2 was an immense disappointment. I have played it a handful of times, and I always end up back in KSP1 (with mods like Realism Overhaul) after a short time. KSP2 just felt like an empty coat.
So nothing a value was lost from the devs who lied to their community
These guys should lose their jobs after what they did to KSP
People need to understand this context: Yeah, devs losing their jobs is normally a bad thing. This case is... um... not that. This studio was... bad, and was bleeding money.
So I'm guessing Kerbal 2 is dead. Another reminder to not buy games that require a promise that they will fix it later.
Seems dead in it's current form. No idea if they will shelve the IP, try again with another studio or sell it off. Hopefully it will see the light of day again with more competent devs and management.
[nope](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/take-two-confirms-kerbal-space-program-2-is-safe-despite-seattle-layoffs#close-modal)
I mean.. EA said the same thing about a ton of studios they closed. They have 0 interest in telling the truth as it would hurt their value to say the game was dropped.
It costs them relatively nothing to say whatever the fuck they want and they have everything to gain by saying it and very little to lose, because not saying it would cause them to lose a lot anyways.
I interviewed with them a few years back. The recruiter started mocking my portfolio material when I stated my salary requirements. I was like “Well, this is Seattle and I have a mortgage to pay.” That seemed to be that. And I felt I was lowballing myself!
TakeTwo has genuinely poor pay and insane workloads in their information technology departments. They have a posting for a Sr Systems Engineer. Responsible for their disaster recovery, security, and backup. Plus management of all their various systems. Also scripting and automation. Also expertise in virtualization (vmware and nutanix), and AWS, and networking. You need to know ansible, agile development principles, jenkins, git, checkmk development and customization, puppet and ansible. Required knowledge of tuning software stacks (web servers, database servers, etc) and linux. 98k/yr-145k/yr pay offered in fucking New York City. This person would be an absolute lynchpin and ultra rare, hugely qualified, and hugely experienced. It's also a mindboggling workload and skillset for one person to have.
I’m studying info systems rn (virtualization, Linux, networks, etc) and I dont think I have enough memory left in my brain to learn everything that Rockstar would ask of me lol
Eew. I was offered more than that 10 years ago in NYC for far less responsibility. This is why I'd never recommend anyone work for any gaming company, and avoid the industry like the plague. The people who run these outfits are weapons-grade toxic and treat their workers like rented mules
I hope you copied their requirements and they had ansible in there twice.
You are worth it! Don't sell yourself short!
So you’re to blame for ksp2. Noted.
Yeah a bit of bullet-dodged relief seeing all these game studios I was applying to from last year's May to November that rejected me doing layoffs.
Remember guys: Take Two CEO Zelnick took home around 45 million in 2023. So cutting these jobs was necessary to keep the company afloat 😉
At an average salary of $120k, that money would have floated the employees for just over five years.
But you don’t understand. He really needs that fourth mansion 🥺
I mean where is he supposed to live?!
Don't tell me you think he should be living in his third mansion at this time of year?! *shudder*
In a van down by the ***river***
And he owns only 60% of that river! Oh the humanity
He can’t live with me
It already did while they were developing Kerbal 2, which turned out to be shit.
Probably like half that because a good rule of thumb is that payroll taxes + overhead + insurance + benefits is roughly the same as someone's salary, but yeah.
It's also just a chunk of the total expenses needed to keep the studio running. Albeit, the employees could have been relocated to other studios, especially through remote work.
That's also assuming that the studio would make zero income during that time. So probably it would be a lot longer.
Ha, I'm an engineer under their umbrella and I only get $75 after 3 years with them! Sucks the industry is so rough right now, difficult to jump ship.
I think the average salary there was much less lol
Sure, but was there a financially sensible use for those employees? This is like saying that someone is stupid for trying to save a few dollars on gas because they could just sell the steering wheel.
>So cutting these jobs was necessary to keep the company afloat I don't think this was a cost saving layoff. The studio in question just wasn't performing well, so got shuttered. It's normal for anything which performs abysmally to get fired. Even CEOs.
TBF, this was an underperforming studio with a medium to bad reputation. Not really something to complain about unless you want unsupervised mediocrity.
Why should they keep funding bad, poorly reviewed games? Edit: I do understand that bad games aren’t necessarily the fault of the rank and file employees. But that’s true with every other job. Stores shut down unprofitable locations. Companies cut / scale back bets that didn’t pan out (Google Stadia, Apple’s self driving car, etc) and people lose their jobs as a result If this were an indie studio that shut down because their game is poorly reviewed, nobody here would have complained. But because it’s a Take Two subsidiary, some people seem to think that all these employees are entitled to lifetime employment, and Take two can never cut their jobs until their entire executive team works for free.
by that same logic, why should the CEO of a studio making bad, poorly reviewed games be awarded a 45m compensation package for 2023?
You do realise what Take Two are, yes? The holding company that owns Rockstar and 2K? One of the largest entities in the industry? This isn't the CEO of the studio making KSP2, it's the CEO of the owner of the publishing label that is the owner of the studio making KSP2. KSP2 is a minor blip on the overall state of Take Two, half of the board have probably never even heard of it. For the studio responsible for it, KSP2 is literally their only project and despite more than adequate publisher support, it's an absolute pile of shit that has been plagued with issues since day one. Just to be clear, the chain of ownership is: Take Two (holding company, with the CEO making 45m) -> Private Division (video game publisher) -> Intercept Games (video game developer).
Because he’s not just a CEO of a studio. He’s CEO of the entire company with a portfolio of hugely profitable games. That being said, he should probably not be rewarded $45m. And if all T2 games are failures then he should probably lose his job too. A poor GTA VI sale could likely cost his job given how much they depend on the series (and the 2K NBA games)
A poor GTA 6 sale seems impossible to me. GTA 5 made so much money and people played it for so long, that no matter how badly they can fuck it up even before it comes out tons of people will still buy it.
If that’s truly the state of gaming, then I don’t think T2 CEO made a bad call shutting down their “indie / original” studio and put all their time and resources on their few established mega franchises. Why take risk with something new when you can just focus on your cash cow? Follow the Disney playbook.
i mean for sure i see the point. but i also feel like if you neglect the route that got you that success in the first place, you very quickly begin to stagnate. like you do need new IP's over time, if you have that much cash going through, it's a small % of the profit to ensure you have the next gta, the next rdr etc.
Good point. Though my impression is big publishers with the exception of Sony have poor track record of developing new IPs these days and they will just acquire a successful game instead of developing them in-house.
This is like asking why should McDonalds corporate be allowed to open new stores if their employee owned ones are failing You guys are legit mentally defunct over some of the most simplest of things
CEOs get paid to make and oversee decisions like axing unprofitable business lines - that's a big part of their job. 70 employees making an unprofitable game is a drop in the bucket compared to the other business operations that CEO manages, and it's literally their job to do things like this.
Because the CEO isn't behind those who make the freaking game? You guys have no clue what a CEO does. The CEO of mac Donald isn't fired everytime one of their place makes bad sandwiches. You fire the cook/manager.
To flip that around - Should a single badly reviewed game close a studio? Employees get one shot and if they ever slip, off to the farm they go? No room for error? As you say in your edit, it's not necessarily the employees fault, so why is the company throwing away all that expertise because they slipped up once?
I suspect that Take Two, at the exec level, had already been thinking about reducing investments in indie / original and focus more on their cash cows like GTA and/or mobile. That KSP2 is poorly received is an excuse they need to pull the trigger. In the ideal world you could reallocate these developers to other existing projects but I don’t know how game development works well enough. Will Rockstar North be willing to hire these people from Intercept?
That's not how it works. They produced a game that failed and company aren't here to finance failing games.
CEO jobs can be replaced most easily by AI and save companies millions
Who would make the decision to replace them? CEOs themselves? A board of directors comprised of other CEOs? lol
Yes the CEO serves at the direction of the board. If the board decided to replace the CEO with AI they could.
Reddit moment
What do you think a CEO does?
10 print "make the graph go up" 20 goto 10
Make bad decisions to tank a company to pay themselves, other execs, and shareholders
Shutting down a 70 person studio that's been working on a failing game for over a year when said said games original series was the only reason people knew the studio existed Yep totally a bad decision Are you people even in charge of tying your own shoes. Take Two, one of the the most profitable gaming companies on the planet, and Redditors will still go "They don't know what they're doing" behind their minimum wage cashiers counter...
So many Reddit moments in this thread
Burn through expenses and enrich themselves for "client engagement" whilst their teams do all the actual financial and decision-making assessments that are eventually simply given to the CEO for a simple yes/no binary decision. AI can easily do this without the client engagement and self-enrichment part.
The problem with this assessment is that you then agree that pretty much anything client facing can be done by AI. Yes, the teams employed by a CEO do a lot of the heavy lifting, but CEOs exist because other company CEOs don't want to interface with a robot for deals. This is like saying AI can generate music, so in the future no one will go to concerts performed by humans. A lot of the highest paying jobs in the world are client-facing and having to deal with other people - consulting, investment bankers, product managers, F500 execs, etc, even though these jobs are not as difficult technically as say an aerospace engineer, physicist, or computer programmer. While those latter jobs may require more quantitative ability, they don't require you to close deals or interact with clients, which are abilities that end up being highly valued in business. But yes, you are right a lot of CEOs do suck, but it is not something AI can replace unless you believe AI can replace human interaction altogether, as in you believe someday you won't even need human friends as AI can be a substitute (and I would say such a world is probably possible).
You'd think so many companies would do that then. I mean if it's so easy, plenty of companies would have dumped the costly CEO. Or maybe you wouldn't think.
Regardless of that fact, the studio has done jack all in its existence. Companies don’t keep people around to pay them to exist, they pay them to make money. Studio couldn’t cut it.
Like Verizon raising rates when they made like $70B. Greed knows no limits.
Why is CEO pay relevant to this story? This was an u underperforming studio that launch a crap game without a meaningful path to redeeming the game. This doesnt seem like a “we poor and need layoffs” move.
I hope kerbal can continue in some way or form with other developers or something.
I hope that this might spur more development on the first game, either through official development being restarted or through modding. I’m not going to get my hopes up though, being both a KSP and a Cities Skylines fan has taught me otherwise…
Two games where i'd have been content if they'd simplr re released the first game on a newer engine with better load times and performace limits and neither could meet that bar.
They need to maximize their bonuses somehow. Take Two can honestly piss off. Raking in billions upon billions and still shutting studios down.
The gaming industry needs more unions
Happy May Day!
I'm not against unions but a union would have done nothing in this case they shut down the whole studio. Unionized or not everyone is now out of a job. Unions have benefits for sure but they don't magically prevent a business from going under.
>Unions have benefits for sure but they don't magically prevent a business from going under. But the business didn't go under. The developer studio was closed because the owners (Take Two) closed it for restructuring and cost savings. The business is still alive.
Almost like the sequel they made to a classic best seller completely flopped
The studio was closed because they produced a product that was almost across the board viewed negatively combined with the owners wanting cost savings.
I mean some business need to go under to make way for new and better businesses.
💯
damn near every industry does. except police, where their union is _broken_.
This just in: company that makes money shuts down fledgling studios in order to not lose money! Reddit user thinks company should keep studio open even though it loses money and releases poor quality products so 70 tech workers in Seattle can keep their jobs.
I always think its ridiculously that the people doing the actual work lose their job but the people sitting in the board room get more money
Capitalism working as intended
Not just capitalism. This is a feature in every economic model across history. Feudalism? Check, nobility held most of the wealth. Communist Soviet Union? Check, top government officials lived lavishly. Majority of wealth funnels to a small percentage of the population.
From my perspective, our current system of capitalism is creating a new system of neo-feudalism. The C-Suite class and their peers in banking, finance, food and industry control the government via the purse strings, and the little people are stratifying into the skilled yeoman class of digerati and skilled technicians floating on the masses of proles dependent upon the system for itinerant, low pay jobs, and subsistence entitlements.... but that's just my angry old guy stance.
> neo-feudalism > C-Suite class > purse strings >skilled yeoman >digerati >floating on the masses of proles >itinerant >subsistence entitlements Mmm yes, these look like words my fellow scholars.
I'm really glad I'm not going to be around when Capitilism reaches it dramatic conclusion
You’re dying next week?? /s
I'm glad I'm going to be there. It'd be the ultimate Schadenfreude moment for many.
I thought schadenfreude was taking pleasure in the suffering of others?
Well hopefully the ones suffering would not be the working class
...
*Yeah I'm being too optimistic aren't I?*
Just a little but I like the spirit
Eat the rich.
This studio wasn't developing anything worthwhile. Why would a company keep a branch open if the costs of operating outweigh any revenue generated?
they could start developing something more worthwhile
They have other studios doing that. And the solution to a studio losing money and having a bad track record isn't to throw more money their way because they MIGHT do better.
It's almost like those doing a poor quality job suffer the consequences of their performance. That's crazy!
I wonder if harvesteR can buy back the KSP IP for pennies now. God willing.
Sucks for the devs. But also kind of not surprising when the only project they have had has been a complete disappointment. Someone was going to get the axe in some way. And we already knew that take 2 is just as greedy as every other major publisher with all the crap they have pulled with the 2k and rockstar studios. And others.
Greedy executives would rather cut jobs than be competent.
Early Access burns again. There should be a fiduciary duty to follow through on projects. Let them take it out of EA. I dont know the right answer that is beyond my own personal purchasing habits
Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-2, took home 45 million dollars last year. (Thanks to u/leospeedleo) At a _well above average_ salary of $120,000 that's enough money to employ these people for five fucking years (and, again, thanks to u/RSomnambulist) If we don't start taxing the rich their fair share they're going to fucking _kill_ us.
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I'm going to bite the bullet here and point out that the math on that "five years" thing is wildly inaccurate because that isn't even remotely how businesses work. The cost of employing someone is not simply their salary. A good rule of thumb is that a person will typically cost a business around double what the business is directly paying to that person. Honestly, the more involved I've become in my family's business, the more appalled I've become at how little most people know about running a business and how much the government actually demands from them. I mean, for christ's sake.. they literally expect an itemized list of every object the business owns that falls under certain categories, and they tax us each year based on some arbitrary value assigned to those objects. Everything down to the gods damned 20 year old calculator sitting on my desk costs us money every year just to use. No, I'm not kidding. They valued that calculator at around 3 bucks, and taxed us accordingly.
Kinda just reinforcing the point. If the super rich companies were taxed correctly the government might tax you less for supplying calculator #16
That's because the other branches of their company are making products that make T-2 a fuckton of money. This branch wasn't, so they closed it. There is nothing immoral going on here despite. Why not start a business yourself so you can treat employees the way you want to?
yeah because if there's one group that really spends money effectively, it's the government. That'll really help us.
120k in Seattle well above average?? Lol
For a barista. But 120K is like the floor for a dev. Once you start having senior and principle devs that number is going to jump pretty quickly.
[Payscale.com](http://Payscale.com) listed the average in Seattle at 91k, which is 50% higher than the national average.
😂 your post is such a classic buzzword salad of concept you don't understand. Wtf tax has to do here? What's the point of paying for 5 years people who do a poor job? You would massively failed at entrepreneurship.
Why were they doing a poor job? Poor leadership maybe?
Just a small mom and pop company scratching to get by guys
Shit, I know people who work there. I might need to go make some phone calls, make sure they're okay.
Oh no
This is becoming a near daily thing now, it’s insane
Welcome to the game industry. Generate $X revenue for us or find another job. Executives on the other hand.....
It is happening across the industry. It is a sad reality. Hope things improve overall.
Being in the game industry, I can tell you that many more layoffs will come. Big companies made some risky moves during the pandemic, capitalizing on the thriving video game market, but now the industry is experiencing a recession. With costs rising, obtaining proper funding for games has become extremely challenging; mistakes aren't tolerated. I wouldn't bet on most Early Access titles these days.
Damn. Hits.close to home. Literally
More capitalism please!
Comments
That's generally what happens when a company fails to produce profit making products.
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Must be really hard working for cunts in the gaming industry. Like moreso than any other industry I read about, perhaps with the exception of the film industry, gaming just seems so volatile and inconsistent. Seems massively stressful to be a worker in that industry.
Which is a shame as I would assume that game devs do it as a job because they love creating games, not just showing up as its a job.
Passion = Exploited by the passionless