It’s a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success
It’s a canon event for any
gamecompany thatachieves moderate successgets acquired by investorsVery much not exclusive to the game industry
Kerbal Space Program 2 still hurts me.
Although Kerbal space program 2 had major issues from the dev team, only for the publisher to pull the plug because of how bad the progress was, and leave the game in permanent early access.
Uh, its more like a new publisher bought the IP, functionally fired almost all of the original dev team, and then hired a bunch of other people who had no idea how their insanely modified version of Unity worked…
And then the idiot in charge just started spamming out extremely grand and difficult to implement new core functionalities… with a team of mostly newbies who had no idea how anything worked.
So, basically, they started out where KSP started out… and would very obviously thus need years and years and years to get it out of Early Access / Alpha state… but it needed to make money NOW, and it didn’t, so everyone got laid off (other than the idiot in charge), and the game was functionally abandoned, but not totally abandoned, because MY IP MINE NO YOU CANT HAVE IT!!!
Or… maybe not? With regard to the IP rights?
Nobody seems to know who actually owns the KSP IP at this point.
https://techdriveplay.com/2025/01/03/kerbal-space-program-2-a-tale-of-corporate-neglect-and-failure/
I never understood the fixation on IPs. For a kick ass universe with amazing lore etc, ok sure.
I mean I love Jeb and the gang as much as the next guy, but they’re not core to my enjoyment of KSP1. The mechanics were.
lol, RIP Jebs 1 - 48395.
But uh yeah, the… the lore is basically:
We made some cute little dudes and dudettes that are… possibly animated, sapient fungi? Or something?
Anyway they are sm0l and live in sm0l solar system.
And they have a space program.
And most of the characters are just obvious cutesy knock offs of famous humans in spaceflight.
Woo!
lol
One of the original goals for KSP2 was the use of a new engine to get rid of the technical debt from the first game that caused issues like the Kraken…but then the publisher forced them to use the KSP engine because “it would speed up development.”
It was doomed from the beginning.
It was even worse than that.
They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn’t want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.
Rip ZA/UM
Except ConcernedApe, apparently.
Individual devs seem to generally manage better I think :3. It’s once the companies expand is that stuff starts going awry
The three people were replaced with a guy who used to work at EA. And one of their first announcements was an unprompted “we wont put loot boxes in the game”…
Next week: Introducing new “reward containers”
I’m not going to burn your house down, rest easy knowing that. :)
No, they won’t. Because they already are there, maybe?
Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?
Everyday up until it releases
And they want to add micro transactions
It’s Krafton. Just look at what became of PUBG. I mean it’s an OK game and a lot of QoL came to it after all these years, but there hasn’t been any major meta shift in 5 years or so. Only recently they’ve started looking into how broken certain semiauto snipers are.
Instead you are drowned in lootboxes and emotes
They did all this because they know that the vast majority of the playerbase will never hear about this, and many of those that do will either forget, or simply not care enough to boycott the game. We’re in an age of apathy across the board, with so much bad press that any given scandal just fades into the background noise.
Who’s the streamer that boosted the Don’t Kill Games petition? Get them on it.
PirateSoftware
Accurate but also not. PewDiePie came out in favour and PirateSoftware lied about it. But I think Thor lying created a huge burst of coverage about how he’s wrong and really created lots of noise about it.
More importantly in the short run, remove it from your wishlists so that Krafton can see your choice! At the moment, they are super proud of the game being the most wishlisted on Steam.
Companies only answer to profit and unfortunately we get to see the results. Can’t have those proles making 250 million dollars now. That would eat into the profits of our shareholders.
I will support this by continuing to be apathetic toward (and in fact ignorant of) the game known as Subnautica 2.
Seems like there is a plot twist to this story no one is mentioning https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3ltmyjaecpc2w
Best comment. Trust the publisher bro !It sucks that this is going around too. Because no matter what the “right” choice is the devs are still gonna have to see what should have just been their fun project get thrown around in gaming politic hell
Subnautica is one of those games that’s incredible hard to recreate. Once they started trying to explain every little thing about the aliens I completely lost interest. You may be able to bottle lightning, but you certainly can’t do it twice.
Honestly, I do not plan to buy it after Below Zero. Now that they did all the evil stuff I guess my decision is well justified.
Oooh, there’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.
$250M PLUS legal costs PLUS $250M in punitive fees. That should hurt them a bit.
I don’t understand how game dev works, how does a publishing company fire the CEO of a game dev company. Like do these publishers own the game company?
Very often they do, but not always. In this particular case they do.
Fuckin vertical integration bullshit
You should get a publisher if:
You want to make one game then get fired
You want your work to be bastardized by the publisher in the future
You want countless hours of overtime/crunch and no compensation
You want to be another disposable cog in the machine
If that doesn’t sound like something you want, self-publish.
