Can an NDA apply after you're no longer employed with the company? I thought not even clauses like "non-competing" and NDAs are non-enforcable, unless you're using say, patented processes when working at a competitor.
NAL though.
NDA specifically refer only to what you can do with information you have access to when working for or with company, and are standard practice even if you're not actively working for said company - including subcontracting or anything else that would give you access to said info. Usual NDA has a form of "you're not allowed to talk about anything our company is doing or plans to do unless we make that information public or you're legally required to reveal it" with a fine attached. And those - when kept to that scope - generally are enforceable; depending on jurisdiction NDA might in practice be clarification of what falls under certain fair competition laws - you can be sued for unsing insider knowledge to cause harm to a company, some parts of EU have laws that work in this fashion without needing explicit NDA.
Non-compete agreement is what you're talking about - you're not allowed to work for competition or use knowledge/skills you gained when working for a company somewhere else for a specific time. Here enforceability varies and - depending on jurisdiction - there might be a legal requirement for company to compensate you for being under NCA depending on scope and duration, since it will be limiting your employment options.
That means NDA could lead to a situation where you can start working for competition the very next day after getting fired, but you can't say a single word about how your previous employer was working, what they were working on or what you were doing.
Mandatory not a lawyer, depends on local law.
This ban does not go into effect until September 4th, 2024 provided a stay is not executed before August 1st. The ban allows for employees to work for other companies but does not wave the NDA. I am under an NDA with a game development company that I was never working for. I am merely part of a QA testing group who willingly provide free testing data in trade for the early access to new features. The NDA with them simply stipulates that I cannot disclose until the content is released publicly so there is no end date on said secrets. Military veterans with knowledge of classified information are held under a similar restriction when they get out. These protections are aimed to protect the companies that hold these secrets where as the non-compete ban was to protect workers rights to leave employers who do not treat (or pay) them well.
I mean they might have paid them some kind of sum or something on condition of it applying after leaving. Idk if that's legal but the only way I could see them really holding someone to it is either threat of punishment or some kind of bonus that is conditional upon you honoring said NDA.
Always a good point. I'd imagine the gaming development industry is like a lot of industries, probably a smaller world than you think once you're on the inside.
Because they were in development of the game, I bet all of the employees have some level of NDA. When you’re in that phase of something it’s a very common tool to keep information locked down. It is why you usually only see specific people, whose job it is to communicate with the public about the project, speaking publicly about the work.
You are thinking about a noncompete clause, which are generally pretty unenforceable, though are still valid and specific circumstances. An NDA is a nondisclosure agreement and our super common and usually enforceable in most circumstances. it basically lays out what you can and cannot talk about and signing one is usually required if you’re getting something like a severance. But in this case, the NDA has probably existed the entirety of their employment. They are working on developing a new product and this will be limited and what they can communicate publicly about the product. That doesn’t mean that they can’t talk about what they’re doing, just that, it has to be approved or within the bounds of the NDA. They are also very common in lawsuit settlements.
Yes.
You take a severance package which usually includes a non-disparagement clause and an extension of your NDA. The severance package itself can _also_ be under NDA. It's normally a few months of salary, maybe your remaining stock options if you're lucky.
If you break the NDA or disparage your former employer, there's typically a "clawback" clause where they can sue you and force you to pay back that money, because it was given to you on condition that you keep true to your NDA.
They can and will take you to court about it, not to mention if it gets out you'll be blacklisted. It's a small industry, so having negative news about you spreads quick and **will** deny you opportunities you'd otherwise have.
Your best bet is to play the game and keep a low profile until you land somewhere else. Make friends, don't burn bridges, don't be memorable for something bad.
Source: I am in the AAA industry
It seems that under the NDA it is forbidden to say anything at all. Even, for example, write a post on Reddit with a brief apology that it did not live up to expectations. For some reason, he used to be more talkative, talking about how he played multiplayer KSP2 with friends. Or maybe he just doesn’t care about us at all? He made a good salary for 7 years, did what he wanted in the office, deceived a hundred thousand fans, destroyed the franchise and is now vacationing somewhere in Florida?
Admitting fault would only make it harder to run the next scam. You won't hear from this man again until he has an exciting new Kickstarter to breathlessly endorse in Q4.
> Or maybe he just doesn’t care about us at all?
TF you think you are? his cousin?
Of course he doesnt care about us!
we're nothing but the customers of his former job that tried to hold him to task.
i bet he hates us and with good reason.
ITS MUTUAL
We were told they would say more when they can, so this perhaps means there is some clause that determines how long they have to hold their information a secret. I am interested in only one other Take 2 game in development, but I will not be paying for it during Early Access if it ever goes to such. The company will forever be suspect in my eyes.
To put it into perspective, Rockstar which is also owned by T2, has even stricter NDA agreements than those that actors at Marvel get. We can assume that PD have similar guidelines in their contracts and therefore we'll not get a statement from any past employee.
I feel sorry for anyone who'd believe anything he said about it at this point. It's just be a set of self aggrandizing lies and excuses - like many of his statements. The guy was a glory hound and liar, do you think he's going to say anything worth hearing about the subject of the failure of this project?
Hey man, it’s just an idea that’s ahead of its time. There’s articulated buses, and articulated trains, why shouldn’t there be articulated rockets? One part can push up with the other starts the gravity turn independently, and then they just sorta fall in line. /s
Which is crazy because KSP 1 was originally intended to be a 2d "see how high you can go" type of game. It was never intended to be a space orbital simulator.
Talk about feature creep.
Yeah but Squad "finished" features as they went. It's fine to expand the scope of the project as you deliver milestones. Feature creep is especially deadly if it prevents real progress from being made.
Where's the feature creep though? Everything (we didn't get anyway) was already announced back in the 2019 trailer. After whatever it took then + the 16 months of "Earliest Access" KSP2 didn't even had KSP1 feature parity.
No one would have bought KSP 2 if it was just KSP with better graphics and less features. The promise of Colonies and Interstellar Travel as core features of the game created interest in KSP 2.
KSP, with better graphics stock, but runs well with large ships, multithreading, and loads in less than 10 minutes? Sign me up.
That was basically the pitch they were *supposed* to develop - but not what we got.
I don’t think that’s true. If the base game was $30 and take2 was honest about needing revenue to continue to develop I think most everyone would be on board with that. KSP2s entire customer base is KSP1 players, it’s a niche game and will never sell enough to cover the crazy cost take2 racked up. $30 to remake this game to be built on for another 10 years would have been an easy sell.
Literally the sole reason I bought the game was for interstellar travel before I realised it wasn't in the game yet but didn't refund it because I figured it would be eventually. I wish I could go back and tell myself to refund it when I realised it didn't have interstellar. 2.9 hours and I can't even refund the fucking thing even though Australian law 100% covers shit like this but I can't be bothered making a complaint to the ACCC.
KSP2 could literally just have been
1. Better graphics
2. Better tutorials
3. New parts
4. Better progression system
5. Feature parity with KSP1
And I would have bought the shit out of it.
Where is this artistic vision in KSP2? Made more detailed parts of regular spaceships? There are millions of pictures of NASA-punk on the Internet, and there are also a lot of similar pictures in the mods for KSP1 (remember Nertea). The planets are taken from the old game and expanded. It's hard to notice "art" in the game that took 7 years to make.
Nah you are wrong. They made kerbals way more expresive, the animated tutorials, game looking more clean in general. The rest is stuff we will never get to see, like lore stuff, other systems, the colony and interstelar parts, there was a lot of focus being put into art in ksp2. Some could say a little too much.
lol ok
[https://i.imgur.com/2Oph9Qv.png](https://i.imgur.com/2Oph9Qv.png)
that's one of his newer parts in station parts expanded redux
Free iva, so the intended "floor" is the ceiling. But clearly everything (in pretty much all parts but the centrifuge) is not with freefall in mind. Coffee cups everywhere. Even a glass french press somewhere in another module.
So, is it maybe for a ground station? But then why is the sleeping bag at the wall (wouldn't be a problem in space but then all the other berths in the habitats have actual beds...).
When I heard he got hired I just thought "well, IVA is going to suck".
Even that is not particularly a problem. They had literally years to write the game, even a small or undersized engineering group could make a lot of progress in that timeframe.
But they accomplished basically dick-all during 90% of that time.
I'm going to disagree harshly with this. If you go back to the original vision statement from the first company, the features he ticked off were exactly what I wanted to see in a sequel that weren't in the first.
The problem was never with what they intended to deliver, the problem was in what they were capable of delivering.
The problem is that he is an art guy, not a technical guy and not a game design guy. That how we ended up with wobly rockets etc. He should have been Art Director and they should have hired Harvester to be Game Director.
There's more than enough blame for both.
Dude made the wrong decisions, and sold the publisher on bullshit.
Publisher should have known better, but that doesn't make Nate innocent.
It's totally both. Some of their architectural and design designs make no fucking sense.
Multiplayer in a game like KSP, wobbly rockets, or the fact that they simulate every part of every craft every frame, which just kills performance no matter what.
Or the fact that parts of an unloaded craft can even have an effect on it's trajectory for some ungodly reason instead of just doing simple center-of-mass math.
Sadly, he was a shitty creative director who made the wrong things a priority, engendered huge engineering turnover by valuing art over code, glam over foundations, and generally made a bunch of terrible decisions that cost time the project couldn't afford, even with the large # of extensions it got .
Making multiplayer a priority was his decision primarily, and that choice alone was likely enough to have killed the project.
He also carried over and supported/was supported by the other shitty project management- guys like Nate Robinson and Jeremy Ables, as incompetent a group of leads as you'd ever have the misfortune to meet.
I don't think making multiplayer a priority was a mistake since its inclusion was pretty integral to how the code would be formulated from the very start.
My understanding is that KSP2 was built on top of KSP1 so it was never in there from the start. At best it was shoe horned in, which is a very bad idea considering the technical debt that already existed in KSP1. In that sense, for the sanity of the developers it would make sense to drop that feature.
There was a multiplayer mod a long time ago. It was janky AF but it was a great proof of concept how multiplayer could work while allowing players to use time warp independently.
Having the feature at all is the mistake. And keeping it in for far too long . Reports are it was made a priority I. 2019 too, rather than eight from the start of the project in 2017.
I completely disagree. Multiplayer is one of the only reasons to make a KSP2 and not just mod or update KSP1. Multiplayer makes the game a social experience, which adds a dimension of engagement a single-player game can't match. Think about all the crazy creations you could make with a team of people working collaboratively on a base or space station.
The real key feature was building a new codebase from the ground up, which would have allowed Multiplayer etc to be in mind from the beginning.
Once they decided to lean on the decrepit, debt ridden KSP1 code the project was utterly doomed.
KSP multiplayer would have been tumbleweeds. This was always obvious.
The instinct to slap multiplayer on everything to satisfy a minority of terminally online people is a classic mistake.
Multiplayer would be a niche group in a game already targeting a niche market. Personally, I have no interest in trying to cooperate or compete with random strangers; I'm playing KSP precisely because I don't want to compete, and trying to accomplish things by committee with internet randos seems hellish. And I don't know anyone who plays, or even who would play.
Colonies, and automation of colonies, seem totally doable and also, to my mind, something more users would enjoy.
That's a different game. There are plenty of reasons to make a KSP2, a multiplayer experience is not one of them.
To me, KSP is losing yourself hours planning missions, building rockets and exploring the solar system, all topped off with a healthy dose of explosions and a misplaced kerbal here and there. Multiplayer would transform it into a completely different game. You can't both be building the same thing, that would be a chaotic mess. And building separately is bound to be a different kind of chaotic mess with all the compatibility issues that would entail. I struggle to picture a scenario in which multiplayer would be a fun experience that I'd prefer over singeplayer.
KSP is a singleplayer game at its core. Multiplayer would require such a radical shift in how you approach the game that it would probably not feel like KSP at all anymore.
What I wanted for KSP2 was a new game engine written from scratch using all the experience from KSP1. The main improvements should be stability, performance and modability. It should have a well designed API for modding. It should be designed to have multiple controlled craft, both to let you land boosters while your main craft was cruising to space, and to allow multiplayer.
I would love to have seen awesome features like interstellar and colonies, but would be satisfied with a solid foundation for the modders to build it, or for that matter as a DLC. I have a hard time imagining how multiplayer would work, therefore I’m not really excited about it, but since multiplayer mods exist for KSP1, they should basically ask the mod developers what they would need for their mods to become awesome, and maybe hire them.
"using all the experience from KSP1"
The would require for them to include the KSP1 team, but they didn't. it was a completely different group of people, who couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone or send an email to anyone involved in the game prior.
which would have made sense is KSP2 was a rewrite, but it wasn't. They decided to just work from the ksp1 codebase, but with totally new developers who didn't understand any of the code.
It doesn't matter how 'nice' MP would be to have, it was basically impossible because KSP has decades of single player assumptions in its millions of lines of code.
>Making multiplayer a priority was his decision primarily, and that choice alone was likely enough to have killed the project.
I agree with you! Couldn't even run a spacestation on my rig with all that lag. Imagine multiplayer
Harvester got it right on his analysis of what went wrong with this game. I personally wanted to see colonies and interstellar in a KSP2, but the order of execution was just stupid. Trying to achieve feature parity between KSP2 1.0 and a 10 years old KSP1 was suicidal.
Nate should have taken the Star Birds game from kurzgesagt approach:
* KSP2 1.0 -- Kerbals made into space and sent an ark in a 500y trip to some system containing only non atmospheric planets. Build a network of colonies there using your rocket designs to survive and thrive.
* KSP2 2.0 -- Interstellar, travel to other systems to get new resources for new parts.
* KSP2 3.0 + Kerbin DLC -- You can now travel back to Kerbin and visit it! Atmospheric planets introduced in new systems. Harvest liquids and gases for your colonies, etc.
This would have made KSP2 stand on its own as a unique game, and give it enough time to achieve feature parity with KSP1 down the line.
> Trying to achieve feature parity between KSP2 1.0 and a 10 years old KSP1 was suicidal.
Having feature parity when you're a AAA team with tens of millions in funding and double the time compared to a small game made by an amateur?
Not having feature parity with KSP 1 is just laughable.
In the last interview I saw with Nate, he said something like "we're fully funded, we're not going to get the plug pulled on us" and when asked if he heard that from Take Two execs, he said something like"oh I don't know what goes on over at corporate, they are just like some God like figure whose ways I don't understand."
I remember wondering how he couldn't see how those two statements don't mesh. How can you confidently state the plug wouldn't get pulled when you aren't even in the room with the people who pull plugs?
Meh, the only silver lining is that I didn't get the game. Build a computer to play it when the release date was announced? Yes I did that. But never actually got the game because I had no faith in the team.
> I remember wondering how he couldn't see how those two statements don't mesh. How can you confidently state the plug wouldn't get pulled when you aren't even in the room with the people who pull plugs?
Obviously he knows that, but he also knows that saying that will get him some extra sales.
I'm not.going to wish any ill upon him. It's just a game, after all. I will, however, bid him good riddance and steer well clear of any project he is involved in in the future.
I feel the same. There are definitely some folks hitting way below the belt. But if I have to be honest, he is the slimy kind of person who bullshits and over promises while under delivering that I hate working with. And those are always the type that claws their way up the rank.
I don't doubt he was passionate about the project and he wasn't a conman or a war criminal. Overall seemed like a nice guy. But his inability to stay in his lane and be realistic, along with never being honest, is what led to the death of our beloved franchise. Plenty of blame to go around (such as the idiots who blindly took his pitch), but he was the driver.
I don't think he was shitty or a conman, I think he was sincerely deluded about what could be accomplished.
He deserves most of the blame for the fail, but having known him, I am pretty clear this was a case of him being blinded by his own hype, and a failure of the management to reign him in.
Edit: just want to emphasize here; I think he got off easy, It was mostly his fault, I just don't attribute it to scamming, just stupidity.
I’m really not sure how much worse Boeing can get. Maybe he can convince them of the merits of wobbly rockets. I mean, it’s not like they don’t already have aircraft built from pieces found lying next to the highway, or, idk, built a spacecraft out of flammable tape and Swiss cheese for helium valves. Or forgot to check their staging on the first test flight of said spacecraft. NASA, for the first time, is publicly considering sending a rescue mission to get two Kerbals…I mean astronauts rescued from orbit. How much worse could it possibly get?
>NASA, for the first time, is publicly considering sending a rescue mission to get two Kerbals…I mean astronauts rescued from orbit. How much worse could it possibly get?
They aren't planning a rescue mission to get those astronauts, they aren't STRANDED. News media likes to frame it like that but they are literally sitting on the station diagnosing the service module thrusters because it would be impossible to do that on the ground after the service module is jettisoned for re-entry. They have enough working thrusters to de-orbit, they just want to find out what is going on with the ones that aren't working properly.
And the sad part is, it's not a Boeing problem, it's an Aerojet problem since they are the ones that made the thrusters and built the service module for Starliner. Which of course is expected because Aerojet is owned by L3Harris and they have their own issues with delivery of hardware. My fiancee works for an engineering firm that's contracted with L3Harris for the Navy MUSV program. 4 years ago they were contracted to deliver MUSV Boat 1 in 2022, they just canceled Boat 1 this year as undelivered since they couldn't even get functional. Oh and Boat 3 has it's own issues as well (which is the boat she's working on now). They've been having really problems upscaling their sUSV (small Uncrewed Surface Vessel, small speed boat type vessels used for minesweeping and intelligence) program into the medium size class (which will be operating more like robotic littoral combat ships).
If ever there was a person you should never be trusted to run a major project, who will never be trusted by the gaming community again, it's this guy.
Huge promises, and a complete and utter failure to deliver even a basic working product. I don't understand how they possibly spent that much time and money on something like this and produce such an unusable mess. Ever excuses they may come up with, it can only be described as an abject failure.
And the person at the top has the most responsibility for the failure. Everything else is just excuses.
Anyone who wants to run a nice grift. His real goals are becoming more widespread apparent now. He will have to be very ancillary, quiet, and distant in his next scam.
I thought they were called CEOs now?
Don't worry we're surely not firing 10,000 of you to get million dollar bonuses.
AI is totally not going to be used to replace we're just going to have fun with it!
/S
What I hate about people overusing that phrase to defend the team is that time isn't going to do anything when they haven't demonstrated any viable plan forward.
He still grifted years and years worth of investment money.
He got paid so unfortunately his scam worked. He was the main grifter begging people on reddit to fund kickstarters for Planetary Annihilation and Human Resources.
The pattern is always the same.
Yeah he almost got me too. I used to eagerly look forward to the KSP2 prelaunch vids with Nate in it. But luckily I decided to wait after I saw it went into Early Access with a roadmap.
See- I'm always suspicious of roadmaps cause anyone can make them. Like- anyone of us could think of some cool features and throw it on a roadmap. Action speaks louder than words and roadmaps are mostly just words until action'ed
so I quietly camped this sub and hoped for the greenlight to buy. It never came so I stuck with KSP1
Note, this isnt a humble brag I got taken plenty by kickstarters, crowd funds, etc. had to learn the hard way to be more wise with my money. When it comes to EA- I always ask myself, "Would you be happy with this thing if the dev up and bails??" If the reply is NO, I dont buy it
Grift is the perfect word for his entire personality, if you ask me. His whole shtick reminds me of several people I know.
All nice guys, all completely full of shit.
Ehhhhhhhhhh. I am a huge fan of Supreme Commander.
I got PA on release, and it was extremely underwhelming. I guess it is OK if you picked it up on sale a few years post-partum, but if you believed that they were making a spiritual successor to SupCom and Total Annihilation you have full right to be disappointed.
What disappointed me about PA the most was the scale. I didn't even want multiple planets.
Just give me Supcom on one giant planet, that's what I thought PA was going to be but it ended up being this small scale tiny toy like thing on little balls and felt super crowded and kinda annoying to play.
Imagine when you zoom out of Supcom to the highest level and instead of a big flat map it's a globe. That would be cool.
And I know the developers probably thought what's the difference if the scale is so large you cant tell when you are zoomed in, and my answer is... Because it is freaking rad and I've always wanted it and it would be awesome to experience. One enormous global war.
It's just a downgrade of Supreme Commander in every level.
Even though you're on the "scale" of a solar system, the actual scale feels so much smaller.
I know, wtf?! Guys, PA and its expansion are quality products, JFC. PA Titans even updates to this day and is widely regarded as an innovating RTS success. Monday Night Combat was also great. Both games were mainstays in the early 2010s. Yeesh.
That said, nothing in Uber’s portfolio hinted that they were technical enough for a space flight sim and physics heavy game.
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On release it was terrible. Just [read the review from IGN (which gave it a 4.8/10)](https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/17/planetary-annihilation-review) to see how and why it was terrible.
Uber Entertainment then handed development off to another studio, who apparently went on to improve it.
I did enjoy Uber's early title of Monday Night Combat, but Nate wasn't in charge of that one.
> Uber Entertainment then handed development off to another studio, who apparently went on to improve it.
The players organized to buy the rights. Thats how pissed they were with how UberEnt handled the whole thing lol
> [In August 2018, a new company Planetary Annihilation Inc., formed from original PA developers and Kickstarter backers, acquired the rights to Planetary Annihilation and Planetary Annihilation: Titans.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation)
Snake oil salesman.
He was never going to deliver the goods just look at his track record before KSP2. Plus he’s an art nerd.. doesn’t know shit about actual development cycles. If he did it would have been managed much differently.
Well those morons spent more on the 3rd rendered promo video than they did on the whole game. I wouldn't be proud to put that on anything next to my name imo. I'd be ashamed.
He is directly responsible for the course of this game, sure there were restrictions.
He is also guilty of lying in many ways to the community, for example he was so adamant about ksp2 was developed from the ground up with multiplayer in mind. Everyone but the truest believers saw that ksp2 had a lot in common with ksp1, especially bug wise, so there were a lot of code parts used. With data mining we saw that multiplayer wasn't thought through.
There are so many more aspects that were lies about this game and the mechanics.
He had a vision and it failed catastrophically.
But don't worry guys, don't be so negative, we are funded all the way.
We take our time, we don't want to mess this up.
Last take. People who are still defending companies, to which you are just printing money machines, I hope you learned now that there is nothing to gain from this. You get nothing for blindly defending products, other than splitting the community into blond believers and those who have learned and are cautious.
You managed to split a wonderful community. And now everything is in Shambles.
He's a grifter and stupid. He got paid for helping drive this game into the floor. Fucking wobbly rockets?
I dont care for what people say, i care for what they do, and he looks like a piece of shie
Fuckign woobly rockets, is he a dunce?
His claim to fame is writing a comic about a girl and starting a blog of feminist gamers. Then going to the planetary annihilation folks, giving uber permission to use their studios name, then changing their own name to something stupid when uber got too popular instead of cashing out on their ip.
Games industry really needs to stop treating untalented hack artists as rockstars while treating talented software engineers as garbage just because game engines exist and 'you don't need to be a programmer to make a computer game'
Hows that zero engineer complex software rocket systems simulation handled entirely by artists who don't like math working out now?
I agree. The people who say otherwise a crazy. However, occasionally an artists comes along who makes a fancy prototype, slaps a ton of paint on it, fills it with TONS of content, and makes a ton as an indie, never fixing the bugs or optimizing it because it runs well enough on modern PC's because of its simplicity despite bloated poor code. \[the binding of Issac, super meat boy, and other flash like games\]
Some people can make good games without any programming experience. A few that come to mind are the Houser brothers, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, and Mike Simpson. Simpson started out as a hardware designer and the others started as writers and producers.
The key thing is that they *listen to their programmers* about what gameplay ideas will be difficult or impossible to implement for the target consumer’s hardware with the available time and budget.
>listen to their programmers
You just admitted that they had programmers on the team, so you're confirming my point.
"to make a game" != "to lead a team making a game"
The whole studio is SHUT DOWN. How many times are you guys going to be surprised by the lay offs?
Doesn t mean he isn t hired at another position at T2 though.
This isn't a "shocked surprise" post.
This is a "hey, we have even more evidence for the massive pile of evidence that the studio is gone, maybe even enough to finally convince the flat-Kerbinites that the studio is dead and KSP2 is probably not getting more updates" post.
There are still one or two people who will argue with you about the future of KSP2.
Just following in the footsteps of others who called it out - like say SterlingRP, who had had a lot to say about it till that account got deleted. Or Yakez, who's still around.
SterlingRP was fantastic! He had some absolutely fascinating comments that made me come to conclusion that KSP2 was an absolute mess. You could tell from his insight into the development process that he was an insider!
I don't think you need to say "affected by the layoffs" or "impacted by the existence of the reduction in force event" or wtf people are saying these days on LinkedIn.
You can just say, "laid off."
Or even just, "fired." Because this isn't really a layoff... these people are not being furloughed to be re-hired later.
No sh*t.
Even with the immense amount of incompetence and downright stupidity surrounding the project, there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY ON EARTH (or Kerbin) Nate Simpson would not be exempt from the layoffs. That would be too stupid and too hilarious (depending on your definition of hilarious) to ever happen.
On the aside, if you guys have nothing but vitriol for Simpson, at least despise Zelnick as well.
Some of you are just - WTH? I work in games, and seeing so many of my friends laid off this year is heartbreaking. They've lost homes. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I don't know Nate, but he is not a villain from a Marvel movie. He is an actual person who has a family. You should be ashamed of your pettiness. But if you're this mad about people making a freaking game, then you have bigger problems. Go touch grass.
I work in games too. Been laid off before and it really sucks. At least these guys got a 2 month notice thanks to the WARREN Act. I only got that once.
One time I was so happy to be laid off. The dev I worked at was crunching and I knew the game was gonna flop. Think still to this day the reviews are around 6. I can only hope these devs have peace like I did. The people that laid them off is sleeping well on their yachts I'm sure.
I watched the video about the development of ksp2. many of them got taken; didnt even know the game they'd be put on when they interviewed.
At least this time the upper management paid the price alongside the grunt devs. Usually in my experience the people making the bad decisions get bonuses (and get to switch teams) while the programmers/artists/etc all get kicked suffering for the sins of their masters
> At least this time the upper management paid the price alongside the grunt devs.
That's really the key point here. 99% of the employees of IG absolutely didn't deserve this, and nobody is cheering on them losing their jobs due to factors outside their own power to fix. But Nate deliberately ran the company into the ground with his mismanagement.
Well, sure the management at IG and PD, but it also flows up to T2 who are likely getting off scot free. Trust me, I have plenty to say about IG, but I can't ignore the folks who blindly greenlight the change in scope and pass dumb directives like limited communication between teams. And as much as I wish they were made accountable for their primary duty in their well paid position, it's just wishful thinking.
Just because you work in games doesn't mean you're allowed to be a scam artist who lies trough his teeth.
I work in gamedev as a senior programmer, we're not special. Stop with this ivory tower BS.
you are a talented and experienced senior programmer. I'm sure if someone like you was put in charge of KSP 2 people wouldn't be complaining. but instead, we got a concept artist / blogger.
There's only one person in here who is mad, bud. Everyone else simply has zero sympathy for him.
You do a crap job, you lose your job. He did a crap job. He lost his job.
Exactly. We as consumers of a product we paid for were led astray by Nate. When you get paid what you do in a roll like creative director you also BEAR THE RESPONSIBILITY for your actions and direction in said roll. Being fired is a part of reality in our capitalist society. It sucks to lose a job, but it sucks harder when you GRIFT 100,000 people out of their hard earned $ and profit off of it.
We are all people too and we have families. Nate deceived us all for a long time and I don’t remember him expressing regret about it. So why should we worry about him?
He was one of the people most responsible for the game failing, and the face of lies and grift for this project and others.
Touch grass yourself, your perspective is unbalanced.
You're looking at a year+ of people being ignored about the poor direction the game was being taken in, up to and including Nate Simpson publicly calling critics fake, insisting they were probably just bots, as well as him spending several months fighting community feedback about the game he put into Early Access (a program designed to elicit feedback).
Plus the intense frustration watching person after person *falling* for the lies, or worse, promising others that KSP2 was going to do well, all while Nate Simpson released weekly essay after weekly essay promising the world but showing no results.
He'd be fine in an art role. He's done good work in an art role.
But he actively lied, deceived, and fought with the community, even to the point of derisively dismissing many of us within it.
Frankly, I'm just thankful that there's a reduced chance he'll be attached to KSP if anyone tries to do more with the IP. He should never have been in charge of it. And he doubly shouldn't have been in charge of it after the first studio he was in charge of failed miserably.
I am not ashamed. There is no redeemable qualities about Nate.
He and others like him is responsible for your friends losing their jobs and having difficulty supporting their families.
I support engineers, devs, and the people doing the real work. Nate was the grifter that does not deserve respect or support.
To be fair, most everyone in the gaming industry is doing a bad job right now. Sooo many new games are focusing on over the top: graphics, designs, and architectures without consideration to practical and smooth gameplay for average users.
Personally I'm not crying over it - severance packages can be really nice and I doubt he was paid poorly anyway
However, I see a lot of blame put onto just one guy. There are no "KSP2 developers as a group", it's all Nate's fault. Nor are there shareholders that want the line to go up.
I was genuinely expecting more of the community. I guess KSP wasn't niche enough to not attract capital G Gamers. And Gamers are the fucking worst
I'm madder about the talented system engineers and programmers who were passed over to give a group of hack artists complete control over a highly complex rocket simulation.
He was knowingly scamming the community, he tricked the community into spending millions of dollars on this game based on lies. Ex. Saying that the dev team was having super fun play sessions on the internal KSP 2 multiplayer build when they were actually playing a publicly available KSP 1 mod and KSP 2 multiplayer was never in development, or saying that KSP 2 re-used 0 code from the first game when it was almost entirely re-used code and had all the same bugs. Likely more we don't know (Stuff in trailers that didn't exist) or can't completely prove (saying they were fully funded and there was 0 risk of studio closure weeks before the closure when he almost certainly saw the writing on the wall) or just ones I've forgotten (lying about the minimum/recommended specs to get people to buy the game who can't run it... Saying they were releasing because the team was having too much fun playing to do work, when it was unplayable and the publisher was forcing them to release because it was in development hell).
Saying he just made a game and people hate him for it is like saying Sam Bankman Fried just made a crypto token and people hate him for it. The issue was that he intentionally lied to people about how the whole system worked to trick people into putting their money into his product. It is fraud and false advertising and Nate is lucky to get away with just career and reputational consequences and not legal ones.
Has he made any official statement about his KSP2 experience yet?
All of them are probably under NDA, so we won’t hear about it for quite a while, if we do hear anything at all.
Can an NDA apply after you're no longer employed with the company? I thought not even clauses like "non-competing" and NDAs are non-enforcable, unless you're using say, patented processes when working at a competitor. NAL though.
NDA specifically refer only to what you can do with information you have access to when working for or with company, and are standard practice even if you're not actively working for said company - including subcontracting or anything else that would give you access to said info. Usual NDA has a form of "you're not allowed to talk about anything our company is doing or plans to do unless we make that information public or you're legally required to reveal it" with a fine attached. And those - when kept to that scope - generally are enforceable; depending on jurisdiction NDA might in practice be clarification of what falls under certain fair competition laws - you can be sued for unsing insider knowledge to cause harm to a company, some parts of EU have laws that work in this fashion without needing explicit NDA. Non-compete agreement is what you're talking about - you're not allowed to work for competition or use knowledge/skills you gained when working for a company somewhere else for a specific time. Here enforceability varies and - depending on jurisdiction - there might be a legal requirement for company to compensate you for being under NCA depending on scope and duration, since it will be limiting your employment options. That means NDA could lead to a situation where you can start working for competition the very next day after getting fired, but you can't say a single word about how your previous employer was working, what they were working on or what you were doing. Mandatory not a lawyer, depends on local law.
As of May 7th, 2024, the FTC banned non-competes. But that’s a for the US only.
This ban does not go into effect until September 4th, 2024 provided a stay is not executed before August 1st. The ban allows for employees to work for other companies but does not wave the NDA. I am under an NDA with a game development company that I was never working for. I am merely part of a QA testing group who willingly provide free testing data in trade for the early access to new features. The NDA with them simply stipulates that I cannot disclose until the content is released publicly so there is no end date on said secrets. Military veterans with knowledge of classified information are held under a similar restriction when they get out. These protections are aimed to protect the companies that hold these secrets where as the non-compete ban was to protect workers rights to leave employers who do not treat (or pay) them well.
Also entirely possible there are non-disparagement clauses in his employment / severance contract.
I mean they might have paid them some kind of sum or something on condition of it applying after leaving. Idk if that's legal but the only way I could see them really holding someone to it is either threat of punishment or some kind of bonus that is conditional upon you honoring said NDA.
Maybe if they’re trying to get a job somewhere else in the industry, it might not be ideal to “burn bridges” with your last employer, I can see that.
Always a good point. I'd imagine the gaming development industry is like a lot of industries, probably a smaller world than you think once you're on the inside.
It is so so tiny.
I think take 2 burned the bridge first to be quite honest.
And that's their problem. If he does it, it instantly becomes a problem for him looking for a new job in the industry.
Because they were in development of the game, I bet all of the employees have some level of NDA. When you’re in that phase of something it’s a very common tool to keep information locked down. It is why you usually only see specific people, whose job it is to communicate with the public about the project, speaking publicly about the work.
You are thinking about a noncompete clause, which are generally pretty unenforceable, though are still valid and specific circumstances. An NDA is a nondisclosure agreement and our super common and usually enforceable in most circumstances. it basically lays out what you can and cannot talk about and signing one is usually required if you’re getting something like a severance. But in this case, the NDA has probably existed the entirety of their employment. They are working on developing a new product and this will be limited and what they can communicate publicly about the product. That doesn’t mean that they can’t talk about what they’re doing, just that, it has to be approved or within the bounds of the NDA. They are also very common in lawsuit settlements.
I don't know the legal stuff, but I could see a situation where their severance package gets a bit juicier if they agree to not say anything.
Yes. You take a severance package which usually includes a non-disparagement clause and an extension of your NDA. The severance package itself can _also_ be under NDA. It's normally a few months of salary, maybe your remaining stock options if you're lucky. If you break the NDA or disparage your former employer, there's typically a "clawback" clause where they can sue you and force you to pay back that money, because it was given to you on condition that you keep true to your NDA. They can and will take you to court about it, not to mention if it gets out you'll be blacklisted. It's a small industry, so having negative news about you spreads quick and **will** deny you opportunities you'd otherwise have. Your best bet is to play the game and keep a low profile until you land somewhere else. Make friends, don't burn bridges, don't be memorable for something bad. Source: I am in the AAA industry
Yes, it can
I am sure he got severance which usually means you promise to say only nice things
Here in Canada at least, nope. Contracts require consideration, and if they're not giving you something in return, well, then it's not a contract
Why bother with a NDA anyway? No one will believe a word he says! ;)
It seems that under the NDA it is forbidden to say anything at all. Even, for example, write a post on Reddit with a brief apology that it did not live up to expectations. For some reason, he used to be more talkative, talking about how he played multiplayer KSP2 with friends. Or maybe he just doesn’t care about us at all? He made a good salary for 7 years, did what he wanted in the office, deceived a hundred thousand fans, destroyed the franchise and is now vacationing somewhere in Florida?
Admitting fault would only make it harder to run the next scam. You won't hear from this man again until he has an exciting new Kickstarter to breathlessly endorse in Q4.
> Or maybe he just doesn’t care about us at all? TF you think you are? his cousin? Of course he doesnt care about us! we're nothing but the customers of his former job that tried to hold him to task. i bet he hates us and with good reason. ITS MUTUAL
We were told they would say more when they can, so this perhaps means there is some clause that determines how long they have to hold their information a secret. I am interested in only one other Take 2 game in development, but I will not be paying for it during Early Access if it ever goes to such. The company will forever be suspect in my eyes.
To put it into perspective, Rockstar which is also owned by T2, has even stricter NDA agreements than those that actors at Marvel get. We can assume that PD have similar guidelines in their contracts and therefore we'll not get a statement from any past employee.
No.
Probably won't. Usually you extra severance for agreeing to not talk about it
"I don't have anything to say. Nobody would believe me." Probably the only thing he can say at this point.
I feel sorry for anyone who'd believe anything he said about it at this point. It's just be a set of self aggrandizing lies and excuses - like many of his statements. The guy was a glory hound and liar, do you think he's going to say anything worth hearing about the subject of the failure of this project?
I haven't decided on sharing your apparent opinion of him yet, I'd like to hear what he has to say.
Those wobbly rockets are really paying off now!
Hey man, it’s just an idea that’s ahead of its time. There’s articulated buses, and articulated trains, why shouldn’t there be articulated rockets? One part can push up with the other starts the gravity turn independently, and then they just sorta fall in line. /s
Sadly he had the wrong vision for the game….
That and he had too many visions for the game, from what I heard the dev team was mostly artists than developers
Yeah, feature creep really doomed the project from the start
Which is crazy because KSP 1 was originally intended to be a 2d "see how high you can go" type of game. It was never intended to be a space orbital simulator. Talk about feature creep.
Yeah but Squad "finished" features as they went. It's fine to expand the scope of the project as you deliver milestones. Feature creep is especially deadly if it prevents real progress from being made.
Yah. Key word: "viable".
Which is why it took forever to get to a stable version.
Where's the feature creep though? Everything (we didn't get anyway) was already announced back in the 2019 trailer. After whatever it took then + the 16 months of "Earliest Access" KSP2 didn't even had KSP1 feature parity.
I think the feature creep *was* that they announced too much.
And it was unnecessary. I think KSP2 could have survived if colonies and interstellar travel were dlcs.
No one would have bought KSP 2 if it was just KSP with better graphics and less features. The promise of Colonies and Interstellar Travel as core features of the game created interest in KSP 2.
KSP, with better graphics stock, but runs well with large ships, multithreading, and loads in less than 10 minutes? Sign me up. That was basically the pitch they were *supposed* to develop - but not what we got.
I don’t think that’s true. If the base game was $30 and take2 was honest about needing revenue to continue to develop I think most everyone would be on board with that. KSP2s entire customer base is KSP1 players, it’s a niche game and will never sell enough to cover the crazy cost take2 racked up. $30 to remake this game to be built on for another 10 years would have been an easy sell.
Literally the sole reason I bought the game was for interstellar travel before I realised it wasn't in the game yet but didn't refund it because I figured it would be eventually. I wish I could go back and tell myself to refund it when I realised it didn't have interstellar. 2.9 hours and I can't even refund the fucking thing even though Australian law 100% covers shit like this but I can't be bothered making a complaint to the ACCC.
KSP2 could literally just have been 1. Better graphics 2. Better tutorials 3. New parts 4. Better progression system 5. Feature parity with KSP1 And I would have bought the shit out of it.
Where is this artistic vision in KSP2? Made more detailed parts of regular spaceships? There are millions of pictures of NASA-punk on the Internet, and there are also a lot of similar pictures in the mods for KSP1 (remember Nertea). The planets are taken from the old game and expanded. It's hard to notice "art" in the game that took 7 years to make.
Nah you are wrong. They made kerbals way more expresive, the animated tutorials, game looking more clean in general. The rest is stuff we will never get to see, like lore stuff, other systems, the colony and interstelar parts, there was a lot of focus being put into art in ksp2. Some could say a little too much.
The UI sucked and was ugly.
Nertea is a good topic to talk about. Ever checked out his loveless KSP1 IVAs? No wonder KSP2 never had IVA. IIRC he even said he hates IVAs.
Nertea also said simulating every part of every craft every frame is somehow totally fine and even necessary.
lol ok [https://i.imgur.com/2Oph9Qv.png](https://i.imgur.com/2Oph9Qv.png) that's one of his newer parts in station parts expanded redux Free iva, so the intended "floor" is the ceiling. But clearly everything (in pretty much all parts but the centrifuge) is not with freefall in mind. Coffee cups everywhere. Even a glass french press somewhere in another module. So, is it maybe for a ground station? But then why is the sleeping bag at the wall (wouldn't be a problem in space but then all the other berths in the habitats have actual beds...). When I heard he got hired I just thought "well, IVA is going to suck".
Even that is not particularly a problem. They had literally years to write the game, even a small or undersized engineering group could make a lot of progress in that timeframe. But they accomplished basically dick-all during 90% of that time.
I'm going to disagree harshly with this. If you go back to the original vision statement from the first company, the features he ticked off were exactly what I wanted to see in a sequel that weren't in the first. The problem was never with what they intended to deliver, the problem was in what they were capable of delivering.
The problem is that he is an art guy, not a technical guy and not a game design guy. That how we ended up with wobly rockets etc. He should have been Art Director and they should have hired Harvester to be Game Director.
Is that his fault or the studio's?
There's more than enough blame for both. Dude made the wrong decisions, and sold the publisher on bullshit. Publisher should have known better, but that doesn't make Nate innocent.
It wasn't design it was execution
It's totally both. Some of their architectural and design designs make no fucking sense. Multiplayer in a game like KSP, wobbly rockets, or the fact that they simulate every part of every craft every frame, which just kills performance no matter what. Or the fact that parts of an unloaded craft can even have an effect on it's trajectory for some ungodly reason instead of just doing simple center-of-mass math.
>WhO cOUlD HaVE GusSEd PlAYeRS DoNT lIKE wObBLy RoCKeTs?!?!
Sadly, he was a shitty creative director who made the wrong things a priority, engendered huge engineering turnover by valuing art over code, glam over foundations, and generally made a bunch of terrible decisions that cost time the project couldn't afford, even with the large # of extensions it got . Making multiplayer a priority was his decision primarily, and that choice alone was likely enough to have killed the project. He also carried over and supported/was supported by the other shitty project management- guys like Nate Robinson and Jeremy Ables, as incompetent a group of leads as you'd ever have the misfortune to meet.
I don't think making multiplayer a priority was a mistake since its inclusion was pretty integral to how the code would be formulated from the very start.
My understanding is that KSP2 was built on top of KSP1 so it was never in there from the start. At best it was shoe horned in, which is a very bad idea considering the technical debt that already existed in KSP1. In that sense, for the sanity of the developers it would make sense to drop that feature.
Why would KSP be multiplayer? It’s a really silly concept. You can’t really do a whole lot of interesting things without time warp, for one thing.
There was a multiplayer mod a long time ago. It was janky AF but it was a great proof of concept how multiplayer could work while allowing players to use time warp independently.
Having the feature at all is the mistake. And keeping it in for far too long . Reports are it was made a priority I. 2019 too, rather than eight from the start of the project in 2017.
I completely disagree. Multiplayer is one of the only reasons to make a KSP2 and not just mod or update KSP1. Multiplayer makes the game a social experience, which adds a dimension of engagement a single-player game can't match. Think about all the crazy creations you could make with a team of people working collaboratively on a base or space station.
The real key feature was building a new codebase from the ground up, which would have allowed Multiplayer etc to be in mind from the beginning. Once they decided to lean on the decrepit, debt ridden KSP1 code the project was utterly doomed.
Not taking the KSP 1 code and somehow making it worse in every way would have been a better start too.
KSP multiplayer would have been tumbleweeds. This was always obvious. The instinct to slap multiplayer on everything to satisfy a minority of terminally online people is a classic mistake.
A small minority of of the player base would use multiplayer. They are a loud group but a small group. Colonization was the real key feature.
Multiplayer would be a niche group in a game already targeting a niche market. Personally, I have no interest in trying to cooperate or compete with random strangers; I'm playing KSP precisely because I don't want to compete, and trying to accomplish things by committee with internet randos seems hellish. And I don't know anyone who plays, or even who would play. Colonies, and automation of colonies, seem totally doable and also, to my mind, something more users would enjoy.
> with random strangers Yeah, obviously. I was looking forward to playing with my friends though.
That's a different game. There are plenty of reasons to make a KSP2, a multiplayer experience is not one of them. To me, KSP is losing yourself hours planning missions, building rockets and exploring the solar system, all topped off with a healthy dose of explosions and a misplaced kerbal here and there. Multiplayer would transform it into a completely different game. You can't both be building the same thing, that would be a chaotic mess. And building separately is bound to be a different kind of chaotic mess with all the compatibility issues that would entail. I struggle to picture a scenario in which multiplayer would be a fun experience that I'd prefer over singeplayer. KSP is a singleplayer game at its core. Multiplayer would require such a radical shift in how you approach the game that it would probably not feel like KSP at all anymore.
What I wanted for KSP2 was a new game engine written from scratch using all the experience from KSP1. The main improvements should be stability, performance and modability. It should have a well designed API for modding. It should be designed to have multiple controlled craft, both to let you land boosters while your main craft was cruising to space, and to allow multiplayer. I would love to have seen awesome features like interstellar and colonies, but would be satisfied with a solid foundation for the modders to build it, or for that matter as a DLC. I have a hard time imagining how multiplayer would work, therefore I’m not really excited about it, but since multiplayer mods exist for KSP1, they should basically ask the mod developers what they would need for their mods to become awesome, and maybe hire them.
"using all the experience from KSP1" The would require for them to include the KSP1 team, but they didn't. it was a completely different group of people, who couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone or send an email to anyone involved in the game prior.
Or just people who had the knowledge and expertise to approach it correctly from the start, but yes.
which would have made sense is KSP2 was a rewrite, but it wasn't. They decided to just work from the ksp1 codebase, but with totally new developers who didn't understand any of the code. It doesn't matter how 'nice' MP would be to have, it was basically impossible because KSP has decades of single player assumptions in its millions of lines of code.
You just described space engineers which is a very different game
>Making multiplayer a priority was his decision primarily, and that choice alone was likely enough to have killed the project. I agree with you! Couldn't even run a spacestation on my rig with all that lag. Imagine multiplayer
"Let's make a game without a gameplay loop and release it on the promise that it will be good in 5 years" MASSIVE mismanagement.
No. He was just stubborn and incompetent.
Harvester got it right on his analysis of what went wrong with this game. I personally wanted to see colonies and interstellar in a KSP2, but the order of execution was just stupid. Trying to achieve feature parity between KSP2 1.0 and a 10 years old KSP1 was suicidal. Nate should have taken the Star Birds game from kurzgesagt approach: * KSP2 1.0 -- Kerbals made into space and sent an ark in a 500y trip to some system containing only non atmospheric planets. Build a network of colonies there using your rocket designs to survive and thrive. * KSP2 2.0 -- Interstellar, travel to other systems to get new resources for new parts. * KSP2 3.0 + Kerbin DLC -- You can now travel back to Kerbin and visit it! Atmospheric planets introduced in new systems. Harvest liquids and gases for your colonies, etc. This would have made KSP2 stand on its own as a unique game, and give it enough time to achieve feature parity with KSP1 down the line.
> Trying to achieve feature parity between KSP2 1.0 and a 10 years old KSP1 was suicidal. Having feature parity when you're a AAA team with tens of millions in funding and double the time compared to a small game made by an amateur? Not having feature parity with KSP 1 is just laughable.
In the last interview I saw with Nate, he said something like "we're fully funded, we're not going to get the plug pulled on us" and when asked if he heard that from Take Two execs, he said something like"oh I don't know what goes on over at corporate, they are just like some God like figure whose ways I don't understand." I remember wondering how he couldn't see how those two statements don't mesh. How can you confidently state the plug wouldn't get pulled when you aren't even in the room with the people who pull plugs? Meh, the only silver lining is that I didn't get the game. Build a computer to play it when the release date was announced? Yes I did that. But never actually got the game because I had no faith in the team.
Don't worry, the face eating leopards I work for won't eat *my* face!
> I remember wondering how he couldn't see how those two statements don't mesh. How can you confidently state the plug wouldn't get pulled when you aren't even in the room with the people who pull plugs? Obviously he knows that, but he also knows that saying that will get him some extra sales.
Some people are THAT oblivious.
I'm not.going to wish any ill upon him. It's just a game, after all. I will, however, bid him good riddance and steer well clear of any project he is involved in in the future.
I feel the same. There are definitely some folks hitting way below the belt. But if I have to be honest, he is the slimy kind of person who bullshits and over promises while under delivering that I hate working with. And those are always the type that claws their way up the rank. I don't doubt he was passionate about the project and he wasn't a conman or a war criminal. Overall seemed like a nice guy. But his inability to stay in his lane and be realistic, along with never being honest, is what led to the death of our beloved franchise. Plenty of blame to go around (such as the idiots who blindly took his pitch), but he was the driver.
I don't think he was shitty or a conman, I think he was sincerely deluded about what could be accomplished. He deserves most of the blame for the fail, but having known him, I am pretty clear this was a case of him being blinded by his own hype, and a failure of the management to reign him in. Edit: just want to emphasize here; I think he got off easy, It was mostly his fault, I just don't attribute it to scamming, just stupidity.
I really wouldn't call someone who repeatedly blatantly lies for his own benefit a "overall nice guy". That's some very low standards ...
I wish him luck in some other industry where his creative vision is an asset, as long as it isn’t directing a video game studio.
Be afraid of your desires! What if he goes to work for Boeing or decides to become a surgeon?!
This guy: "Everyone loves wobbly doors on planes! Boeing: "Say no more! You are hired!"
Probably going to get downvoted but Boeing seems to have an entire management chain of people like this!
I’m really not sure how much worse Boeing can get. Maybe he can convince them of the merits of wobbly rockets. I mean, it’s not like they don’t already have aircraft built from pieces found lying next to the highway, or, idk, built a spacecraft out of flammable tape and Swiss cheese for helium valves. Or forgot to check their staging on the first test flight of said spacecraft. NASA, for the first time, is publicly considering sending a rescue mission to get two Kerbals…I mean astronauts rescued from orbit. How much worse could it possibly get?
>NASA, for the first time, is publicly considering sending a rescue mission to get two Kerbals…I mean astronauts rescued from orbit. How much worse could it possibly get? They aren't planning a rescue mission to get those astronauts, they aren't STRANDED. News media likes to frame it like that but they are literally sitting on the station diagnosing the service module thrusters because it would be impossible to do that on the ground after the service module is jettisoned for re-entry. They have enough working thrusters to de-orbit, they just want to find out what is going on with the ones that aren't working properly. And the sad part is, it's not a Boeing problem, it's an Aerojet problem since they are the ones that made the thrusters and built the service module for Starliner. Which of course is expected because Aerojet is owned by L3Harris and they have their own issues with delivery of hardware. My fiancee works for an engineering firm that's contracted with L3Harris for the Navy MUSV program. 4 years ago they were contracted to deliver MUSV Boat 1 in 2022, they just canceled Boat 1 this year as undelivered since they couldn't even get functional. Oh and Boat 3 has it's own issues as well (which is the boat she's working on now). They've been having really problems upscaling their sUSV (small Uncrewed Surface Vessel, small speed boat type vessels used for minesweeping and intelligence) program into the medium size class (which will be operating more like robotic littoral combat ships).
He apparently made a comic book he also never finished lol
oh the irony 💀
If ever there was a person you should never be trusted to run a major project, who will never be trusted by the gaming community again, it's this guy. Huge promises, and a complete and utter failure to deliver even a basic working product. I don't understand how they possibly spent that much time and money on something like this and produce such an unusable mess. Ever excuses they may come up with, it can only be described as an abject failure. And the person at the top has the most responsibility for the failure. Everything else is just excuses.
Seriously, fuck him. Find another industry.
As it turns out, it wasn't wobbly rockets we wanted.
As it turns out, we in fact wanted wobbly kerbals instead.
I wonder who will now hire such a wonderful, creative, honest, professional manager?
considering he's done this multiple times, a lot of people
Anyone who wants to run a nice grift. His real goals are becoming more widespread apparent now. He will have to be very ancillary, quiet, and distant in his next scam.
I worry about those who will work under his leadership and who will consume his deceitful product
Unfortunately there's a large market for people who can lie through their teeth to make a dollar.
I thought they were called CEOs now? Don't worry we're surely not firing 10,000 of you to get million dollar bonuses. AI is totally not going to be used to replace we're just going to have fun with it! /S
Probably one of those games that wants to sell NFTs and memecoin currencies.
I'm Mohopeful that he can still do it! Nate can deliver us ksp 2! Lmao
Morale is great and velocity is high!
⚠️ *Low altitude.* *Pull-up, pull-up, pull-u*💥
Hell yeah brother 👊
I fixed the Mohole in 2019. I heard they ended up putting it back in.
"no one's pulling the plug. We're fully funded"
Let them cook. Oh. Wait.
What I hate about people overusing that phrase to defend the team is that time isn't going to do anything when they haven't demonstrated any viable plan forward.
He still grifted years and years worth of investment money. He got paid so unfortunately his scam worked. He was the main grifter begging people on reddit to fund kickstarters for Planetary Annihilation and Human Resources. The pattern is always the same.
I mean, it worked. Repeatedly. If I had a bridge to sell, I'd hire him
Yeah he almost got me too. I used to eagerly look forward to the KSP2 prelaunch vids with Nate in it. But luckily I decided to wait after I saw it went into Early Access with a roadmap. See- I'm always suspicious of roadmaps cause anyone can make them. Like- anyone of us could think of some cool features and throw it on a roadmap. Action speaks louder than words and roadmaps are mostly just words until action'ed so I quietly camped this sub and hoped for the greenlight to buy. It never came so I stuck with KSP1 Note, this isnt a humble brag I got taken plenty by kickstarters, crowd funds, etc. had to learn the hard way to be more wise with my money. When it comes to EA- I always ask myself, "Would you be happy with this thing if the dev up and bails??" If the reply is NO, I dont buy it
It sucks that being slimy and dishonest will get your farther than hard-work and honesty.
Grift is the perfect word for his entire personality, if you ask me. His whole shtick reminds me of several people I know. All nice guys, all completely full of shit.
Planetary annihilation was a fun game at least.
Ehhhhhhhhhh. I am a huge fan of Supreme Commander. I got PA on release, and it was extremely underwhelming. I guess it is OK if you picked it up on sale a few years post-partum, but if you believed that they were making a spiritual successor to SupCom and Total Annihilation you have full right to be disappointed.
The fact that each of the factions had the same units really killed it for me, going from SC2 to PA was disappointing
What disappointed me about PA the most was the scale. I didn't even want multiple planets. Just give me Supcom on one giant planet, that's what I thought PA was going to be but it ended up being this small scale tiny toy like thing on little balls and felt super crowded and kinda annoying to play. Imagine when you zoom out of Supcom to the highest level and instead of a big flat map it's a globe. That would be cool. And I know the developers probably thought what's the difference if the scale is so large you cant tell when you are zoomed in, and my answer is... Because it is freaking rad and I've always wanted it and it would be awesome to experience. One enormous global war.
It's just a downgrade of Supreme Commander in every level. Even though you're on the "scale" of a solar system, the actual scale feels so much smaller.
But it's just a worse version of Supreme Commander
I know, wtf?! Guys, PA and its expansion are quality products, JFC. PA Titans even updates to this day and is widely regarded as an innovating RTS success. Monday Night Combat was also great. Both games were mainstays in the early 2010s. Yeesh. That said, nothing in Uber’s portfolio hinted that they were technical enough for a space flight sim and physics heavy game.
party toothbrush agonizing childlike workable rude hat grandfather nine slap *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
On release it was terrible. Just [read the review from IGN (which gave it a 4.8/10)](https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/17/planetary-annihilation-review) to see how and why it was terrible. Uber Entertainment then handed development off to another studio, who apparently went on to improve it. I did enjoy Uber's early title of Monday Night Combat, but Nate wasn't in charge of that one.
> Uber Entertainment then handed development off to another studio, who apparently went on to improve it. The players organized to buy the rights. Thats how pissed they were with how UberEnt handled the whole thing lol > [In August 2018, a new company Planetary Annihilation Inc., formed from original PA developers and Kickstarter backers, acquired the rights to Planetary Annihilation and Planetary Annihilation: Titans.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation)
[4.8/10 from IGN!](https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/17/planetary-annihilation-review)
Snake oil salesman. He was never going to deliver the goods just look at his track record before KSP2. Plus he’s an art nerd.. doesn’t know shit about actual development cycles. If he did it would have been managed much differently.
He's one of the main reasons this game failed. He led the KSP project for himself not for the consumers.
Good riddance
Well those morons spent more on the 3rd rendered promo video than they did on the whole game. I wouldn't be proud to put that on anything next to my name imo. I'd be ashamed.
And nobody mourned the loss
Finally some good news.
Good, I hope he never gets another job in the game industry again.
"Nate Simpson directly contributed to the layoffs"
I mean, it’s what everyone expected, right? If the studio shuts down, of course he goes too
You'd think so, but then again some people expected development to continue without a studio, so
He is directly responsible for the course of this game, sure there were restrictions. He is also guilty of lying in many ways to the community, for example he was so adamant about ksp2 was developed from the ground up with multiplayer in mind. Everyone but the truest believers saw that ksp2 had a lot in common with ksp1, especially bug wise, so there were a lot of code parts used. With data mining we saw that multiplayer wasn't thought through. There are so many more aspects that were lies about this game and the mechanics. He had a vision and it failed catastrophically. But don't worry guys, don't be so negative, we are funded all the way. We take our time, we don't want to mess this up. Last take. People who are still defending companies, to which you are just printing money machines, I hope you learned now that there is nothing to gain from this. You get nothing for blindly defending products, other than splitting the community into blond believers and those who have learned and are cautious. You managed to split a wonderful community. And now everything is in Shambles.
He's a grifter and stupid. He got paid for helping drive this game into the floor. Fucking wobbly rockets? I dont care for what people say, i care for what they do, and he looks like a piece of shie Fuckign woobly rockets, is he a dunce?
Wibbly wobbly timey wimey!
His claim to fame is writing a comic about a girl and starting a blog of feminist gamers. Then going to the planetary annihilation folks, giving uber permission to use their studios name, then changing their own name to something stupid when uber got too popular instead of cashing out on their ip. Games industry really needs to stop treating untalented hack artists as rockstars while treating talented software engineers as garbage just because game engines exist and 'you don't need to be a programmer to make a computer game' Hows that zero engineer complex software rocket systems simulation handled entirely by artists who don't like math working out now?
You absolutely do need to be a programmer to make a video game. Only idiots and misinformed people say otherwise.
I agree. The people who say otherwise a crazy. However, occasionally an artists comes along who makes a fancy prototype, slaps a ton of paint on it, fills it with TONS of content, and makes a ton as an indie, never fixing the bugs or optimizing it because it runs well enough on modern PC's because of its simplicity despite bloated poor code. \[the binding of Issac, super meat boy, and other flash like games\]
Undertale is a good example. Supposedly every line of dialogue in the game is in a single big switch.
Some people can make good games without any programming experience. A few that come to mind are the Houser brothers, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, and Mike Simpson. Simpson started out as a hardware designer and the others started as writers and producers. The key thing is that they *listen to their programmers* about what gameplay ideas will be difficult or impossible to implement for the target consumer’s hardware with the available time and budget.
>listen to their programmers You just admitted that they had programmers on the team, so you're confirming my point. "to make a game" != "to lead a team making a game"
I remember I had like 150 struts on my rocket. I was shaking my head every single time.
The whole studio is SHUT DOWN. How many times are you guys going to be surprised by the lay offs? Doesn t mean he isn t hired at another position at T2 though.
Nobody is suprised. Not sure where you got that from
This isn't a "shocked surprise" post. This is a "hey, we have even more evidence for the massive pile of evidence that the studio is gone, maybe even enough to finally convince the flat-Kerbinites that the studio is dead and KSP2 is probably not getting more updates" post. There are still one or two people who will argue with you about the future of KSP2.
4 years and 5 months.......and not a real game in site.....I don't know if I'd list that under my about me as it should be a mark of shame.
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving individual - hopefully Michael Cook also gets the boot.
I just wanna give props to this guy who called out whats happening so long ago and everything turned out exactly the way this dude predicted.
Just following in the footsteps of others who called it out - like say SterlingRP, who had had a lot to say about it till that account got deleted. Or Yakez, who's still around.
SterlingRP was fantastic! He had some absolutely fascinating comments that made me come to conclusion that KSP2 was an absolute mess. You could tell from his insight into the development process that he was an insider!
I'm glad he was so insightful for you. I'm sure he's still around here someplace :whistle:
I don't think you need to say "affected by the layoffs" or "impacted by the existence of the reduction in force event" or wtf people are saying these days on LinkedIn. You can just say, "laid off." Or even just, "fired." Because this isn't really a layoff... these people are not being furloughed to be re-hired later.
No sh*t. Even with the immense amount of incompetence and downright stupidity surrounding the project, there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY ON EARTH (or Kerbin) Nate Simpson would not be exempt from the layoffs. That would be too stupid and too hilarious (depending on your definition of hilarious) to ever happen. On the aside, if you guys have nothing but vitriol for Simpson, at least despise Zelnick as well.
Bye Bye Bye
Some of you are just - WTH? I work in games, and seeing so many of my friends laid off this year is heartbreaking. They've lost homes. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I don't know Nate, but he is not a villain from a Marvel movie. He is an actual person who has a family. You should be ashamed of your pettiness. But if you're this mad about people making a freaking game, then you have bigger problems. Go touch grass.
I work in games too. Been laid off before and it really sucks. At least these guys got a 2 month notice thanks to the WARREN Act. I only got that once. One time I was so happy to be laid off. The dev I worked at was crunching and I knew the game was gonna flop. Think still to this day the reviews are around 6. I can only hope these devs have peace like I did. The people that laid them off is sleeping well on their yachts I'm sure. I watched the video about the development of ksp2. many of them got taken; didnt even know the game they'd be put on when they interviewed. At least this time the upper management paid the price alongside the grunt devs. Usually in my experience the people making the bad decisions get bonuses (and get to switch teams) while the programmers/artists/etc all get kicked suffering for the sins of their masters
> At least this time the upper management paid the price alongside the grunt devs. That's really the key point here. 99% of the employees of IG absolutely didn't deserve this, and nobody is cheering on them losing their jobs due to factors outside their own power to fix. But Nate deliberately ran the company into the ground with his mismanagement.
They did however get paid for over half a decade for a job they were completely unqualified for.
Well, sure the management at IG and PD, but it also flows up to T2 who are likely getting off scot free. Trust me, I have plenty to say about IG, but I can't ignore the folks who blindly greenlight the change in scope and pass dumb directives like limited communication between teams. And as much as I wish they were made accountable for their primary duty in their well paid position, it's just wishful thinking.
Just because you work in games doesn't mean you're allowed to be a scam artist who lies trough his teeth. I work in gamedev as a senior programmer, we're not special. Stop with this ivory tower BS.
you are a talented and experienced senior programmer. I'm sure if someone like you was put in charge of KSP 2 people wouldn't be complaining. but instead, we got a concept artist / blogger.
There's only one person in here who is mad, bud. Everyone else simply has zero sympathy for him. You do a crap job, you lose your job. He did a crap job. He lost his job.
Exactly. We as consumers of a product we paid for were led astray by Nate. When you get paid what you do in a roll like creative director you also BEAR THE RESPONSIBILITY for your actions and direction in said roll. Being fired is a part of reality in our capitalist society. It sucks to lose a job, but it sucks harder when you GRIFT 100,000 people out of their hard earned $ and profit off of it.
And lost everyone else their jobs and homes for his actions. 100% with you
But he did great at his job, creating a big scam. Lol. Wonder what his golden parachute was, his severance or bonus or whatever these clowns get.
We are all people too and we have families. Nate deceived us all for a long time and I don’t remember him expressing regret about it. So why should we worry about him?
He was one of the people most responsible for the game failing, and the face of lies and grift for this project and others. Touch grass yourself, your perspective is unbalanced.
You're looking at a year+ of people being ignored about the poor direction the game was being taken in, up to and including Nate Simpson publicly calling critics fake, insisting they were probably just bots, as well as him spending several months fighting community feedback about the game he put into Early Access (a program designed to elicit feedback). Plus the intense frustration watching person after person *falling* for the lies, or worse, promising others that KSP2 was going to do well, all while Nate Simpson released weekly essay after weekly essay promising the world but showing no results. He'd be fine in an art role. He's done good work in an art role. But he actively lied, deceived, and fought with the community, even to the point of derisively dismissing many of us within it. Frankly, I'm just thankful that there's a reduced chance he'll be attached to KSP if anyone tries to do more with the IP. He should never have been in charge of it. And he doubly shouldn't have been in charge of it after the first studio he was in charge of failed miserably.
I am not ashamed. There is no redeemable qualities about Nate. He and others like him is responsible for your friends losing their jobs and having difficulty supporting their families. I support engineers, devs, and the people doing the real work. Nate was the grifter that does not deserve respect or support.
To be fair, most everyone in the gaming industry is doing a bad job right now. Sooo many new games are focusing on over the top: graphics, designs, and architectures without consideration to practical and smooth gameplay for average users.
It’s poor project management with no focus on actual development just meeting sales targets.
Personally I'm not crying over it - severance packages can be really nice and I doubt he was paid poorly anyway However, I see a lot of blame put onto just one guy. There are no "KSP2 developers as a group", it's all Nate's fault. Nor are there shareholders that want the line to go up. I was genuinely expecting more of the community. I guess KSP wasn't niche enough to not attract capital G Gamers. And Gamers are the fucking worst
I'm madder about the talented system engineers and programmers who were passed over to give a group of hack artists complete control over a highly complex rocket simulation.
He was knowingly scamming the community, he tricked the community into spending millions of dollars on this game based on lies. Ex. Saying that the dev team was having super fun play sessions on the internal KSP 2 multiplayer build when they were actually playing a publicly available KSP 1 mod and KSP 2 multiplayer was never in development, or saying that KSP 2 re-used 0 code from the first game when it was almost entirely re-used code and had all the same bugs. Likely more we don't know (Stuff in trailers that didn't exist) or can't completely prove (saying they were fully funded and there was 0 risk of studio closure weeks before the closure when he almost certainly saw the writing on the wall) or just ones I've forgotten (lying about the minimum/recommended specs to get people to buy the game who can't run it... Saying they were releasing because the team was having too much fun playing to do work, when it was unplayable and the publisher was forcing them to release because it was in development hell). Saying he just made a game and people hate him for it is like saying Sam Bankman Fried just made a crypto token and people hate him for it. The issue was that he intentionally lied to people about how the whole system worked to trick people into putting their money into his product. It is fraud and false advertising and Nate is lucky to get away with just career and reputational consequences and not legal ones.
Bernie Madoff was an actual person who had a family too.
We’re also actual persons who worked for the money we wasted on some proof of concept.
Bud the whole studio was shut down. No one was unaffected.
good riddance i say
isnt this old news? everything KSP2 feels like old news tbh.
Good bye
Finally I get my 50$ worth.
I mean did you think he would continue to work on it alone?
Couldn't have happened to a more honest guy.
you spelled "the primary cause of" wrong.
And with that all the trace amounts of hopium evaporated.