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Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
- xigency 9y agoVideo game company acquisitions can be brutal. I hope everything goes well for the team now and several years in the future.
- mysterydip 9y agoAgreed. The number of times I've read "don't worry, this doesn't change anything" in the press release of an acquisition is too many to count, and the number of times it's been true has been close to zero.
- TylerE 9y agoIn this case it's probably a good thing. Really, the thing to do is buy it for the name, and then start from scratch in an actually good game engine (i.e. not Unity)
- cr0sh 9y ago> in an actually good game engine (i.e. not Unity) ...and drop Linux support, of course. /smh
- jsmthrowaway 9y agohttps://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linux_Support https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linux_Support http://www.pcworld.com/article/2940175/cryteks-powerful-cryengine-is-the-latest-gaming-engine-to-embrace-linux.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2940175/cryteks-powerful-crye... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)#OS_X.2C_Linux.2C_and_Android_support https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)#OS_X.2C... UE4 even runs in a browser out of the box. Unity is not the Magic Linux Engine, it's just a bit more convenient because of .NET, particularly when it comes to modding.
- omg_ketchup 9y agoUnity's actually great... the problem is anyone can use it.
- TylerE 9y agoUnity's great for small indie games. Complex simulations don't mix well with mandatory GC. Microstutters suck.
- jimmaswell 9y agoIt's not that hard to work with the GC in Unity to make the game smooth, especially if you do so from the beginning. https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/performance-optimization/optimizing-garbage-collection-unity-games https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/performance-optim...
- TylerE 9y agoHow come no ones seem to do it then, or not do it well enough? Cities:Skylines has the same GC stutters.
- bananaboy 9y agoIt's easy to fall into the trap of doing things the simple way or the unity way. To avoid it you have to go out of your way a bit and apply the same rigour as if you were writing your own engine.
- jimmaswell 9y agoNot making heap allocations in loops/Update and favoring object reuse really isn't comparable to writing your own engine.
- bananaboy 9y agoI didn't say it was. I'm just saying that you can't allocate and instantiate all over the shop just because it's a GC language.
- pawadu 9y agoGive a man a game engine and he will write a game. Give a man no game engine and he will write a game engine for the rest of his life. - unknown GDC speaker
- gozur88 9y agoYes, but it wasn't EA who did the purchase.
- ciaranm 9y agoSeems like a chunk of the team left already (and were subsequently hired by Valve[1]) [1] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-05-22-valve-hired-the-kerbal-space-program-developers http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-05-22-valve-hired-the...
- BOBOTWINSTON 9y agoI saw somewhere that Riot had also picked up a few of them. Not that it really makes what happened much better, but at least these guys got a reward of sorts.
- sevensor 9y ago> these guys got a reward of sorts. Of sorts. The games industry is not exactly known for its humane working conditions.
- chickenfries 9y agoMust be better than being owned by a marketing firm, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squad_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squad_(company)
- babuskov 9y ago> I hope everything goes well for the team IIRC there was a lot of controversy regarding the working conditions and wages. If those stories were true, things could only get better.
- Declanomous 9y agoI think most of the team actually left after 1.0 was finished. They got sick of working for Squad. I think Squad was never a particularly good place to be a game developer, and they realized they should probably cash out now.
- Svekax 9y agoThe ones that were weren't fired and replaced with Mexican "interns" working full time for $200 per month. https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program-developers-slam-studio-for-poor-pay-and-crunch-time-359507.phtml https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program-deve... I wonder if Take-Two Interactive considered the morality of acquiring a company that paid slave wages. Maybe they should change their name to Take-Two Thousand Annually.
- MrZongle2 9y agoTake-Two appears to have purchased the KSP property, not Squad, the original owning company.
- Svekax 9y agoWhat is your point?
- mcphage 9y agoWell, you asked: > I wonder if Take-Two Interactive considered the morality of acquiring a company that paid slave wages. But they didn't acquire the company.
- ionised 9y agoYou said acquiring the company, which they didn't.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoAre you suggesting that KSP is eternally tainted by Squad's actions? Should we burn the code, and start from scratch?
- baq 9y agothis time it can't be much worse, there was a lot of drama about a year ago when everybody from the old guard left.
- pawadu 9y agoWhats next? Dwarf Fortress acquired by EA?
- MrZongle2 9y ago"This is a DLC. All craftdwarfship is of the lowest quality for its price. It menaces with spikes of suck and greed."
- Eerie 9y ago"Tales of Avarice and Cupidity"
- intended 9y agoI know The world has been odd for the past year, but I assure you that we aren't in the EA buys DF time line. We may be in the DF eats EA timeline though. Edit: I wonder what the Adams brothers would do with "fuck you" money
- jandrese 9y agoProbably work at exactly the same pace. DF isn't something they're doing to maximize their return on investment, it's a labor of love.
- eduren 9y ago>I wonder what the Adams brothers would do with "fuck you" money If EA bought Dwarf Fortress then they would move onto their next game: "Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter III: Simulation Hypothesis" Some say we already live within it.
- Dirlewanger 9y agoI doubt that. The brothers behind it couldn't care less about money. To them, DF isn't even half complete, and won't be for many, many years.
- vit05 9y agoI think RimWorld and Prison Architect are great opportunities for bigger studios.
- jesseryoung 9y agoHopefully the game will be better off under Take-Two (I am not familiar with their past treatment of indy-like games like this) I have read several stories online about how poorly SQUAD treated the core development team of KSP: https://www.develop-online.net/news/squad-devs-blast-kerbal-space-program-studio-for-high-crunch-and-low-pay/0220059 https://www.develop-online.net/news/squad-devs-blast-kerbal-...
- dingo_bat 9y ago$2400 sounds incredibly low even in PPP terms for Mexico.
- crispyambulance 9y agoThat does seem impossibly low. I happen to know that electronics manufacturing techs in Mexico (assembly line work) get the equivalent of $50/week for the lowest rung. To pay the same for high-skill developers/content-creators seems like something has been mis-communicated or maybe a typo. Kerbal Space program has been doing well. I wonder who, exactly, has been raking in all the cash?
- adl 9y agoSoftware developers (.NET and Java) can get between 1,000 - 3,000 dollars a month in Monterrey, Guadalajara or Mexico City. 2,500 yearly salary sounds extremely low. Even interns get paid more that that here.
- Sebguer 9y agoThe guy who was getting paid $2400 wasn't a developer- he was basically their community manager.
- theWatcher37 9y agoI say this as a massive KSP fan with ~1000 hours in it (admittedly a lot lower than others). Almost any level of support will be better than SQUAD. 5 guys working part time on it would yield more features/year than SQUAD has managed to roll out over the years. My only concern is mod support, since that's been the main source of new feature growth.
- tangue 9y agoI hope they won't fuck up the game. As a side note I didn't suspect there was that much people working on this game.
- LoSboccacc 9y agois this por guy getting downvoted for giving a reality check? have you noticed in the last six month they managed to add just internationalization and the console port didn't move an inch ahead with people totally unable to enjoy the game since release because of the save corruption? right now there are only newbs and modders left in that team, none of the core team is there and for the most part they're barely getting by in maintenance mode. notice how few of the long standing issue ever got resolved? btw, asking some real question here, what will be of this now? http://archive.is/aPSX7/image http://archive.is/aPSX7/image
- Analemma_ 9y agoThe core team left because Squad was a terrible place to work, hence the dismal development pace. The optimism in this thread stems from the fact that Take-Two will hopefully be better and attract talent back to the team.
- cosinetau 9y agoCongrats KSP team! Hope this next adventure is unlike my adventures with Jeb.
- intoverflow2 9y agoRead up on the reality of the KSP team. It's not pretty.
- cosinetau 9y agoAssumptions outside of scientific contexts also aren't pretty.
- mediocrejoker 9y agoI hope this goes well. I would love to see a remake that retains the exact same gameplay with more modern graphics. Hopefully all the people who paid for the current in-development version are not left high and dry in terms of updates and bugfixes. I also have heard the rumors that the team was not treated well, and that the game was never really the focus of the company. I think it may have been a side project of one of the developers on a totally unrelated product (ie. not even a game).
- yellow_postit 9y agoTo each their own, but this kind of sandbox game to me works better with simpler graphics as it leaves more to the imagination.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 9y agoHow do you mean? You still see everything, what's left to the imagination when something looks worse? It's not like a book where you can add your own details...
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago'Simple' aesthetics and high-quality graphics aren't mutually exclusive. You can have cartoony looking games that still benefit greatly from better lighting, among other things. The big thing that I'd like to see are atmospheric effects and better rocket plumes. I very much agree that the simple aesthetic works really well for the game, but there's a lot that could be done.
- LoSboccacc 9y agosimple is orthogonal with quality https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2lryka/heres_a_link_to_b9s_barn_critiques/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2lryka/...
- dingo_bat 9y ago
- cr0sh 9y agoI have a good (bad) feeling that this change will likely mean that, sooner or later, Linux support will be dropped. /bet me it won't...
- wjoe 9y agoDoubtful. Take Two have released a fair number of Linux games already, at least from 2K's catalog - Borderlands, Bioshock Infinite, XCOM, etc. I guess much of this is down to the individual developers rather than the parent company, but it is at least evidence that Take Two has no inherent issue with their games being on Linux. Not to mention the game being in Unity, already running on Linux, and I assume a higher than average proportion of Linux players (I have no numbers for this, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case), I can't any reason why they'd want to drop support.
- omg_ketchup 9y agoIsn't Linux becoming more and more compatible with modern games/development?
- Doxin 9y agoThe problem isn't, and has never been, linux being compatible with games or with their development. The problem is game developers not making their game compatible with linux.
- Graham24 9y agoI await the release of Grand Theft Planet.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoYouTube delivers: https://youtu.be/zszJRsGzo9A?t=124 https://youtu.be/zszJRsGzo9A?t=124 (also good from the very beginning, though content warning: dank themes)
- grondilu 9y agoI'm surprised not to see more mentions of GTA on this thread. Take 2 owns Rockstar games and I've always hoped that one day GTA would expand to space.
- codezero 9y agoI've had so much trouble playing the port on console. I know it was made by a contractor but ugh. I want to love this game but it's total masochism to play on console right now. Hopefully this leads to something good.
- amiga-workbench 9y agoPlaying it with a controller must be like pulling teeth! KSP isnt really that entertaining for me without mods to expand the gameplay either.
- codezero 9y agoIt's actually fun enough to suffer quite a bit, but yeah, watching people with mods on PC makes me very very jealous!
- cdrark 9y agoCome on co-op mode!
- TeMPOraL 9y agoKSP was possibly my best entertainment spending ever. It definitely is the best game for me in terms of costs / time played. If you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and buy it now. If you have a kid with even tangential interest in space, get a copy for them. Side effects of playing KSP include: - getting an intuitive feel for basic orbital mechanics - finding yourself reading up on actual math to better understand what's happening with your rockets (and how to build more efficient one) - no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics (RE the last point - after Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and The Expanse series, getting basic spaceflight wrong should no longer be accepted in popular media. Looking at you, makers of The 100.)
- marcosdumay 9y agoIt's so weird, looking at a perfectly normal movie and the only thing you can think about is "What? It doesn't work that way!" like if everything started falling up with no explanation and the characters found that perfectly normal. But I'll disagree on Gravity and Interstellar getting spaceflight right. Unless you are going for very basic.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI'm going for the very basic. The kind of which immediately destroys any suspension of disbelief I would have. Gravity was good enough in my book, and is also somewhat rescued by the way you could feel the vastness of space when watching it in 3D.
- plopz 9y agoThe protagonist-seeking-debris that ignores orbital mechanics pretty much destroyed my suspension of disbelief with Gravity.
- logfromblammo 9y agoI could suspend pretty well up until the point where the dude just had to nobly sacrifice himself for no reason. All I could see at that point was the emergency drama screenwriter shooting a blunderbuss filled with space station shrapnel into the unsuspecting back of the realistic physics consultant.
- nirav72 9y agoI just logged into my account and grabbed the installers and portable zip files for the last 2 versions. Just in case, take-two's influence somehow breaks the KSP experience I've come to love and enjoy.
- mhh__ 9y agoKerbal Space Program is a game that we're quite lucky to have. No microtransactions, no DRM, just sciencey goodness. Except for those making it, who Squad apparently didn't bother paying anywhere near what they were worth.
- dragonwriter 9y agoIts likely the lack of excessive monetization and the lack of pay to developers are not unrelated.
- erik 9y agoKSP has been extremely successful financially. The staff problems likely come from Squad not being a game studio. It was a marketing agency, and KSP grew out of an employee's passion project. Management has never seemed to be invested in the game.
- epicide 9y agoThis possibly isn't the least hard to read sentence I have read :) Easier to read and hopefully captured what you were trying to say: > Reduced monetization likely reduced developer pay.
- dragonwriter 9y agoA more accurate rephrasing would be: The lack of effort toward monetization likely is an effect of the same cause as low developer pay. I was suggesting that the two were linked, but not suggesting the specific causal link from monetization to developer pay of your version. But you are correct that the original was unnecessarily elliptical.
- kfrzcode 9y agoI'm almost certainly in the minority, however, I do so enjoy pedantry. "Everything in its right place."
- renega3 9y agoI stopped playing KSP due to the microstutter issue (ostensibly due the to garbage collector) fixing that would make the game playable again.
- cydonian_monk 9y agoHopefully this means things will "improve" without turning the community into a sterile, lifeless environmemt, but we'll see. Maybe not much changes, maybe they take the IP and run with it. Who knows. Must say it was weird to stumble on this news here on HN first instead of on the KSP forum (where admitedly it was posted first); guess it's been a busy morning and I just missed it.
- itgoon 9y agoMostly, I hope they mostly improve the game. Not remake it, re-think it, re-purposed. Just clean it up, make some UI improvements. If I were to make a big change, it would be to add a stand-alone server. Not necessarily multi-player, but just something I can leave running and attach to. I have an itch for real-time missions (days and weeks long), plus I'd like to run multiple scenarios at once. I guess what I'm saying is I hope Take-Two doesn't lose the _spirit_ of the game. It has let us ground-bound wanna-be rocket scientists the opportunity to play.
- cydonian_monk 9y agoAgreed. A stand-alone server would also be great for those of us that run the game with a different integrator (such as Principia for n-body physics). I too like real-time missions, at least short duration ones, and recently flew Vostok 1 in near real time (though less successfully).
- tdsamardzhiev 9y agoWell, out of the big gaming companies, Take Two is the best one to get acquired by. Let's see where that leads.
- erikb 9y agoWhy do they always say "nothing will change"? Of course things will change. That why someone acquired them, to change something. And why do they always say the acquisition is good for the community? I count meself to the community, yet I didn't receive any six to ten digit payouts from the sale. Why should it be exciting for me?
- dschuetz 9y agoI'm just glad that Microsoft didn't get this one. I bought it within the early access period, so I actively contributed to the development. I hope/expect to see some franchise spin-offs with the Kermans <3
- wexxx 9y agothis is awesome!
- wexxx 9y agothis is awesome!
- Orangeair 9y agoI sometimes get the feeling that this is the only game HN plays. When people talk about not being able to switch away from Windows due to games, it seems like someone always responds, "Well Kerbal Space Program runs on Linux and that's all I care about." I don't think I've ever seen articles similar to this one about other games gain as much traction. Can't think of very many articles about games getting to the top of HN at all, actually, unless they're about John Carmack writing one.
- mdavidn 9y agoAgreed. I'm surprised Factorio hasn't surfaced more frequently on HN. The game's automation play is just as addictive and creative, and it runs on Mac and Linux.
- j9461701 9y agoThe people who have found Factorio have yet to come back from playing Factorio. Their children miss them.
- simonbarker87 9y agoSo true, I spent about 150 hours on that game in 2 months and apparently that's pretty light compared to a lot of people (probably explained by me not being a gamer and this being the only game I've completed in the last decade other that Leo's Fortune), I launched a rocket and have since uninstalled it. Fortunately I found the latter stage of the game such a trudge that I've got little inclination to go back to it - although I think 0.15 will solve many of my gripes so I'm avoiding reading about it for now. Factorio is nicknamed Cracktorio for a reason :-(
- DiabloD3 9y agoFactorio has murdered as many hours of my time as OpenTTD has. What is this "outside world" you speak of?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI've seen it mentioned at times, usually in discussions around Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress. Factorio definitely scratches a geek itch, but KSP has one advantage - Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaceeee!
- koiz 9y agoIt seemed something was up when a few devs went to valve.
- parisidau 9y agoShameless self-promotion, but together with some friends I wrote a book for O'Reilly Media on KSP! Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/dp/1491913053 https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/... O'Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do Safari: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-kerbal-players/9781491913475/ https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-kerbal-pl...