Take-Two publishes WARN notice about seventy layoffs and studio closure in Seattle, possibly affecting Kerbal Space Program 2 developers Intercept Games
Take-Two posted a legally-required notice that it is laying off 70 workers and closing a studio in Seattle. This is part of mass layoffs announced across Take-Two. This has also been mentioned by Games Industry.biz, although without much more details than what I have here (at time of writing).
The only Take-Two studio in Seattle is Intercept Games, who have been making Kerbal Space Program 2. We also know that Intercept had about 65-70 people working there (half of which were on KSP2, half of which were on an unannounced project).
Various KSP2 devs have also posted on social media that they have been impacted by layoffs (not sure about the rules re: linking social media profiles, so I'll hold off).
We may or may not have more news in the coming days. It's hard times in the industry right now, and my heart goes out for everyone affected.
EDIT: From Game Developer:
When approached for comment by Game Developer, Take-Two wouldn't confirm whether Intercept Games has been impacted by the cuts–despite multiple Kerbal Space Program developers indicating they recently left the studio, with one expressly stating they were "laid off." A company spokesperson did, however, explain that its Private Division publishing label will continue to support Kerbal Space Program 2.
...
When pushed again on the current status of Intercept Games, Take-Two told Game Developer it has "nothing further to note."
The story of Kerbal Space Program is a case study of the rot-economy.
Guy builds something cool.
Team makes it something amazing.
Community makes it legendary.
Big company gobbles up the IP, shreds the talent and rushes out a cash grab.
I'm sorry for the devs who lost their jobs, but the writing was on the wall when KSP2 was announced.
In this case, the pre-takeover studio was also not, by all accounts, a great place to work, which resulted in turning over the entire dev team.
KSP2 is a sad case of the state of the video game industry.
Firstly it came out as a full priced game in early access. I bought in because I wanted to support their ability to develop a successor that wasn't pulled together with what felt to be bubblegum and bailing twine. I loved KSP1, but had gotten sick of the game's limitations for what I wanted to accomplish with it. Also, by the time KSP2 came out, a major update for KSP1 had come to pass and I really wasn't interested in making sure all my mods were up to date. So, back to vanilla adventures I went!
The initial launch of Early Access was not great. Many people were soured by this, and I honestly don't blame them. They had a standard of product from KSP1 and the sequel wasn't even delivering on that baseline. Not everything was there, performance was poor and it just felt rushed and incomplete. As if a larger hand was forcing the delivery of an incomplete product. Fine, it's early access and if I choose to participate, I must accept the knowledge that I am now a public beta tester.
But the updates were slow and low impact. The crowd grew restless as they wanted to see something resembling progress, anything resembling caring. The Devs would send assurances that things were in progress, but things would go radio silent for longer than recommended. Eventually, they did post an update that was worth it. The "For Science!" update was a breath of fresh air, and a reflection of what I wanted to see: Progress and innovation in their vision for the game. Yes, there were even loftier goals of colonies, resource management and multiplayer, but this felt like we finally got the game to "Feature comparable" to base KSP1.
Afterwards? Deafening silence. They were at work on something. They had to be. Right? A few weeks ago, we got a message saying: "Some big news is coming! We're eager to share the updates with you!" and got a picture of some graphical updates for clouds as a teaser (which, I admit, were really good looking) but not much more. Unfortunately, I don't think the announcement they expected to give was the fact that the studio was being shuttered.
It doesn't take a genius to see what likely was going on here. Take2 upper management was likely upset on all the money that was not being recouped from their investment into the game. They likely pressured Intercept Games into just "Get the job done, we don't care how, just do it!" The problem is that from what I could tell, Intercept's grand plans were not something that they felt could be cut down into smaller pieces. They were possibly trying to be forward thinking and preventing code rebuilds. Building code for games that are single player and multiplayer are two different beasts and having the proper framework in place was in their best interests. The downside of this is that you will likely go for a long period of time without anything to show for your work. They were able to skirt by until the economy soured for the tech world, and then it quickly shifted to a scenario where profit margins are being measured to every cent and if you're in the red, you're on notice.
I can't speak for the Devs here, but I wonder how many of them were aware of the implications of the climate in their industry. Did they know and just feel like they had no chance to succeed? Were any attempts made to rescope their work or did they just stick to their guns? These questions are forever unknown unless others come forward, but I doubt that they will and honestly, that's okay. We'll just speculate for now.
At the end of it all though? I'm sad because this likely means the end of any hope for a KSP rework. Other copycats have tried, but they all lacked the charm of slinging those goofy little Kerbals through the stars. Take2 is likely going to shelve this forever until someone who wants to try again will attempt to buy the rights. Those rights will not be cheap either, as Take2 will want to try to recoup their losses + interest and I seriously doubt anyone wants to spend big money for a niche game.
Rest in Peace, KSP. You had a good run.
I mean - I'm obviously not a KSP dev, but I can kind of speak to your last point from my experience.
Our game was launching and not doing well. It started off as an indie project by a small (but talented) team. The indie studio wanted to get acquired, so they slapped a coat of franchise-specific paint on a prototype they had been working on for 2 years and pitched it as an entry in an existing franchise.
The publisher saw the potential and agreed. The indie dev was acquired and the prototype was being turned into a "real game". This is when I joined the team, as one of the first new hires after the buyout.
We worked on the game for 3 more years. In that time, we made some missteps:
I was a strong advocate for using one particular system (Unreal's Gameplay Ability System) and got the engineers onboard. I spearheaded development on it for 8 months, with it being a core system everything else was built on. Designers hated it and there wasn't much I could do to address their concerns as it was an issue on the architectural side. Eventually after 8 months the lead designers told engineering that designers all agreed the current system was untenable and asked us to completely remove it (with the backing of production + management). This decision led to another year of new work as it meant rewriting large sections of the game from scratch. This happened right as the pandemic hit, so this rewrite also happened as the team shifted from in-office collaboration to being fully remote.
Our engineering lead quit unexpectedly. He was a shield that kept everything together, an industry vet of 30 years. Replacing him was an engineer who had never led a team before, with 6 years of experience. This is just after we recovered from the above-mentioned rewrite. Our new lead was grumpy that we did that rewrite to begin with because he says the new systems didn't handle netcode as well as the old systems. He pushed for a complete rework of netcode and movement systems, and since he was the new lead... well, what he said was gospel. He rewrote some core netcode and checked it in, but it was buggier than Unreal's stock networking. He would spend the next 10 months leading to soft launch trying to make it better, but it never got better.
We soft-launched and people complained about movement and core mechanics. Surprise surprise. We also didn't have any engineers on the audio team, so people complained that sounds were awful. The tutorial was drawn-out and had an abysmal completion rate (keeping in mind that most tutorials have bad completion rates).
The community told us loud and clear what needed work. None of it was new (although the community did find some easy things we could fix). We made some adjustments and went for a second soft launch. Things were better the second time - not amazing, but the community reaction was improving. The game was getting more fun, and we got another round of feedback that was productive. It was looking like we could turn the ship around, with another patch planned in a couple months that would improve on a lot of areas the community disliked (and add some new features that we had finished internally but were purposely slow-walking to build hype).
Then, a month before the patch dropped - we got a random all-hands meeting during lunchtime, on a Wednesday. 1 hour of notice. We were all nervously joking about what it could mean; there was some speculation about us doing a Switch port so maybe that was it.
Instead... we got the news that we were all fired, and the studio was shutting down. It was to be formally announced at the earnings call in an hour, and we were not to say anything until then. We were told that we had 30 days of regular paychecks. After that, we were to be given a lump sum of 30 days of salary + sick/vacation pay + severance. (I calculated mine to be 5-6 months of runway.)
Until the layoff "formally" went through within 30 days, we could look for other jobs at other studios owned by our parent company. However, we were informed that our parent company was not actively hiring at this time and that most of the 130-person team was going to be laid off. (The real joke is that they were to be hiring, just in Q1 and we were being laid off in Q4 to make the fiscal year look good. So because there was no overlap - we weren't eligible to transfer to the jobs that would open up a week after our transfer window expired.)
In the end, I managed to find a role elsewhere. And it's not like the writing wasn't on the wall - we just refused to see it, thinking that we could somehow fix the issues and make something people liked. And we were making progress, which sucked.
We never even got a chance to deploy that patch, either. We just quietly shelved it, and the new features/fixes never saw the light of day.
It's one of those things that I think parallels the KSP Devs. It feels like they were in a similar situation. Like you mention, we probably won't ever know for sure - but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some aspects that overlapped between our situations. And I wouldn't be surprised if the KSP devs honestly thought they could fix things up until the day they got told they were fired.
Say what you will about the state of KSP2, but it seems there were internal problems regarding game direction and it wasn't the fault of these devs.
I work in the AAA space myself and my prior studio got shut down January 2023 under similar circumstances. I moved to a different project, which got cancelled February 29th of this year. I've found another home for now - but it's really scary seeing stuff like this constantly.
The community manager posted an update last week saying things were "full steam ahead" - they recently updated their LinkedIn saying they were "open to work". Having been on the other side of it - you know your project is in trouble (well, sometimes you know), but you always hope you have enough time to right the ship. For legal reasons nobody is told that things are cancelled until appropriate legal notices have been filed. So from their perspective - last week things were "full steam ahead"... until they weren't.
Smol update:
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/take-two-confirms-kerbal-space-program-2-is-safe-despite-seattle-layoffs