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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

First the lead, now half the team. What is it with people jumping ship on KSP?

There's a lot of rumors of shady practices at that developer - shitty hours, below minimum-wage pay, poor management, intern exploitation, threats of litigation against ex-employees, profits being poured into pet projects of the founders...

Generally, but not always, these kinds of stories aren't told about well-ran shops. But hey, it's video games, so who knows?

OTOH, all the developers say they're sad about leaving, and really seem it. And I've never heard anything of the sort.

Mind, they're an advertising company by business: this is their first foray into games.

It's perfectly possible to have suffered shitty hours/below minimum-wage pay/poor management/etc. and at the same time be sad to leave. (The sadness then being leaving a project you're proud of and the community that loves it.)

Indeed; it's the kind of project I'd be personally willing to work on for free as long as savings lasted. Whatever the crap is going on at Squad, there's no denial that this is one of the best video games ever, especially if measured by amount of kids who actually learned advanced physics in order to play it better.

I have 0 context and background info, i'm not even into the game, but maybe it's just people moving on. I can see they have created a truly amazing game and now they are looking for new venues, new challenges. Considering the success they had I wouldn't be surprised most of those people are also getting some sweet offers.

Nope - read up. The (unverified) claim is exploitation by the game studio.

Given what I know about Squad, that seems unlikely. Well, unlikely beyond ordinary levels, anyways. This is video games.

More claims: https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/4hw5x7/...

That's not a good thing, but that's actually quite common in the games industry. It's bad, and the industry is apparently trying to kill it, but for now comes part and parcel with the job, in most places.

Ah, no. I missed some stuff. Yeah, that's a but worse than usual.

That seems to be likely.

Squad isn't a games company they are just awesome and backed an employees drive to create the game. I suspect the staff who work at Squad are attracted to all kinds of projects they're contracted for. As ksp peaks and slumps perhaps they don't want to just be in the maintenance game.

"Isn't a games company" that stumbled across KSP and gave it up is kind of like Amazon deciding they weren't an IaaS company and giving up AWS.

Talk about your failed opportunities to pivot.

They didn't give it up, there are still developers on it.

Digital advertising agencies are special in a sense that game dev isn't really other domain for those. If you do your tech inhouse, its likely you'll have people capable of gamedev, be it iOS/Unity/Unreal/Defold/HTML5 or (much less these days) Flash.

They're not digital advertising in the traditional sense, although they do a bit of that. They're interactive stuff, some physical stuff. And some games and software, which is why they had Filipe on staff when he tendered his resignation to start work on KSP, setting the whole thing in motion.

They recently released versions of the game on consoles. I'd guess that they stuck around for post-release patches, and now that it's stable, are winding down development.

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