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Comment by xigency | Hacker News Reader

Video game company acquisitions can be brutal. I hope everything goes well for the team now and several years in the future.

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I 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.

The 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-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.

Take-Two appears to have purchased the KSP property, not Squad, the original owning company.

What is your point?

Well, 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.

You said acquiring the company, which they didn't.

Are you suggesting that KSP is eternally tainted by Squad's actions? Should we burn the code, and start from scratch?

A wage that is agreed upon by both parties without coercion is not, by definition, a 'slave wage'. Yes, there are poor people who live in hellholes and are used to much lower salaries than you and me. It may make us feel uncomfortable or guilty, because we don't 'feel' as if we 'truly' deserve so much more money than them. But thankfully, following irrational feeling of injustice is not the only foundation of ethics that we have.

> I think Squad was never a particularly good place to be a game developer

Given the usual conditions a game developer works on, that's a particularly intense phrase.

Squad isn't (or wasn't, at least) a game company. I can't remember their actual line of business. Viral marketing or some such. The guy who started KSP made his pitch and had a fair amount of freedom to do what he wanted, but I don't think the company management ever really knew what to do with the game or the developers involved.

Also, game companies are famously bad places to work. I can only think of two for which I would even consider working, and I turned down an offer from one of them.

Seems 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...

I 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.

> these guys got a reward of sorts.

Of sorts. The games industry is not exactly known for its humane working conditions.

Valve is.

Valve seems like it might be a little too "humane". Gotta light a fire under those devs and get them to actually release a game now and again. Valve has been coasting on Steam and Hats for way too long.

As much as I'd love a new Valve game, why fix what's not broken, financially speaking? Valve/Steam definitely have plenty of other problems that I'd love to see get sorted out, but they're making tons of money.

Because I for one am not making any of that money and I want a new Portal game, damn it.

Valve seems to have a slow pace for a reason...

With games, you seem to have two choices...

Do you want a game now, or a genre defining masterpiece that maintains playability for a decade later?

I would be okay with Valve Time. This isn't them being slow, this is them not making games anymore. There hasn't been a Valve-developed game since 2011 (that's when Dota 2 was released as a beta).

It's becoming a race of the tortoises to see whether Valve or George RR Martin will release a much-rumored, eagerly-awaited new work first...

I have an unpopular opinion about Portal 2 that seems relevant here. I just don't think it was that groundbreaking. Sure, it was a fine game, but it felt more like Portal: Episode 1 (in the vein of the HL2 content packs) than it did a proper sequel. I don't recall it adding any truly meaningful/groundbreaking gameplay mechanics. Portal blew my mind the first few times I played it, and I couldn't get enough of it. The only other games within at least the past decade that also did that for me were KSP and Minecraft. Portal 2 just felt like a content pack, with admittedly well fleshed-out characters. Am I missing something? I mean, I guess the coop puzzles were cool.

Now an actual Half-Life 3 in VR, on the other hand ... if executed properly that would literally go into the history books as launching the entire next generation of gaming, more different in kind than even the original transition from sprite-based to truly 3D-rendered environments.

Agreed. 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.

In 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)

Give 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

Hey, I resemble that remark :-(

Same here. At some point I had more abandoned game engines than actual games in playable state...

I didn't say write their own... but how about a proper multithreaded modern engine like Unreal?

> in an actually good game engine (i.e. not Unity)

...and drop Linux support, of course.

/smh

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linux_Support

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2940175/cryteks-powerful-crye...

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.

Unity's actually great... the problem is anyone can use it.

Unity's great for small indie games. Complex simulations don't mix well with mandatory GC. Microstutters suck.

It'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-optim...

How come no ones seem to do it then, or not do it well enough?

Cities:Skylines has the same GC stutters.

It'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.

Not making heap allocations in loops/Update and favoring object reuse really isn't comparable to writing your own engine.

I 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.

I've never encountered a stuttering issue in any Unity game I've played.

For a game engine, smooth performance is pretty much required. If you have to a) know that you have to worry about GC stutters (which beginners are unlikely to), and b) proactively do something about it, that seems like a major failing of a game engine. If I use a game engine, it's because I want to work on the game and avoid having to do things like manage the GC.

Besides, GC is one of those things that is classically unsuitable for real-time use cases, and games are exactly a real-time use case. So you could argue that Unity choosing a GC language was a predictably a bad decision. Again, I don't use a game engine because I want to put up with bad decisions.

All of the extra convenience and features afforded by using .NET are more than worth having to do a few simple things not to make the GC trigger at the wrong times. A game written by a beginner in any engine is going to have classes of errors that make it harder to keep using the same codebase over time. Compare the few simple suggestions (many of which like object reuse apply to C++ as well) in the article to the huge list of things not to do in C++.

If you're playing KSP, you can tame the stuttering with the MemGraph[0] mod. I don't know about other Unity-based games (nor do I even know of any other games that suffer from the issue). Also in my case they weren't microstutters, rather ~1-3 second pauses.

[0]http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/139128-...

Yes, but it wasn't EA who did the purchase.

Must be better than being owned by a marketing firm, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squad_(company)

> 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.

this time it can't be much worse, there was a lot of drama about a year ago when everybody from the old guard left.

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