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Comment by t0astbread | Hacker News Reader

KSP always looked very cool but I've heard a couple of things that threw me off:

- KSP devs are or were treated poorly by their employer (low pay, no compensation for the success of the game)

- apparently the program collected a lot of data (I can't remember what exactly) about its users and the machines it was running on, to the point where even non-privacy minded people were calling it spyware

Does anyone know anything about this? Afaik discussion about these issues just kinda stopped after a while but we never got a conclusive answer to these points.

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Squad was/is a marketing company based out of Mexico. The owner of the company agreed to let his lead technical guy work on KSP as a side project as a bribe to keep him from leaving to do other things. KSP took off, and the team grew to more than five people. After the 1.0 release most (all) of the original team left, especially after they outsourced the console port to an outside team. The original KSP team are all now working on independent projects.

KSP2 is sort of a Battlefield 5 type game, where somebody still owns the IP but the original team that built the engine/brought the magic is gone. It might be good, who knows.

In my opinion I'm a little skeptical about KSP2 as the base KSP1 game was so moddable that I can't imagine what they would add to KSP 2 that isn't in the base game through mods already. But maybe it will be even better than the first.

So that means the original devs were never really compensated and if I buy a KSP game nowadays I'm not supporting them either?

Well KSP launched several successful careers and also there's the goodwill of the owner of Squad who had the foresight to invest in his employee and his employee's skillset. But yes you are correct KSP is not owned by the original creative/creator, it's owned by their employer.

>there's the goodwill of the owner of Squad who had the foresight to invest in his employee and his employee's skillset

Sure if you ignore the whole once Squad realized they had a cash cow they treated the developers like shit until they all left.

Companies investing in skill sets generally try to keep their cash cow men around.

It’s an interesting example to bring up next time one of those HN threads pop up about “Should I work on a side project while still working for my employer?”

I don't understand how the answer to that question can be anything other than "fuck yes, if you want to", though.

>I don't understand how the answer to that question can be anything other than "fuck yes, if you want to", though.

Sure, but it probably makes sense to first have a reasonable, flexible, non-draconian invention assignment agreement in place—even if you don't think the side project will be worth anything.

Depending on where you live it might not even be enforceable either implicitly or explicitly due to local laws if all resources are employee owned(time, equipment, etc etc).

Yup, that would be illegal in Illinois for sure

Ideally, but even if not, just work on it and don't release anything about it until you quit the company (preferably with a bit of a buffer for deniability sake). I wouldn't normally advocate for this behavior, but these draconian rules shouldn't be so commonplace to begin with, and also companies shouldn't be able to control what you do in your free time.

> anything other than "fuck yes, if you want to"

ownership transfer clauses. some are in the fine print, some are directly in the standard contracts i.e. Italy has these in the C.C.N.L., no way to avoid them, so you can't cash in a side project, you need first to severe your employment contract.

So what are the original devs doing now? Particularly whoever originally envisioned KSP? I can't believe you can create KSP and then not go on to work on something interesting.

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9i9ovv/i_am_felipe_ha...

Isn't that how most games are? I can't imagine many devs get royalties for their code.

Yes but it's apparently exceptionally bad with Squad/KSP.

Aside from that I also think that this isn't good. Everyone involved should be compensated for the success of the product they created.

if you want a share of the success, then you should also share the failure. Would devs agree to a salary clawback or loss of an equity buy-in?

What was the loss for the company if KSP failed? They were sponsoring the cost of KSP dev time to keep their lead developer not to actually create KSP. Under your mercenary evaluation of this the company didn't actually have any chance of failure as the dev stays, so by your reasoning the company shouldn't get any of the profits.

I don’t know how you get from what I said, to what you said. The dev was paid for the dev time, which was advantageous to him, so he took it instead of leaving. He has no risk, therefore does participate in the upside beyond his salary. The company paid for the upside.

Equity is sharing in both. If it fails, your equity is worth less.

Right, and if you want equity then you need to come onboard for equity.

These devs did not.

You cannot take a salary and no equity and then complain when the business does well and you don't get a share in the profits.

If someone employs me to innovate for them I expect them to protect me from the consequences of failure (as long as I don't constantly produce failure) while still appreciating my results.

I mean steering the company to invest in projects that are more likely to succeed, that's just the job of upper management IMO.

They protect you from the consequences of failure and appreciate your results by giving you stable salary.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion but I really think it's management's job to buffer our failures (or even better, avoid them upfront by making me work on things that likely succeed) and share the fruits of our success with me. And in that way, a stable salary isn't fair.

Of course it doesn't work like that, unfortunately.

Your expectations should be reflected in your employment contract. Outside of that, you are just wishing.

Thats not how salaries work. You dont get paid in proportion of the sales of your company.

I worked on console games for a large company and we were paid bonuses that bracketed larger depending on how well the game sold, so not exactly royalties, but close. For large companies, I think this is pretty standard. It was the same when I worked in CG films as well.

I don’t speak for “most” games though. More games are made by small teams than large ones. For indie and mobile games, the creators/devs might be only getting royalties, and no salary.

I actually think all this talk of royalties is sort of insane since for the devs there is no immediate monetary downside if a game flops.

The risk of being laid off seems like an immediate monetary downside to me.

No, that's unfortunate but it is what is.

Downside would be the devs OWING money back to the company.

I’m not sure I understand. Being laid off is absolutely a downside to flopping, and “unfortunate” is, in my mind, fairly synonymous with “downside”, I’m not understanding your objection.

Nor do I understand how owing money back to an employer is a realistic scenario. I’ve never heard of that happening. Maybe it happens in weird indie or friend group startups for various reasons. Are you suggesting this happens with any real frequency to employees at established companies?

No but that’s the difference between being an employee and being an entrepreneur.

I’m totally getting the feeling you have an interesting story to share, perhaps about a startup exploding in the bad way? I’ll stick around if so! I’ve had one myself that was a roller coaster, but at least didn’t end with people owing personal money.

No, that's simply being laid off. You still got paid while developing the game that made no money.

Being paid a wage and also expecting royalties is wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Generally when an artist (or creator of any sort) is paid royalties, it's in lieu of wages, so you're also shouldering risk if the project fails.

Losing a job unexpectedly isn’t a downside?

> Being paid a wage and also expecting royalties is wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Expecting royalties or bonuses is generally a bad idea in the “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” sort of way. I saw people spend money they didn’t have, and then get smaller bonuses than they counted on. Oops.

Being offered a bonus by your employer after six months of 80 hours/week crunch because the game sold well is not the same thing as either expecting royalties, nor having+eating cake.

> Generally when an artist (or creator of any sort) is paid royalties, it’s in lieu of wages, so you’re also shouldering risk if the project fails.

Why do you think this? Lots of people are paid both wages and royalties and/or bonuses. I have no idea how often it’s royalties-only, I’m curious why you claim it’s “generally”. I have only seen the mix kind in my experience, never royalties-only payment in lieu of wages. FWIW, my experience includes six different companies and maybe roughly about a thousand people being paid sales based bonuses on top of wages.

That might be true if you’re being well paid. Game devs tend to be less well paid on average than people with equivalent skills in other tech businesses. And if you’ve been putting in unpaid overtime to finish a game, which is rampant in the industry, or if your friends in other game companies get royalties, then in both cases there actually is an immediate monetary downside to having a flop.

Anyway, “insane” is a pretty strong word considering profit sharing is super common in all kinds of industries. Some people and some companies really do try to share a little bit of the wealth and reward and retain talented employees, not all company owners are out to keep every cent for themselves.

Absent widespread unionization in the gaming industry and standardization of royalty tables, this was never in the cards anyway.

most money was syphoned by management pet projects, including a recording label and a film iirc.

however I'm still pissed at how they treated modding and their community, killing a lot of promising endeavours by declaring then redundant with the project roadmap, including resources and base building and goddamn multiplayer, sapping a lot of the momentum under the modders but ultimately undelivered on their commitments. mods picked up steam after it was clear some of these things were going nowhere, but the damage at that point was done.

There was a post about it; the lead dev was paid a thousand dollars a month or so during development, his regular salary, but no other compensation.

He made an absolute shit deal, the kind that should probably be illegal or at the very least strongly discouraged through proper education. His employer’s actions were unethical.

> KSP2 is sort of a Battlefield 5 type game, where somebody still owns the IP but the original team that built the engine/brought the magic is gone.

What do you mean by this? AFAIK, Dice is still making Battlefield.

Maybe he meant that original Dice developers who made the game had left.

I mean... I should hope so.

The original Battlefield came out in 2002.

The largest difference looks like the graphics, and there are already graphics mod for that. I really don't see how they could add to the game from a back-end perspective. The trailer is pretty awesome though

The graphics are kind of irrelevant because it's not a gameplay rendering you're seeing. They've listed multiplayer and interstellar travel as notable new features. Looks like colonization will be a big part of it.

The spyware was called red shell, it would apparently track your web browsing to figure out how marketing campaigns were paying off.

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/8stnm3/...

Is there a way to mod that out of the game?

Everything I read about Squad makes me really not want to support anything they do, but KSP is one of the coolest games in recent history. It's a real shame the original devs didn't stay in control.

If you follow the link in GP, you'll find a reddit post explaining it was removed in an update.

Aside from those controversies, does anyone else find it kinda weird that KSP is not FOSS? I mean, I don't wanna sound like the guy that points an index finger at devs making proprietary software but I would've guessed they have the right kind of audience for that. (In the sense that their audience would still pay for the program and they might actually benefit from open sourcing it.)

Weird, yes, in a way. KSP always looked and felt very OSS to me. But in hindsight it seems very hard to argue with the route they chose, given the immense, improbable success they had.

I wonder how difficult it would be to build a FOSS clone of the base game of KSP, that's ABI-compatible with all the mods.

The game targets Mono and written in C# so reverse engineering it should be simpler than a game compiled into a native binary.

Not so weird when you consider that there are very few open source games with open source assets.

An open source engine, similar to OpenTTD, OpenRCT2, OpenMW, etc sure would be nice though.

Yeah (unfortunately) but there are lots of open source space simulation programs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518109

Godot? Seems to be popular and some pretty decent games have been made with it.

I've never thought about this before, but now that you asked...

We should totally create a FOSS KSP, say Kernux:KSP == Linux:Unix

As for the spyware accusation... from what I read, Take Two slapped their usual privacy policy on the game after they bought it. The community didn't take that nicely.

I don't remember ever seeing any evidence for spying beyond policy discussion and would be surprised if there is anything beyond common telemetry.

This is incidentally a very warm experience for me - I remember launching KSP some time after 2018-05-25 and being greeted with a request for consent for tracking. And the ability to say "no".

So it has neither been proven nor disproven that the game has privacy-invading telemetry but TT could add it in any day? Add to that that Steam forces you to update games if you wanna play them and that this probably affects all TT-owned games now.

Isn't that true of the vast majority of software these days (e.g., the vast majority of Steam games)?

(I mean, yes, that's of course bad, but it seems like a relevant distinction whether it's uniquely bad or just a non-noteworthy participant in a bad ecosystem.)

Agreed. That's why I barely play games anymore these days and instead spend my free time switching to free software where I can. ^^

You should be fine with copying the ksp directory out of steams reach and run it from there, since the game doesn't appear to use Steam as copy protection. It certainly didn't when I was into modding years ago (still have quite a few older versions with different mods laying around) and even an up to date install still seems to start fine after exiting steam / doesn't contain any dlls looking like steamworks.

Just checked, the game runs fine without Steam. You can even launch KSP_x64.exe to skip the launcher, if you want.

The most interesting part of the log:

    [ERR 10:20:15.181] [SteamManager]: SteamAPI_Init() failed. Refer to Valve's documentation or the comment above this line for more information.

    [EXC 10:20:15.185] InvalidOperationException: Steamworks is not initialized.
        Steamworks.InteropHelp.TestIfAvailableClient ()
        Steamworks.SteamApps.GetAppInstallDir (AppId_t appID, System.String& pchFolder, UInt32 cchFolderBufferSize)
        SteamManager.Awake ()
    [LOG 10:20:15.218] Loading data opt-out preferences from PlayerPrefs
    [LOG 10:20:15.244] Requesting data opt-out preferences from https://data-optout-service.uca.cloud.unity3d.com/[stack of unique parameters]

I always used to launch KSP via CKAN [0] so removing the ability to launch independently of Steam would have killed a lot of utility for me. (CKAN is/was the best mod manager for KSP, handling dependency resolution, config options, multiple mod profiles, compatibility checks, and even mod discovery)

0: https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN

I used mac version and just starting the KSP from terminal is no problem at all.

It is available on GOG with downloadable installer and that version works fine on an offline Windows 10 system. I think I've heard that the Linux support is fairly good too but I haven't used it personally.

Unfortunately, it seems like essentially all games these days have at least basic phone home telemetry, even the DRM free stuff that still works if it can't connect. The only way to avoid is to block the game from accessing the network one way or anther. That being said, not everything has RedShell level stuff, although a bunch of games did and possibly others are using similar stuff that hasn't been identified. Take Two, like most companies caught with RedShell, solemnly promised to wait a while before reintroducing something like that and to do it less obviously next time.

IMO, it is best to assume that games are hostile from a security perspective. On Linux, at the very least run them under a different user without access to any important data. For Windows I'm not sure that will help much due to the permissions they require but I don't know Windows very well.

>Add to that that Steam forces you to update games if you wanna play them

Not true. KSP has previous versions you can pin to in Steam and play just fine.

If you don't want to buy products made by employees treated badly don't buy games. Unless they are the few, cool, indie ones like Papers Please and so on.

Employee treatment is a wide spread problem in the games industry. No unionization, and the pool of hires is continuously refreshed by new young naive people who've "always dreamt of working in games".

I'm not saying that this is not an issue, but it's kind of obvious that this is a shit market for employees.

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