This post is kind of a crappy way of introducing the entire controversy, let me summarize the situation better. I want to disclose that I am biased, as I'm on the side of "outraged at management", don't take everything I say as absolute truth and please form your own opinion.
The last two major releases of KSP have been questionable in quality.
Known major game-breaking bugs getting through the QA phase and released to millions of people to play, followed by several hotfixes over the next few weeks that often break just as much as much as they solve. Last week, the devs were sent on vacation despite numerous of these game-breaking bugs going unfixed; so they remain for the next two weeks.
These bugs range from wheels being completely unusable for aircraft takeoff/landing, to landing leg collision boxes being flat out wrong, to crash to desktop when doing common operations in the CAB, to OSX UI completely freezing, to Linux builds not starting at all (though this is a Unity problem). Absolute messes that should have never been released and they were completely known. The fact that a hotfix comes out within the week signifies they weren't even necessarily
difficult to fix.
This is fine and dandy for the early access a lot of us bought into, but 1.0 last year was their "out of Beta" release. They gave it to reviewers and they took the "Early Access" tag off in Steam. They're now selling this game for $40 as a fully functional product, but it's broken and absolutely does not support all the platforms they claim to. After the latest patch, the community has been less forgiving about the mistake and want some answers.
It was fairly obvious that this was a management issue from the start. In previous devnotes they've talked about their strict internal deadlines, which explains the crunch. "You haven't finished the release by the arbitrary date only we know? Well you better work 80 hour weeks because we won't change it." It's not like the community wouldn't understand another delay - we waited an entire
year for the last update. We've always sung high praise of Squad and are wildly patient.
After looking into it a bit, we (the community) found that Squad is not really a game development studio, it started as a guerilla marketing company. KSP is the dream child of one of their employees who was about to leave to make his passion project. If he did, the projects he was working on would fall through and the business would go under (good sign). So in exchange for him finishing his projects, they would give him 6 months to work on the game.
Well, it was wildly successful. It was strange, though, they never told us
how successful they were. In 2014, it came out that Squad has sold
over a million copies on Steam alone, excluding transfers from people who bought straight from them or through GoG.
The game's price varied, but assuming that Steam is about 50% of their purchases and the game started at $20, moving to the current $40. So let's safely assume 2 million copies at $30 average, not sure what Steam takes but I'll guess 15%: ~$50 million dollars. EDIT: Down below Arzamas pointed out some errors. Steam takes a 30% cut and the price varies on region quite a bit. My "safe" assumption could be wildly off and there's a lot of factors. I'd still throw it into the tens of millions, but if we want accurate numbers, we need insider information.
A company with a headquarters in Mexico has fairly low operating costs. And KSP doesn't have many, if any, veteran developers, they seem to love hiring from the community. Unfortunately, it does show quite a bit in the art and client stability. A while ago we had an amazing artist on the team, but he left for various reasons (I'm happy to say he's moved on to bigger and better opportunities). Right after that we had the...
barn. So where is all this money going to? It surely isn't to the developers and it surely isn't to operating costs.
Well, a
Polygon article was found, where the owners themselves admitted to the author that they were channeling money from the game's profits as a way to escape the marketing industry. One owner, Ayarza, is working on his own movie. The other, Goya, wants to work on his own record label:
Whenever anyone joins Squad, Goya and Ayarza make a pledge to listen to their pitch someday... While Ayarza and Goya are tight-lipped as to what share of Squad's total income is earned by the game, they admit that it's significant. It's the lifeboat they've been looking for, and they're both ready to leave the safety of the mothership... Squad is not becoming a publisher per se, rather an incubator for the passion projects of its staff. Ayarza has finished the script for his first movie, which will be produced by Squad. Goya is creating a record label and composing, all funded by Squad.
I don't blame them for wanting to follow their own dreams, and they claim the studio supports other members of the team doing the same, but we've never heard about anyone else's enormously expensive endeavors: It's... fairly uncomfortable to see the owners doing this.
A little further up in the article, a pretty damning quote:
Goya says that when Ayarza is in front of a client he only ever says yes, often leading to short timelines and absurd promises of lavish spectacles. Goya the artist provides the creative vision to pull it out in the end, while the rest of the team at Squad carries the load.
This plays heavily into a recent assumption that the 1.0 and 1.1 releases have been pushed so hard and sloppily because of their new console deals. They needed to leave Beta to secure the deals, they needed to release 1.1 (Unity 5 update) to work on console ports. It fairly undeniably confirms that they're setting unrealistic timeframes and nigh-forcing the developers to meet them. EDIT: That last sentence just seems to me a nice way of saying "the owners make impossible promises, then make the employees work to the bone to meet them."
And now we have ex-developers coming out and confirming the conspiracies:
The first post there speaks about how they would work 80 hour weeks yet only make $2,400. As soon as their immediate "usefulness" ran out, they were booted from the team. In Mexico, this is about twice minimum wage, so if you live there it's not... atrociously bad... kinda. But they're hiring international as well, so who knows what's going on behind these closed doors. For all we know, some of them make $2,400, others make $90,000, and they have NDEs that bar them from speaking about it to each other. EDIT:
/u/r4m0n has apparently confirmed with other developers that this was the usual salary being offered. Some members made significantly more, up to $2,000 monthly, but these were the exceptions and is still far below what they should be receiving.
With regards to legitimacy, the parties speaking in both the posted threads, as well as the top comments to them, are confirmed to be past-developers or people who have worked with the developers. Specifically:
- /u/DamionMRayne - Ex-developer
- /u/r4m0n - Creator of MechJeb (also posting anonymously on behalf of those afraid of legality or blackballing)
- PDTV from the 4chan thread posted a video proving his identity earlier, but has since taken it down. - Ex-community manager (EDIT: The "!!" does not confirm identity, but merely shows that posts under that name are from a consistent password-protected identity)
- /u/NovaSilisko [+2] - Ex-developer
And I'll say it again, I'm a bit disappointed in the people who aren't refuting the claims, but are defending Squad anyway:
Who care's, this is how most studios operate.
That excuses nothing. It's unethical regardless. It's not even close to the same drastic scale as forcing children to work in coal mines during the rise of the industrial era, but that's a great example of "industry standard doesn't mean okay". And last I checked, industry standard salary for a game dev was over $60,000, not $2,400.
It was in their contract.
Most people don't realize the lengths companies will go to absolutely screw you. Especially when you're going into what you think is a great small company with indie roots and a loving community. And especially when you're passionate to get into the field. They're taking advantage of small people who don't know better, and I'm sure half the reason there aren't veteran devs in the team is because anyone with experience laughs at their offers.
Further, have you read some employment contracts? I've seen suckers several dozen pages long in legal jargon. Good luck finding all the loop holes professional lawyers crafted in.
And I'll sign off with: The developers are really great people. None of the previous employees had anything bad to say about anything but management. Please don't take it out on the wrong person here, the guys who actually work on KSP are passionate and I'm sure they're doing their absolute damnedest given the situation.
EDIT: The inevitable grammar mistakes, wording.
THIS JUST IN: Just before 1.0 was released, a Dutch company called Deported B.V. was created and the KSP license was transferred to them. Due to the permissive Dutch tax laws, this allows them to avoid paying taxes to Mexico and use the much lower Dutch ones. This company is then owned by a Parallel Dynamics corporation, which we know little to nothing about at the moment other than being based in Mexico City, similar to Squad. Thanks to
/u/Mirkury for the information.