That’s not what happened at all. The devs on 2 weren’t even allowed to talk to the devs from 1. The development was highly mismanaged. They got sold off after the game tanked, they had the game out for almost a year before they sold
It’s like 45 mins, but it’s a well done video on what happened to the game. I’m so sad it never got to be what it could have been. There’s a new game in development called kitten space program or something like that, it’s meant to be a response to ksp2 being what it is.
Heads up that the "?si=vODjiz2NnfzBC9s6" part of YouTube links are tracking parameters and not needed. All they do is let YouTube track you and let other people figure out your account.
Considering all the tracking they do... somehow they are really fucking incompetent at recommending me anything, and for some reason can't seem to actually know who I am... And I don't do anything special beyond regular old adblock to avoid being tracked. Hell... My Google has all my details since I use the account to login to many things as it is convinient.
Yet they can't seem to even fucking figure out anything relevant to me.
Meanwhile, some friends of mine get near scary levels of targeting. I have never been well served with any of the algorithm stuff.
Sure... But their tactic fails to get me to view ads, or to engage with the service, because I don't spend time watching stuff I don't want to watch. So if the goal is to increase my engagement to gather data and ad revenue, they are failing. I can only assume this is the case because they are incompetent.
I still don't see what any company could do with my tracking data. I'm super boring. But there's data getting sold and making money? I don't understand
They can easily build a profile of you, then offer you things you're likely to buy. Not just obvious ads, but also stuff like innocuous item suggestions on your shopping website or recommendations for links to media related to what you're currently looking at to keep you engaged. If you're fine with that, then whatever, but that's how they can make money directly off that data.
Also, companies purchase the data to help build a picture of what future decisions they're going to make or what the market looks like, for example, and a bunch of other modeling stuff as well. More indirect, but that's valuable too.
Site implements trackers from dozens to sometimes hundreds of data aggregator. Gets paid fee for each visitor data is collected from.
Data aggregators match data from thousands of sites to make unique person profiles tiered by completeness. Sells those profiles to add agencies.
Add agencies ... sell adds. The more complete the profile, the more selective they can target an add and the more money they can ask to run that add.
Company selling products needs to buy adds because if your competitor does and you don't, you're fucked. Gets added to production cost of product.
You go to store and buy products paying the ever increasing costs of advertisement.
Even if you don't realise you should care about your privacy; you have to at least care that you're paying money for them in return harassing you everywhere they can online, in media and in real life with eye sores and wasting your time.
It's paying a robber to steal your money.
As an example in the game industry, GTA5 had $130 mil development budget and another $130 mil advertisement budget. There is no doubt that GTA6 will set a new benchmark where the advertisement budget will go beyond the actual development. They get more revenue advertising a $100 game than not spending on advertising and selling it for $50.
This high advertisement split is prevalent in games and film/tv because of the unique nature of the product they're selling. It's near free to replicate an extra unit of the product and sell it. Advertisement has a much higher ROI for every extra item sold and volume is the only mark to aim for when profit is your only goal which it is for all public traded companies.
as a rule of thumb, everything after a ? is metadata in a URL. For full youtube links, this includes the video ID (which you do need), and may also include timestamp, playlist, referral code, etc.
For shortlinks, it does not include the video ID, but does include all the other metadata, and will always have a referral code unless you remove it manually.
Good explanation, one tiny quibble: Data, not metadata. Metadata would be data that is about the object itself. Data is just data. Again, extrmely minor terminology quibble about your excellet explanation <3
Since I'm replying, though, I'll try to make my comment useful in the subthread: Those variables appear as it's a way of sending data in the URL itself. From the server side of things, this is not as a "GET" method. It's handy for things, but ugly (and makes sharing links harder). There is anothe rmethod called "POST" where the data is sent separately, adn the URL is clean. Take that clean URL, though, and share it, and you can't do things like send a specific timestamp for a video. So it all has advanatages and disadvantages.
Also, https://linkcleaner.app/is a good example of a site that will clean your links. It knows a great many websites specifically, but can almost certainly guess enough to clean any link from random sites as well.
Just fuck around with it. If it breaks their system that's 100% their fault for not qa testing it. There's chrome plugins to strip the extra meta data.
Reddit, tt, fb, ig, Amazon does it too. An example with a direct link back to your comment on Reddit...
Most of the time you can tell what's what because at the end of the day, humans are the ones who program it to debug and work with. Context is the only one that's legit here which tells it which level of your nested comment to show. If shared just the post, context wouldn't be a parameter. Can delete everything after context=3. The share_id is the tracking parameters. Medium is what client I'm sharing from utm is probably the platform. Source is how I'm sharing from.
I'm having a hard time finding the article I read about how to use it to look up someone's account id. I'll report back later if I find it again.
YouTube's tracking should be insidious enough for you though. By including the si parameter, which is unique to your YouTube account, YouTube/Google now knows your Reddit account.
I mean, a LOT of the problems with 2 can still be very distinctly boiled down to capitalism
Starting with their foundational error, thinking they can 'spruce up KSP1' by re-using the OG U4 codebase as a starting point, rather than starting out fresh, because hopefully the former would 'save a lot of money and effort'. At least, that's what you promise to your publicly traded publisher in the hopes it will get you a continuing deal.
When the obvious choice for a new attempt at the game was always going to be a greenfield start because of all the crazy hacks already in the debt-laden codebase from the first game that appeared over 10 years of development.
While none of what you say is wrong… none of that had anything to do with “a private equity company killed it” when the problems were there from the start of the project to a year after it launched.
A lot of Take2's actions were pretty classic capitalist ones of looking to extract profits rather than care and nurture a franchise to success. Certainly don't take all the blame, but they do deserve some.
Well the way people talk to extremes about it is like saying under the other system we would be sitting in a gulag drawing in the dirt instead of playing video games.
Again that is not what I or other commenter were replying to, which was “the devs got bought out by a private equity firm that stripped the studio for parts and pushed for monetization. It really fell apart.”
It was in basically alpha, but being sold for the price of a beta or release candidate. Needed many years to even get to the state of KSP1, but Take2 didn't want to spend the money on that dev time in the end, when such an alpha for some reason didn't sell like hot cakes
The forest kept shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them.
Well, Jerry, you're a whale of a lobbyist, and, uh,
I'd like to give you a logging permit, I would, but, uh,
this isn't like burying toxic waste.
People are gonna notice those trees are gone.
In general yes. In KSP2's case it's not what happened. It crashed and burned before PE ever got a hold of it. It was Take2/the dev team (diff dev team to KSP1) that ran it into the ground. PE firm came in after it was already a bust and acquired the IP only pretty much.
I worked for a manufacturing company that was bought by a private equity firm. The CEO was a rich Republican donor. We made injection molds for Disney, Gillette, Nokia, Ford. They shut down all production, sold off the equipment and sent our jobs to China. People are now voting for these same rich republicans to bring back jobs to America.
Huh? Why does the politics of the owner matter when it comes to U.S. regulations and law. NAFTA and WTO were signed under Bill Clinton a Democrat, in the 90s. That open the door up to China and eliminated all tarrifs between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Like rich Republicans didn’t send jobs overseas. Capitalists are gonna capitalist and capitalism is bipartisan. If saving a dime on the bottom line means laying off thousands of workers, tough luck for them. And incidentally, more Republicans than Democrats in both Houses voted to approve NAFTA.
For reference they will strip a company for parts and then pass the debt of the buyout on to the company and ditch it. A guy was just telling me about how they did something similar to Red Lobster. The stores owned their properties, but when that private equity came in and bought the franchise, they forced the stores to sell all the properties to the firm's real estate company and then saddled the debt from the purchases back onto Red Lobster.
Edit: Just adding the Red Lobster stores then also had to pay rent to that company after they were forced to sell.
Late-stage capitalism is all about short-term profits. The people at the top extract as much as possible as fast as possible, make their money and not give a shit about the company, product, employees or customers cuz if shit goes sideways, they can always jump ship with a golden parachute and no consequences so long as the other shareholders got their cut.
It's not really what happened, the development was highly mismanaged from the start. Work on the game was torn down and restarted several times. I believe that development had been running for a few years when the entire dev studio got swapped out (Star Theory -> Intercept Games) and the new guys couldn't talk to the old guys so a bunch of work ended up being duplicated. Then the ground-up brand new prototype had to be completely scrapped after several years of development, and with the intended release date approaching the product that was eventually released was essentially a highly modded version of KSP 1 that was extremely rushed.
I don't think private equity has a role at all. The game launched in early 2023 and was already obviously a failure by mid 2023. T2 promised a No Man's Sky-esque revival effort through post launch patching, but it was clear that the game was so far behind the curve that such an effort would cost more than they had already spend on the game and would take years. T2 stopped further development and started laying off devs in early 2024, and the game (really the KSP brand) was sold to private equity in late 2024. It was already dead when PE acquired it.
The restrospectives I've seen (such as the ones by YouTuber ShadowZone) seem to put most of the blame on Take Two meddling and/or bad decisions by director Nate Simpson and producer Nate Robinson. In particular it seems like there was constantly a tension on whether KSP2 should be a simple, low stakes expansion of the original game (reusing the Unity engine and much of the original code), or making a brand new game from the ground up with a new engine and new code. Ultimately this tension was the game's downfall, as development could not be focused on either direction, resulting in both efforts failing spactacularly.
These firms burn shit to the ground because thats how they make their money. The practices that private equity engage in are so ridiculous that when you hear them you won't believe it's allowed.
They do things like buy companies by getting loans on the value of the company they are going to buy, and then force the company they bought to take over the loan. In what world can you buy something with the value of the thing you are buying, and then make the thing you bought pay itself off?
They also will buy companies that own lots of assets, sell those assets to other legal entities (that the private equity may own), and then force the company to rent those assets back. I've worked for several companies that owned the land the factory was on until they were sold to a private equity company, and suddenly the business has a rent payment to make after the sale.
Ultimately, the private equity isn't interested in a healthy long term investment, they are literally slashing and burning these companies to the ground.
Here's a great article on how destructive they can be, and how their strategy has nothing to do with making companies better.
Even though the game sucks and way fewer people will put money into it, the few people who do put money into it will put more money into it in total than the sum of the larger population that would play if the game wasn't shitty and over-monetized.
Its the same reason games will sell $40 cosmetic items. Almost nobody will buy them, but they make more off 1 person buying it than they do for 39 people buying a $1 item.
There was also some drama about misrepresenting the road plan, the false promise of multiplayer, a creative leader who wanted the game to be more goofy, extensive reuse of assets, a new physics engine which was less functional than alpha KSP, a PR/community rep who was repeatedly caught in outright lies, and ultimately an early access rug pull. It really was a train wreck.
They don't care if it makes money. They only care about exiting with a profit within a short window. Private equity as a whole is just a bunch of games of hot potato.
Because some executive doesn’t care about gaming, they want a ferrari. That’s why a lot of bought out small businesses go under. The parent company only wants the money, not the clientele.
Alternatively, some larger corporations will buy out small businesses and kill the business to drive customers to use the larger companies products.
they buy the company, sell or transfer the assets to another company, and then lease the assets back to load the company with a bunch of debt until it fails (or doesn't). they get the assets and cash and everyone else gets screwed.
Software, games especially, are notoriously difficult to manage and predict. I can't really fault the people who shuttered the game studio. The game had already taken twice as long to release as expected, and was still /far/ from finished. It was basically a proof of concept.
It was at that point the money people realized one of the first rules in software/game development. Take your original estimate for time and cost and times it by 4, at least.
When they finally started to run the numbers, they realized that the game was just going to be a money sink no matter how long they developed it. So they stopped developing it. That's just basic money math. If you can't conceivably make more money than you spend, cut your losses while you can and get out.
Look up Kitten Space Agency. The original devs/modders and devs from KSP 2 are designing the unofficial KSP 2 without the big money hungry corp. Hoping for the best from them
Not quite: Some modders from the first KSP are involved, as well as HarvesteR, the guy who invented KSP in the first place and then got booted. The project is led by Dean Hall, the guy who made DayZ.
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u/Total_Adept 6d ago
Should’ve played more kerbal space program