Wow - Take Two shuttering this studio AND Roll7 (OlliOlli, Rollerdrome) just a month after they announced they're buying Gearbox for almost half a billion. Absolutely catastrophic mismanagement. What a shitshow.
Given the botched launch, this isn't much of a surprise. Only thing I can say is that I hope it serves as a lesson to people with the mindset of "this game'll be great ^in 5 years^"
In which case, I'll clarify that I meant the people who bought, found it was borked then chose to wait for updates instead of getting an easily deserved refund.
I said this at launch, you cannot do early access with an established IP. The agreement is a reduced price because you're paying to get in on the ground floor before it actually gets good. But for an established IP you've already built your audience, so most people are going to buy on day 1 at the reduced price, so the "reduced price" has to basically be full price. Now you're paying full price for an unfinished game because Take Two pushed them to release an unfinished game that had been delayed by years.
Maybe it was the botched launch. Baldur's Gate 3 was an early access title made by a known developer (at least in crpg spaces) of an existing IP, though BG 1 and 2 are old as hell and I imagine most of the player base didn't play them, myself included.
I played KSP and was waiting for performance to get better before buying KSP 2. Oh well.
Extremely disappointed. They had some very passionate people on the project and I was hoping that they'll turn things around over the next several years.
Damn, I really hope this isn't true. I just started playing (even though my PC is below spec and I have to run it at potato quality) and I was having fun with the improvements over the original. I've followed the development and yeah initial launch was way premature but the 0.2 For Science! update looked to have turned things around.
But staff departure postings on LinkedIn are a very bad sign...