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First a disclaimer: I have no idea what's going on with KGS or any inside info. I'm just speculating, please treat it as such.

As a generalization when a significant group from a successful game walks out en mass, it's because they feel the owners aren't fairly sharing profits. Letting this happen is usually a really dumb move by the owners.

A great example is the Medal of Honor franchise, which raised a studio best known for a nice quake expansion to the top of the industry. The owners did not treat the team in a way the team considered fair. The bulk walked out, signed a deal with another publisher to become their own studio, and the Call of Duty franchise was born. I think most people are aware that CoD has made an obscene amount of money. It's hard to believe that whatever selfish split the MoH owners were getting justified not having any split of that team's later work.

When you have a team that has proven they can hit the top, the last thing to do is treat them as disposable.


owners basically used all the money (to the tune of millions) to start a music label and create a film instead of investing it in their golden laying hen

the project itself was a employee pet project (Harvester's) and he was about to quit to start it, but they convinced him to stay. Harvester should have seen it coming, since the very reason he was fed up to leave was the way Squad treated the employee as low quality tools, but hey, it's not an easy decision to start your own thing in a climate of financial insecurity


Do you have any info on what music label and film they created with that money?

It's very sad seeing this happen since i love KSP and as a Mexican it was great to see sonething like this being made here. How is it that you lay waste to something as cool as KSP :(


no idea how far their secondary went tbh, internet doesn't say and they're probably targeted to a local audience


> As a generalization when a significant group from a successful game walks out en mass, it's because they feel the owners aren't fairly sharing profits.

Another key factor is often the owners stifling creative developments in order to chase $. This is particularly the case with long running franchises that are being milked rather than developed.


sigh... s/KGS/KSP/ my apologies, I can't edit the prior comment.


You play Go, I take it?

https://www.gokgs.com/


I don't any longer, but yes, at one time I was pretty regular on KGS, hence the habit typo. :D


It has been years for me as well (mostly due to the Java Runtime requirement which I'm usually loathe to install.) The highest achievement of my amateur career must have been tying with a 1-Dan once. :)

I wonder why this game hasn't seen a resurgence (in the West) on today's mobile devices yet.


There is https://online-go.com/ if you don't want to deal with Java.


A java app straight out of 1999 or so, but at least wmshub isn't exploiting anyone but himself!


>“$2,400 was my yearly salary working a full time eight hours a day, 40 hours a week job.”

Why would you ever choose to work there in the first place?


Yikes, that's only 60 sold licenses to pay for a whole year's worth of salary. They have sold over 1.5m licenses on Steam alone:

http://steamspy.com/app/220200

Absolutely shameful.


TO put this in perspective, they made about $60 million, and paid out probably less than $60 thousand total as salary here in the 1.5 ish years the game has been out.


I really don't get it. If the owners make that much, why would they want to be such total jerks? At this point it would cost them extremely little to pay a decent wage. It's not as if it's fiscally prudent either, since losing your good name and having all the developers walk out on you isn't exactly cheap.


Because you're 21, and want to make video games, and live with your parents?


Sounds reasonable. We might be talking about a modder or someone in other ways deeply invested in the community who is given pocket change each month as some kind of hobby stipend. Which is perfectly all right precisely up to the moment where anyone involved starts to think of it as a full time gig, maybe a career even.

The failure on the side of squad then isn't so much in not paying them more (although that would certainly be one way to solve it), it's in not realizing that there can't be a middle ground.

What I don't get at all, no matter how you spin the story, is how anybody could be forced to overtime etc on pocket change. Sure, that stuff happens millions of times each day, but it would typically involve people at the brink of starvation in an isolated mining town or so. Remote tech workers with enough leisure time to fall deep into the rabbit hole of gaming don't quite fit that pattern.


Well see humans unlike companies have this thing called dedication, they'll work insane hours for little pay because they believe in what they are doing. Companies who are dedicated to nothing, but money will lash a rope around them and ride it to the bank.

It's called capitalism...


> dedication

We would not be talking about this if it were a number of unmistakable volunteers quitting after running out of dedication. Add 200$/month and you get a situation where both sides are prone to confuse a bit of thank-you-cash with an actual job.


For coders thinking they'll just build something cool?

This is your competition.


More reasons to evolve your career away from coding, it's a dead end by 35, you'll just be outcompeted on so many fronts.


And do what instead? Where is that not an issue?


Probably, yes. I'm guilty of taking jobs like these in the past as well.


Well, the obvious answer is that better offers weren't at hand.


To be honest, KSP's a hell of a resume entry. It's like asking someone why they might join the Peace Corps.


No. That viewpoint is utterly toxic to anyone who wants to work as a game dev. The Peace Corps is not making a ton of money off your back.


I'm not a game programmer. As an outside observer, the whole game dev industry seems pretty toxic. That may be a wild misconception. My first inkling came from the whole EA widows thing. I don't actually go looking for opinions, so the few opinions i see come from these kinds of explosions. From my old stale point of view, it seems like companies exploit passion until the devs can't hack it anymore.

Should i update my opinion? Has game dev gotten better?


Game dev companies I've interviewed in Germany were just bad. I can't name names because of the things they make you sign, but I've talked to a bunch of employees and they were

a) one of the "dinosaurs" who honestly believe things will get back to how they were when they first started while explaining how everything will change the moment I join

b) depressed developers who were supposed to explain what I would be doing but ended up explaining how chaotic everything works there.

It is also fairly possible that my resume is just bad and I've been interviewed just by the dysfunctional companies, but there aren't so many here to begin with.


Parts of it have. Other parts are still very happily engaged in a race to the bottom that shows no signs of stopping. (Under no circumstances would I ever recommend working in mobile, for example, unless it's King or another hit machine.)


Yes and no.

To illustrate your excellent point about how companies exploit passion, there are still some extremely small minded self aggrandizing sexist bigoted loud mouthed horrendous toddler Neanderthals throwing tantrums and insults and lighting toxic waste trash fires and melting down in public out there, exemplified by the shamefully long and sordid track record of Alex St. John [1], who even his daughter Amilia deplores [2].

But fortunately most of the rest of the game industry deplores Alex St. John just as much as his own daughter does, so thanks to her and others like EA Widow bravely stepping up and speaking out, things are gradually improving.

Amilia St. John proves her point by quoting her father's own vile words in her article "I am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He is Wrong About Women in Tech" [3]:

"And finally, here we are at this written hemorrhoid from my father’s blog:"

“Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.” -Alex St. John

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/alex-st-johns-sexist-recruitm...

[2] http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/21/11479710/alex-st-johns-daug...

[3] https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-...

On a brighter and more constructive note, I will also quote Amilia St. John's list of useful resources:

"If you are an individual interested in furthering the fight to improve ratios for women and minorities in the industry, there are so many opportunities to get involved! Start a female and minority hackathon, volunteer to mentor young women and minorities in computer science, or even just start by learning more.

Here is a {short} list of other resources to get you started."

http://girlswhocode.com/ -An excellent nonprofit with a focus on teaching women k-12 how to code. They make it relatively easy to start (or join) a group in your area!

http://www.code2040.org/ -An awesome site with a focus on blacks and latinos in the coding industry

http://www.2020shift.com/ -Focus on minorities in hybrid careers in the tech business. I love this website because it is all about entering the tech world if you ARE NOT in a technical career.

https://www.codecademy.com/ -A great start to dive in to the basics of coding.

https://scratch.mit.edu/ -This is an amazing tool for young children learning how to code. It teaches children to think logically while removing the syntax hurdles.

https://blog.hootsuite.com/four-inspiring-women-in-tech/ -Some killer tech giants who are making a difference.

http://ghc.anitaborg.org/ -Grace Hopper is a female and minority focused conference. I have unfortunately never had the opportunity to go but I constantly hear what an amazing experience it is. Students can earn scholarships to finance their trip.

http://codepen.io/ -This site is a personal favorite tool. It is such a fun playground for front end development. It allows you code while simultaneously working with HTML, CSS and Javascript and it is so flexible. It is all buffed out with preprocessors galore.

- If you want to continue the conversation, hit me up at anytime on twitter, my handle is @milistjohn


Everybody and their dog wants to work as a game dev. Nearly every program to get kids interested in programming involves games. Nearly everybody who gets into programming does so because they like games and think that this makes game development a fine career choice.

By supply and demand, you should expect a price of roughly zero. In other words, it's a hobby. Enjoy it, have fun, and do something else to pay your bills.


I'm the other way around, never been remotely interested in game programming I actually like solving 'boring' business use cases.

It's half programming and half process optimization, it's amazing (unless you work in those places) just how inefficient a process can be before you automate it (I sometimes think that the process of automating a manual process is like when the rewrite is much better in a different language because all the edge cases are known from the first one).


And you are trying to force your view onto others. If I want to work for a minimum wage creating games, then let me.


Except a version of the Peace Corps where the suits are raking in tens of millions of dollars on the back of your nearly free labor.


The Olympics and the NCAA.

EDIT: I'm not saying its right, I'm saying it happens far more often than it should (as long as people decide not to opt out of being exploited).


The NCAA is far worse. KSP was exploitative, but at least these employees could quit and get a different job. If you want to play pro football/basketball, the ncaa owns you. And they're gonna make sure that everyone around gets paid (coaches, universities, chancellors, shoe sponsors) while the athletes stay broke, poor, and never really end up getting that supposed education either. With free risk of life-altering injury!


Well, games don't really make a lot of money, unless you are King or another mobile giant, or make CoD or Fifa. I work at one of the largest games companies in the world, and all I can say is that for every game that makes millions of dollars, we have 20 projects that never even see a public announcement and eventually die, yet still cost us tons of money. That's where most of the money goes.

But yeah, programmers are hilariously underpaid, until they get to Senior level or above - there's just loads of people to fill junior positions.


Being a key part of the development of one of the biggest commercial success stores in indie gaming ever should be good for more than an entry on your CV though.


But nobody knew it was going to be a big success when it started, so that doesn't justify anyone's behavior.


Well now KSP is going to be renowned for paying developers less than fast food workers. Hell I know homeless people making more in street change than these developers.

I would be hesitant to hire anyone from KSP. From my admittedly limited experience interviewing people, those people who value themselves at the bottom end of the market generally are lacking in some manner that makes them unsuitable for working in a team in a professional setting.

They most likely make great hackers and I bet they are very capable in one particular way, but can they cope in a fast paced business with large responsibilities? I've found that people asking for way below the market rate are asking for a very good reason and that's that they are not up to scratch for this type of environment.


You dangerously sound like you don't trust poor people. I bet such reasoning makes rising out of poverty harder than it otherwise already is.


You wouldn't hire anyone who worked on KSP because of assumptions you've made?


The article states that the minimum wage in Mexico is $100/month ($1,200/year). My guess is he moved to Mexico to work on this and gain experience. Pay sucks but the game is successful and if he didn't publicly come out against the company it would have likely led to higher paying jobs in the states due to association.

This may not be popular to many people but I'm sure it's well known on on Hacker News by now. Long hours in startup companies are not new nor are they going away. This was a startup for all intensive purposes.


Excuse me? For all intents and purposes $2400 a year is less than I spend on parking every year. This is not a "startup" salary, this is less than 1/10th the salary of your typical QA engineer IN MEXICO.

I see a lot of posts in this thread that seem to be trying to whitewash the work hours and the pay as somehow reasonable. They're not, not even for the notoriously-bad-to-work-for game industry.


There's a difference between whitewashing and seeing the bright side. Having been on the dev team of this popular game is useful. Presumably even the $2,400/yr was useful, though obviously only as useful as $2,400/yr is. I'm not saying it's fair, I'm saying "it happened, and what now?" It's Success 101. When you go through something that sucks, by all means enumerate what sucked about it so you can watch out for those things in the future. But the next thing a successful type of person does is take inventory of what positive and useful things they got out of it, or can make out of it. And then go do it. Cry if you want, have yourself a little outrage parade for your Facebook friends, but it's a waste of time. Maybe fester over it for 20 years and get an ulcer, that'll show 'em! Meanwhile if I interview that person I will stay far away, and hire the guy who found the bright side.


So you're saying that it is bad for people to complain when they are shafted. That they should look on the bright side for whatever they were subjected to.

And you are saying that you want to hire people that will not complain when they are exploited. I'd not want to work for anyone like you, since you would think it is my fault that I was stupid enough to get screwed.

What this whole Squad developer thing tells me is there needs to be a way for exploited employees to retaliate legally, because nothing much seems to be happening at the moment.


The words you're putting in my mouth are very imaginative, but no, I don't believe in exploiting people. I'm saying people on here pointing out upsides of this, don't deserve to be accused of trying to "whitewash," because finding the upside is actually a good way to handle shitty things that happen.

The advice applies in the mental and emotional realm and isn't supposed to be an answer to "what to do in the practical realm to resolve the issue." People should go ahead and take whatever actions they can toward a satisfactory resolution. But that part is boring to me, because usually the actions to take are obvious, and because even when you do everything right, still the outcome might go the wrong way. You're forced to conclude in that case that the outcome was "outside your control." However, I would argue that even when it goes your way, the outcome probably was outside your control. This sounds defeatist but is actually empowering because you can focus on the things that are WITHIN your control, which is always the interesting part. Learning a lesson from a shitty thing or not, is within your control. How you frame it to yourself, is within your control. Actually it's almost (I'm saying ALMOST) better if things DON'T go your way, especially a few non-catastrophic things that don't ruin your life. But they need to be things that at least hurt a little. Because then you have the chance to practice the kind of magical alchemy I'm talking about here, where you make gold out of lead.


Did you mean "intents and purposes" or did some wordplay go over my head?



"mating name instead of maiden name"

I gotta admit, that made me laugh.


Hah, we laugh at that one, but as soon as you point out that "performant" is not an English word, the HN "languages evolve!" guys come out of the woodwork with their pitchforks.


I always thought it was "in tents and porpoises".


Oh, the huge manotee!


So good.


It's common usage, supposably.


*supposively


*supposedly


that's the joke...


whoosh


Squad wasn't a startup, it was already an established company when KSP was being developed.


Normally people take part of their "low" salary in shares in that case. Not here though.

These developers would have been better off begging for money on the street.


$2400 a year? What US dev works for that in this market? You are better off at burger king.


Farther into the article:

> To be fair to Squad, the Mexican minimum wage is about $100 USD monthly, so they weren't technically paying anyone lower than the minimum wage...


I live in Mexico, I've never seen anyone in Mexico make minimum wage, ever. And I do know people from all walks of life.

As to what they earn, again, I live in Mexico, I am employed by a Mexican company, and work for Mexican clients. I make their yearly salary in 15 days or so. It really is disgusting that they would treat employees this way, specially when they were such a big success.


> I live in Mexico, I've never seen anyone in Mexico make minimum wage, ever. And I do know people from all walks of life.

But what do you mean by that? Do they get paid less or more?


They mean more.


The minimum wage in Mexico is only used as a unit to pay fines, no one earns that, you simply can't live with that kind of money. Even $200 per month is low for a engineer. A Junior Engineer's salary is around $500-$1k per month.


~13% of the fraction of the country that is formally employed earns minimum wage[1]... just not usually people in any sort of specialized profession working in cities.

[1] (in Spanish) http://www.milenio.com/politica/salario_minimo-aumento_salar...


13% are reported earning minimum wage. This is a known way for employers to avoid paying more taxes, seguro social, etc. Then they get all other part of their salary marked as 'bonus'


I don't see any reason to think that there aren't a number of laborers being paid the minimum wage in Mexico, or else why would anyone go to the trouble and risk of illegally crossing the US border to take sub-minimum wage work?


The very large population earning $30-$50 a week work for companies or individuals who will never report that salary in order to avoid paying taxes on it. This means any statistics related to this issue are going to be hard to trust namely, the situation looks better than it is and thus why so many desperately want to cross the border. It's not like Mexican companies don't make money, they make tons of it. They just don't share or invest it.


I don't find it unlikely that that is happening, but I find the claims here that absolutely no one in Mexico is paid the minimum wage hard to believe.


At least no one working on a stable company, im sure theres people working on the fields that earn the minimum. I live in Mexico and i don't know a single person that earns the minimum salary. Even people doing interships earn more than the that.


I was agreeing with you :)


That's what I get for not reading carefully.


Oh there are. But we can not say if all the 13% reported earn minimum wage or not. I'm not saying there isn't. There just isn't 13% that's for sure. Even if it is at 12.9% we just really can't know.


Sure, but then you are also missing all the people who make below minimum wage because they are not formally employed. Which is a large number of people in Mexico. For example, the salaries of domestic workers are hardly ever reported (the average is around 2 minimum wages, but it is unclear what the lower bound is and is not like they work only 40 hours in practice, see: [1]), and the earnings of street food vendors probably vary a lot (it might often be above minimum, but in plenty of cases it could also be below).

[1] http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/02/05/sociedad/039n1soc


But by the same token, people are going to drift in and out of minimum-wage work, either through unemployment or better employment. It's not like it's the same fixed 13% of the population we're talking about. So it could well be a greater proportion of workers who at one point or another have worked for minimum wage.


Some were US based developers who could have gotten more money as dish washers. I don't get this.


Moreover, they know they were directly working on a game that made at least (1.5M * 39.99) ~60 million USD. I admire dedication to one's work and love of the game and all, but that's just not rational.


Not that it justifies anything but that is probably a significant overestimate, Steam takes 30% and most people didn't pay full price for the game.


It doesn't change your broader point, but I suspect that could be a significant over-estimate. Steam take ~30%, and many copies was have been sold at a discount price (I paid ~$15) due to the frequency of Steam sales.


What about working for literally nothing? Like, say, open source?


In open source you keep the rights. Which for this game probably means millions. They did not get the rights or Rúe money. It just baffles me to no end.


Keeping the rights to something you're giving away for free is the definition of meaningless symbolism in this context.


It's entirely likely they didn't know that - apparently none of the people working on it were told how much it sold and the company tried to stop outsiders estimating its sales figures through services like SteamSpy.


Using current exchange rates that's about 3850 MXN a month.

That sounds like what my friend made as a cashier here in Mexico.

Very shitty payment, even for this country. A good entry level job starts at about 10k a month.


A homeless beggar can clear $2400 a year easy; that's less than $7 a day. You're essentially working for free at that point. I don't understand why they ever agreed to it, at least not without some sort of profit-sharing thing.


Maybe because:

July 2015 - Oct 2016: Lead Engineer, Squad

Delivered Kerbal Space program version 1.2 on time and on budget. Managed team of 5 geographically distributed developers and graphic artists. Reduced defect count by 17%

Reads way better than:

July 2015 - Oct 2016: Panhandler, Mission and 16th

Achieved 11% month on month growth in revenue. Exceeded all set goals and milestones. Migrated from crack to high grade Bolivian cocaine without incurring mob debt or serious personal injury.

;-)

(Though with a little more polishing and embellishment, I bet you could get that second entry past a typical recruiter... Maybe change to "July 2015 - Oct 2016: Growth Hacking Contractor, Bay Area Startup still in stealth mode (under NDA)... " and "Migrated from legacy processes to best practice agile methodology without incurring technical debt or serious downtime." - there, that ought to do it...)


Hard to judge without knowing the full story. There are many possible reasons for taking a job with less than average pay. Tough job market, lots of competition, wanting to get some (any) experience on the resume. It's not like plum, high paying tech jobs are growing on trees, despite what you might hear about the mythical "shortage of developers".


This is $200 a month; unless you work part-time, it's likely illegal.


Jurisdictions are quite important when deciding whether something's "illegal".

Seems like that's twice the minimum wage where it happened (just from reading the post/comments), so it's extremely unlikely to be "illegal" where it happened.

(it's a curious question as to whether there's anything illegal, and if so, on who's part, if a Mexican business is paying above-local-minimum wage salaries to people who are not local. If you _accept_ a remote job where the renumeration is disclosed but below your local minimum wage - I wonder if any law has been broken, and if so, by who?)


>>If you _accept_ a remote job where the renumeration is disclosed but below your local minimum wage - I wonder if any law has been broken, and if so, by who?

Yes. That is a crime. The employee has committed a crime by negotiation/accepting the wage. The employer has too. Regardless of where they think they "work" they are employing someone standing in the other jurisdiction. If one allows offshore companies to bypass wage laws then every single local company would be run through an offshore shell, negating the local law. So it is near-universal that offshores must comply with local wage laws.

In practical terms, a flesh-and-blood 'employee' isn't going to be prosecuted. That side of things is reserved for sub-contracting entities that aren't real people. Negotiating a sub-minimum wage contract remains a crime for subcontractors. This is necessary to prevent one-person "companies" negotiating illegal pay for their one employee under the fiction that they are an arms-length subcontractor when everyone knows the person is effectively an employee.


This is only as an employee. You're free to contract your own rate at whatever you'd like (including for free); while "salary" implies a full employment that doesn't look like the case here.

EDIT: none of what I said applies; this was in Mexico.


While I may agree with some criticisms of minimum wages, there are jurisdictions that mandate a minimum hourly rate. Most of the US states are such jurisdictions.


Actually worse, beggars on the street make more money.


None should, but this is ~2x the Mexican minimum wage.

I guess the question here (as per nine_k comment) becomes, if you are working remotely, for a position listed in country A, but you are located in country B, do country B's minimum wage laws apply? If so, does that mean the company in country A should pay you a higher wage, or simply means you don't qualify for the position (note that developer positions in Mexico with Mexican companies are often advertised with offer details such as the salary, in a way that is not common in the U.S.)

Edit: huge correction on the multiplier on minimum wage. For some reason I had been comparing monthly rates with annual ones and arriving at 24x. Upon careful examination, that is ridiculous, but the overall point remains. With the correction, this is actually hugely subpar wages for developers even in Mexico, but not quite illegal wages... for reference, entry level dev work at software companies might be around $20,000 MXP, which is currently $1,000 USD monthly.


$2400 is their annual wage, not monthly. Only 2x


24x the Mexican minimum wage would be $28.8k. This is 2x minimum wage.


Shit, I didn't read the annually versus monthly part... corrected in the original, with edit note.


Wow it's kind of amazing that USA-based coders signed up for a $2400 annual salary!


Or click through to the original posts: https://imgur.com/a/9Lf86#5JQABQG

One thing that most people in this thread seem to be confused about: PDtv, the guy making $2400/year, was a "Media Director", not a developer.


Well, with such a good game behind them, I'm sure they'll find other paying work. Or maybe they can just take the whole studio and make a new game.


I hope the devs found their own studio and make a competing product. I feel like they could potentially make more money and an even better game.




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