At the risk of repeating a comment I made further down in a thread, the average QA Engineer salary in Mexico is literally 10X more than one of these devs was making. Anyone trying to justify this in terms of the Mexican minimum wage is trying to sell you ocean front property in Arizona.
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 am probably one of those comments below "justifying it in terms of the minimum wage". Quite honestly, a big part is that I read it as $2,400 USD a month originally (not yearly!). Even if that had been the case, I wouldn't have faulted developers for feeling underpaid in the particular case of KSP (given how big of a success the game ended up being).
As yearly salary it is indeed atrocious. Still, worth saying, not an illegal salary. But yeah, I don't see many people enticed to work for that amount for a for-profit company they don't have significant ownership of. The point is not on whether or not it is advisable to resign in those conditions (of course it is), but on whether it is viable to sue (I doubt it is).
And... many people in Mexico do make minimum wage (around 13% of the country does), but usually not anyone in a specialized profession in a city.
"This is so shitty that the nicest thing that can be said is it's not actually illegal" doesn't merit the exculpatory nature of this sentence. And the sentiment behind it isn't really worth much in the first place.
I did never meant to say that made it a good/reasonable thing (although, if we are going down that path, why is it right to pay someone $200 a month to clean toilets and not to write code? If anything, it is a shittier thing - pun intended - to offer that deal to people who don't have the means and options to refuse or get other jobs... but I suspect we would both end up agreeing that the Mexican minimum wage should be higher). My point is that there is likely no legal recourse here, which is an important detail.
How does that compare to the similar argument when people bring up free speech (and a person responds that if the best defense is that the government can't make it illegal, etc.)
That's pretty much exactly my argument in those cases, too. The government not finding a piece of speech so objectionable as to be criminal is a far cry from a positive moral defense of its existence.
Interestingly, Mexican law does put a series of restrictions on employing 16 year olds, so that part might be actually illegal (specially if it's full time work, or anything above 6 hours per day).
Much of that depends on specifics. Some of these devs traveled. Any work done while in other jurisdictions must have been done at local minimum wages. It doesn't take many days spent on the road promoting KSP in the US before you are legally entitled to more.
There are prosecuted cases of offshore firms sending below-minimum workers into the US. It is a crime.
That's interesting to know. Guess my mental model was "this is work that can be done anywhere on earth, for a Mexican company under Mexican laws, so where the employee is should not matter legally", but if the location of the employee had anything to do with the work they were asked to perform... e.g. go to this event and promote our game, then it should indeed be illegal.
There are a few jurisdictions that take it to another level. Some governments will sue on behalf of the aggrieved employee. There it is a government taking action to recoup funds and any assigned penalties, not an employee. Third parties (is Valve/steam) can also be sued if they hold funds/property.
(From British Columbia, a typical such jurisdiction.)
"If a third party is or will be indebted to a person who is required to pay money under a determination, the Branch may demand that the third party pay all or part of their indebtedness directly to the Branch."
"The Branch may seize personal or business assets of a person required to pay under a determination, settlement agreement or order to satisfy the amount owing and the costs of the seizure. The Branch may direct the Court Bailiff to seize assets to recover the amount owing. "
The devs agreed voluntarily to accept this salary for a number of years. It is not ours to judge whether this it was too small, because for them it was not (until now)
Likewise, if you insist on "this salary is too small for them", you're saying that you know better what's good for them than they themselves. I would find that offensive.
I'm probably missing some back story here. Why did the developers agree to work for such low salaries? If they accepted the job knowing how much they will be paid, why are they upset about it now?
Because things change over time? There's a big difference between accepting a job at a low salary, and then staying on after awhile at that low salary with no raises, when you realize just how hard the working conditions are, and that you aren't saving any money while your friends are making steps in their financial lives and careers. This is basic at-will employment; you're free to decide you on longer want to do it at any point. I don't understand why you think that just because they initially accepted it, they should be OK with it indefinitely.
I never said they should be OK with it indefinitely. If I was in their shoes, I would have just quit immediately. But I wouldn't accuse my employer of bad behavior either.
Many of the other comments seem to be accusing the employer of acting in bad faith, or of immoral behavior. If the employees knew exactly what they were getting into, these accusations seem baseless.
It sounds like Squad was taking advantage of employees by forcing them to work very long hours. That's definitely bad behavior. Maybe you or I would quit immediately, but a lot of people don't. They still have a right to complain about it when they finally do get around to quitting. I just don't understand why you are going after the employees. What point does it serve? We know that burnout, being overworked, and being taken advantage of is a huge problem in this industry, so why go after the victims?
I disagree. I think he's unjustly going after the employees, or even if that isn't his intent, that's how it's coming off. I felt like I needed to speak up for them, because as an employee myself, I would hate to speak up about bad conditions in the workplace only to be dismissed by someone who knows little about the situation saying "But he knew what he signed up for, why is he complaining?"
To repeat what Eric said, I'm not "going after" anybody, particularly not the employees. They didn't like their working conditions, so they quit. Absolutely nothing wrong with what they did. My original post was mainly driven by confusion: many commenters talked about their yearly salary as though it is abnormally low. Hence my confusion about why these programmers would accept a job with an abnormally low salary.
Regarding immoral behavior on the part of the employer: I still don't buy that either. Someone can be a bad employer (ie, one that i would never want to work for), and still be perfectly morally upstanding. If someone, in a competitive labor marketplace, takes on a job which has low pay, I don't think they can accuse their employer of immoral behavior because of low pay. Such accusations should be saved for those scums that pull a bait-and-switch and refuse to honor their promises.
The disconnect here is that abysmal working conditions are a huge issue to me, and that the mere existence of them means that an employer is not morally upstanding. Employers have obligations to their employees to treat them well and fairly, and when those obligations are not met, I think people should both change jobs and speak up to save others from entering that same situation at their previous job.
Squad is taking advantage of its developers. There's no other way to put it. It's over-working them with massive crunch times (that may not have been communicated clearly to job seekers up front) and paying them a very tiny fraction of what they could be earning elsewhere. Who knows how much of that is related to false promises. A lot of scummy employers will say things like "The pay will go up after an introductory period", or "We'll give you a raise soon", and then it never happens. Maybe it happened here. We don't know until we listen to the employees' stories. That's why my first instinct is not to look for reasons why it's their fault.
If it's "baseless" to accuse the employer of acting in bad faith, then those poor working conditions are either an utter accident or the fault of the employees' decisions.
It's no different from people choosing a career in early childhood education. Some people insist on doing what they love, ignoring ugly financial issues caused by supply and demand.
I can't speak for the devs, but there are a few possible reasons:
- Working on games is their dream job. They want to do it so much they'd do it for free.
- Long-term unemployment makes one desperate. I have personal experience with this: I once took a job that offered no benefits and low pay because I had been unemployed for two years and was desperate for a job.
- For the same reasons people don't get out of abusive relationships ASAP. They come to believe they deserve the abuse. Again, personal experience: working at a company with low pay and abusive management convinced me I wasn't cut out for anything better, and it was a long time before I broke free of that mental trap and eventually sought employment elsewhere.
- They think that the low pay is temporary and that it'll go up when the product takes off. And then the employer keeps delaying the salary increases by moving the goalposts. Hey, another trap I've fallen into... (and yes, all of my personal experience comes from the same company)
>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.
Sorry, but have you really met actual working class people that work in "maquilas"? It is not uncommon to see people earning around 600 MXN pesos a week which is barely enough to count as 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.
Hmm, there are dead poor people in Mexico and even the US, including people that make less than minimum wage (from part time gigs they can manage to find, etc).
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 reallydumbmove 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 :(
> 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.
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.
TO put this in perspective, they made about $60 million, and paid out probably less than $60 thousand total as salary here in the 1.5 ish years the game has been out.
I really don't get it. If the owners make that much, why would they want to be such total jerks? At this point it would cost them extremely little to pay a decent wage. It's not as if it's fiscally prudent either, since losing your good name and having all the developers walk out on you isn't exactly cheap.
Sounds reasonable. We might be talking about a modder or someone in other ways deeply invested in the community who is given pocket change each month as some kind of hobby stipend. Which is perfectly all right precisely up to the moment where anyone involved starts to think of it as a full time gig, maybe a career even.
The failure on the side of squad then isn't so much in not paying them more (although that would certainly be one way to solve it), it's in not realizing that there can't be a middle ground.
What I don't get at all, no matter how you spin the story, is how anybody could be forced to overtime etc on pocket change. Sure, that stuff happens millions of times each day, but it would typically involve people at the brink of starvation in an isolated mining town or so. Remote tech workers with enough leisure time to fall deep into the rabbit hole of gaming don't quite fit that pattern.
Well see humans unlike companies have this thing called dedication, they'll work insane hours for little pay because they believe in what they are doing. Companies who are dedicated to nothing, but money will lash a rope around them and ride it to the bank.
We would not be talking about this if it were a number of unmistakable volunteers quitting after running out of dedication. Add 200$/month and you get a situation where both sides are prone to confuse a bit of thank-you-cash with an actual job.
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.)
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
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://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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Interesting. I didn't realize, before trying to figure out what this means for KSP just now, that Squad is not first and foremost a game developer: they're basically a marketing company, for which KSP was originally a 20%-style project.
I hope this development is not so much a product of internal company bullshit, but now I'm very worried it is. KSP is one of the most genuinely important games out there right now. I would be surprised if many less than 100% of the next generation of spacetravel-involved scientists and engineers counted KSP as part of their journey.
Can someone give me a little background here? What exactly is 'Squad'? Is this just some of the devs leaving? A particular subgroup? They're true KSP devs and not mod devs?
I don't see why squad didn't sell KSP before it came out of beta. They are probably not going to give it the attention it needs, leading to bad publicity. Meanwhile, I'd venture game companies'd be willing to pay a pretty nice sum for it.
Good they didn't, I'm pretty sure anyone willing to buy a franchise would just milk out every penny they could out of it and let it rot. KSP progressed pretty nicely out of beta and through several updates.
That said, it's pretty sad to see development stops. At least they AFAIR sorted out the modding API issues, ensuring a stable platform for the community to work on. Honestly, that's what makes me believe KSP will be still improving in the coming years - the modding community is strong and have already pulled off incredible feats of programming and science (this game attracts a really specific crowd).
Ah, it's a pretty awesome game - the right amount of complexity and fun. If it was open source it could continue forever like OpenTTD. Then maybe career mode could be completed.
Honestly, this is one of the very few games I've enjoyed in the last 10 years.
OpenTTD is a re-implementation of TTD, though. OpenKSP would be the equivalent (which doesn't exist).
Quake 3 Arena is a better example, which has open source code but proprietary graphics. OpenArena is the open variant.
Or HoverRace, where the developer released the source code but extremely late. The game was abandoned around 2000, community dead by 2004ish, and code released a few years after that. Too late to really save it, but it was still nice to play now and then.
Warzone2100 would be a proper example of an commercial game having a open source afterlife (including being ported to linux/mac and continued development to this very day).
I'm pretty sure KSP will continue. The modding community is strong, and has already created several addons that are more advanced than anything the original devs ever wrote.
I spent less than 5 hours playing this game. But I think it is very, very important for gaming, for space travel simulation, flight simulation, and space exploration. Would buy it again and feel sad that development stops.
Play few hours more, and before you know it, you'll clock a thousand hours.
As a somewhat veteran player at this point, I confirm that this game is very important for space industry. It strikes the perfect balance between fun and science - making it easy to just eyeball your Mün missions and blow stuff up, while at the same time strongly encouraging learning real physics in order to figure out just what the fuck you're doing and how to hit your destination using less fuel.
There's a lot of rumors of shady practices at that developer - shitty hours, below minimum-wage pay, poor management, intern exploitation, threats of litigation against ex-employees, profits being poured into pet projects of the founders...
Generally, but not always, these kinds of stories aren't told about well-ran shops. But hey, it's video games, so who knows?
It's perfectly possible to have suffered shitty hours/below minimum-wage pay/poor management/etc. and at the same time be sad to leave. (The sadness then being leaving a project you're proud of and the community that loves it.)
Indeed; it's the kind of project I'd be personally willing to work on for free as long as savings lasted. Whatever the crap is going on at Squad, there's no denial that this is one of the best video games ever, especially if measured by amount of kids who actually learned advanced physics in order to play it better.
I have 0 context and background info, i'm not even into the game, but maybe it's just people moving on. I can see they have created a truly amazing game and now they are looking for new venues, new challenges. Considering the success they had I wouldn't be surprised most of those people are also getting some sweet offers.
That's not a good thing, but that's actually quite common in the games industry. It's bad, and the industry is apparently trying to kill it, but for now comes part and parcel with the job, in most places.
Squad isn't a games company they are just awesome and backed an employees drive to create the game. I suspect the staff who work at Squad are attracted to all kinds of projects they're contracted for. As ksp peaks and slumps perhaps they don't want to just be in the maintenance game.
Digital advertising agencies are special in a sense that game dev isn't really other domain for those. If you do your tech inhouse, its likely you'll have people capable of gamedev, be it iOS/Unity/Unreal/Defold/HTML5 or (much less these days) Flash.
They're not digital advertising in the traditional sense, although they do a bit of that. They're interactive stuff, some physical stuff. And some games and software, which is why they had Filipe on staff when he tendered his resignation to start work on KSP, setting the whole thing in motion.
They recently released versions of the game on consoles. I'd guess that they stuck around for post-release patches, and now that it's stable, are winding down development.
My understanding is that KSP is a bit like Minecraft - the value was never in the technical competence of the code. I don't know that you can just throw either team at a new product and be guaranteed a success.
I'm really curious what's going to happen to the guy that got > 1k votes for saying they should shoot him a message, since he's just a webdev contractor that's been working at NASA for about a year.
IMO, NASA should hire those guys anyway. It'd be a good move.
At those wages, they can get work off elance, odesk, etc and make a heck lot more money. I guess that's the gaming industry for you. Treat people poorly because they are passionate about what they do and can't find that kind of work elsewhere.
Kerbal Space Program is a really fantastic game that rekindled my love of flight (and space) simulation.
For those who don't know about it, it's a spaceflight simulation game. You design a spacecraft from parts, assembling rocket engines, fuel tanks, thrusters, command modules, etc. into a design, and then test it and try to get it into orbit; or from there, to other planetary bodies. Multiple spacecraft if you want: you can dock and coordinate them, or build space stations or moon bases.
It's got an incredible amount of detail, modeling a whole solar system with various planets and moons and asteroids. Remember how the staff working on "No Man's Sky" made claims about how "all other video games are fake, they have a skybox, the planets and sun in our sky are real real and you can fly to them" (claims which turned out to be largely false)? Well, Kerbal Space Program actually delivers on that experience. You can rocket into space, dock in orbit with something you've put up there previously, gravity-slingshot yourself to another planet, parachute a lander down to the surface and roam around, etc.
The game has realistic space flight physics and orbital mechanics (though tuned to be very generous to players compared to real life). You can learn a lot about the basic mechanics of spaceflight just by playing it; you begin to intuitively understand delta-v, apoapsis and when to apply thrust, etc. If you want to dock with with something then you need to plan an appropriate launch window. Maneuvering in orbit is very interesting and initially counter-intuitive (if a spacecraft is "ahead" of you in orbit, in which direction should you boost to "catch up" to it? If you boost directly toward it, you'll increase your orbital speed and thus the shape of your orbit, taking you away from it in a different dimension!). Getting to other astral bodies is tricky and requires more planning. KSP manages to make all of this challenging but fun.
If you'd like to learn more about it, or are even just curious what the fuss is about (the game itself, not the drama), I'd direct you to videos by Scott Manley [1]. Here's a video of a fairly sophisticated mission starting with liftoff from the launch pad, made by another YouTuber [2] (skip to 13:00 to see him planning orbital maneuvers like circularizing his orbit). Manley's "Interstellar Quest" mission has even more complex orbital planning (5:00) [3].
The depth of KSP is astonishing and there's not much else out there like it. It's in the same ballpark as Minecraft in terms of the amazing creative sandbox it provides, with a world that has a ton of depth to explore. There's a wonderful atmospheric feel with the music and artwork that happens when you successfully lift off into space, going from the thrill of launch to the serenity of orbit. It's a beautiful feeling and one that isn't easily captured by recordings.
So it's sad to hear that the company and/or developers who made the game aren't carrying on. The game may not be a commercial success on the scale of Minecraft but the artistic and conceptual achievement are on par or greater.
Orbiter [0] is commonly mentioned. You trade a bit of the "fun" angle of KSP for more realism. The physics model is more advanced too: I believe halo/lissajous orbits are possible, it has lagrange points & more.
> with a world that has a ton of depth to explore
Very deep: on Duna's surface (KSP's Mars equivalent), there is a rock emitting an SSTV signal...
Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering,
construction, exploration and survival in space and
on planets. Players build space ships, space stations,
planetary outposts of various sizes and uses, pilot ships
and travel through space to explore planets and gather
resources to survive.
As a casual fan of KSP, I'm not up to date on all the haps. Can someone tell me what to expect in the future? Will there be more development work done?
Most interesting points: "Another point: Squad has been actively censoring the official forums. Any content related to the resignation of the 8 devs was immediately removed. This was done by Squad staff, not the regular forum mods. With this in mind, it's also pretty obvious that the latest Devnote is full of shit. They don't want anyone to think that something is wrong."
And: "Currently, there are 2-3 developers left. Two of them were not held highly by their fellow devs, and the third one is RoverDude, who only work part-time."
Sad and unfortunate, but I expect KSP has left an influential mark on space related games for years to come. For example, see the orbital mechanics segment of Children of a Dead Earth [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiIh4Xw2bnQ
Is there a way to donate directly to these guys? They've done some pretty good work and it would be a nice gesture to say thanks by directly improving their conditions and to bypass their employer.
Dang and other HN staff have said before that they like making readers have to work a bit for the information, and not just be spoonfed in the headlines. I understand it to be about fostering curiosity and wonder. I assume it's also about discouraging people from dismissing an article based on headline alone. ("Kerbal Space Program? I don't know what that is and don't care about it"). Really great HN articles are often an unexpected discovery on a topic I didn't expect to be as interesting as it was.
Dan could probably explain better than I. I don't have any information about whether this title was changed or why, but the current title strikes me as lining up with that approach. See also "I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words."
> I understand it to be about fostering curiosity and wonder. I assume it's also about discouraging people from dismissing an article based on headline alone.
Quite an euphemistic way to say "clickbait", isn't it?
You've said clickbait titles are against the rules in the past. What is your definition of a clickbait title, if it's not something vague and provocative that requires users to click through to figure out what the topic is?
(Note that I am talking purely about titles, not the articles behind them.)
Definitions are beyond me, but in this case I don't call it clickbait because it's the title given by the author to a text written from the heart, not to hoodwink or waylay. That makes it content, not bait tacked on later.
There's no need for every title to spell everything out. On the contrary, it serves reflection for readers to work a little, and 'reflective' (as opposed to 'reflexive') is the quality we most want here.
And in this case the title is written from the heart in the context of reddit, where it has "/r/KerbalSpaceProgram" automatically attached.
I cannot agree with categorizing the act of naming the company/brand as "spelling everything out". You have to work equally hard to understand this title with or without the name. It requires reading the post and putting in the same amount of mental effort. But the stripped-down version fails to serve the purpose of setting context. It might as well be a random ID.
The posts you linked both have titles that at least set context, whether or not some people wanted more information.
