No news in PA Discord, except this gem:
Lula Mae wrote:There was a briefly a WIP on the dedicated servers where if the meteor was small enough in relation to the target planet, it would create a planet-wide shock wave instead of destroying the planet. Can't find the demo video - it may have been pulled.
That would have been a great addition. And of course the shields mikey had been working on (though the unit he proposed to use was ugly). It seems highly unlikely we'll get these features now. I am sure they are on his hard drive somewhere but nowhere in the new devs' hard drives, and since the ending was acrimonious, there isn't likely to be an exchange of material.
So no news from the new devs, but I've been doing some digging in the meantime, and I think I've figured out what happened with Uber and PA.
For the longest time we thought that mikey had bought the game, and that the new company, PA Inc., was his. It seemed that way because he was handling all the company's accounts, including its new Twitter, and the official website, whose details he edited to reflect the new company. He took full control of the official forum, the Reddit, the Steam accounts, etc. And since all other staff vanished, it was reasonable to assume mikey had purchased the rights to the game.
What we didn't bother to investigate however was the whole Star Theory saga. And from hints in the PA Discord and the Star Theory Wikipedia page, I've managed to piece that together now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Theory_GamesStar Theory Games was what Uber renamed themselves to, ostensibly so as to avoid conflict with the ride-sharing company, but I suspect in truth to shake the bad reputation they had garnered due to autists on the internet complaining about "unfulfilled Kickstarter promises" (which to my knowledge there were none). Once it became clear they couldn't get much traction with new Kickstarters, they pivoted to VR games, of which they published two:
Wayward Sky, and
Dino Frontier, both for PS VR. Those must not have done well in sales, so they next contracted to make
Kerbal Space Program 2. This makes sense as it's a space game, and they had a strong background in space games, and it was around that time that they changed their name to Star Theory Games, which suited their strengths and their new project well.
However, after some time developing the game, there was some drama with the company contracting them, who owned the Kerbal IP: Take-Two. Take-Two proposed to purchase Star Theory, but Jon Mavor and Bob Berry—who owned Uber, and now Star Theory—"did not like the terms of the deal, so Take-Two instead established Intercept Games and offered all Star Theory staff a position there, while Berry and Mavor encouraged the staff to stay with Star Theory. By February about twelve of the 30 staff had moved to Take-Two, and Kerbal contract was pulled from them by Take-Two. The remaining staff had planned to prepare prototypes and have material ready to present to publishers at the March 2020 Game Developers Conference, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference and others like it were closed down. Star Theory Games was shut down on March 4, 2020 as a result; some of the staff ended up at Take-Two to join the former staff."
One of the people who jumped ship btw was Jeremy Ables, or jables as he was known in the PA forum. That guy was a huge scumbag that treated us almost as badly as mikey did, and lo and behold he abandoned Uber the moment it was favorable to him. And good riddance. Enjoy working on that retarded soulless "Kerbal" franchise, dickweed.
In the midst of all this, I speculate (and have seen someone on the PA Discord say the same) that Mavor and Berry spun off the PA IP into its own company—Planetary Annihilation Inc.—so that if the deal to sell Star Theory to Take-Two had gone through, they would keep the PA IP. So THAT is the reason that PA Inc. was formed and NOT because mikey was trying to take over the game, as we had assumed. And the game was given to mikey because jables and the rest of the staff jumped ship. Mavor and Berry and their reduced staff had too much on their plate, so they handed the PA to mikey to keep it running without bothering them.
So what caused them to kick mikey out now, and hand the game over to a new dev team? We don't know, but what we do now is that they care enough about the PA IP to treat it differently than all the rest of the ones they own. They didn't care enough about the Monday Night Combat IP, or about the PS VR games. They know PA is special.
Btw, Mavor and Berry have both worked on Supreme Commander, and Mavor even worked on Total Annihilation—both of them in highly technical roles. Mavor was graphics programmer on TA and lead engineer on SupCom, so the way he climbed the hierarchy so quickly makes it seem reasonable his next step would be to try to direct the next game. And Berry was a senior engineer on SupCom, and later producer for Gas Powered Games. And on PA he worked as producer.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmavorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-berry-254941https://www.topionetworks.com/people/bo ... dc55000041These people own PA Inc., and these people kicked out mikey and hired Jake Simpson—who apparently worked on
AoE2 DE in some capacity—to work on PA, in a maintenance role at least. But there are rumors of bigger plans. We'll see what comes out of them. I am coming round to the idea that we might be seeing some sort of DLC. It might be a way to test the waters as to how much demand there is for more PA-related content. I'll take anything at this point, and will get back to playing the game very soon in anticipation of further developments. I'll even spruce up the
Cosmic War website.