Kerbal Space Program developers hired by Valve Timeframe for the new hires coincides with departure of eight of Squad's core staff last year

Matthew Handrahan Editor-in-Chief Tuesday 23rd May 2017 Share this article Share

Companies in this article Squad

Update: The community manager for the KSP dev team has posted on the forum and clarified with GamesIndustry.biz, that Squad itself has not been acquired by Valve.

"We continue to be an independent studio with the core KSP team remaining at Squad, hard at work on the improved KSP for consoles port, Update 1.3 and the Making History Expansion. The KSP community shouldn't be concerned about this news having any impact on the game," said the team.

"Regarding the developers joining Valve, it is important to note that we have had several people working on our team over the years, and it is common among development studios for team members to come and go. If some of them joined Valve, it is on their own behalf and we wish them good luck and success in their current and future endeavors. So do not worry, everything continues normally with KSP."

Original story:

Valve has hired the developers behind Kerbal Space Program, moving the entire team from its original Mexico City location to Redmond, Washington.

The Squad team was hired six months ago, but the news only recently emerged on an episode of the Game Dev Unchained podcast. Roger Lundeen, who worked as an environmental designer for Valve between 2010 and 2013, mentioned that Squad had joined the company as part of a wider discussion on breaking into the industry through making mods.

"[Valve] are still buying up mod teams," he said. "There's the group that made Kerbal Space - I think that happened about five or six months ago. They gave that entire team jobs. Those guys were out of Mexico, I believe."

Lundeed later clarified that it was Squad, and not a separate group of modders, that had joined Valve. PCGamesN also received direct confirmation from Valve: "Yes, they joined a little while ago and we will have more news about what they are doing soon," the company said.

In October last year, there appeared to be a mass departure of eight key employees from Squad, though the exact details and its impact on the studio were never officially confirmed. However, the timeline does line up with Lundeed's claim that the Kerbal team was hired by Valve six months before.

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