Valve hires a few former Kerbal Space Program developers

Members of the Kerbal Space Program development team have started new jobs at Valve.

Update: Kerbal Space Program creator Squad has reached out to clarify that while Valve did indeed hire developers who were once part of the Kerbal team, Squad studio is not being acquired by Valve, and remains independent.

In a post on the Kerbal forums, the studio reiterated its commitment to the game's Making History expansion, and improving the console ports.

You'll find see the original story below.

Original story: Developers at Squad, the indie team behind the successful Kerbal Space Program, were recently hired by Valve. This actually happened around six months ago, but we're only finding out about it now thanks to a former Valve employee.

Speaking on the Game Dev Unchained podcast, Roger Lundeen, a former architect and environmental designer at Valve, revealed that the company still hires mod creators from time to time. Lundeen then let slip that Valve's latest hire was the Kerbal Space Program team.

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

During the interview, Lundeen incorrectly referred to Kerbal as a mod, which he later corrected when contacted by PCGamesN. "I guess some members of that team are now at Valve, how many I don't know. I imagine KSP remains the IP and property of Squad, in Mexico City. So the devs, not a mod-team," he said.

Following the news, Valve confirmed that the team joined "a while ago," and promised to share more about they'll be doing "soon." It's unclear if the team will be heading up its own project, or work on other projects within the company..

That said, this is not the first time Valve has acquired an indie team to work in-house on a new IP. The most recent example is Portal, when the company brought in a team of student developers.