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.
