About DLC and Expansions for KSP

Lead Developer HarvesteR just posted on his dev blog this message, which is copied here:

As many of you know, there's been a lot of debate lately over the topic of DLC and Expansion packs for KSP, so I wanted to try and explain this as clearly as possible now. Bear with me here:

As you all know, last week we've been to the GDC, and while we were there, we had many opportunities to think and talk about where KSP is headed, and what we want the full game to be like.

I had a growing concern that development was starting to turn away from the course we had planned for it, and there, we realized that that indeed was the case: In our efforts to make the best we can on every area of the game, we were starting to get stuck on very advanced areas of the game, while other areas were (and still are) vastly underdeveloped. Specifically, I saw that we were putting a huge amount of time and effort into resources processing in flight and such, and neglecting the mostly unstarted Career mode section of the game.

We concluded that we needed to change our priorities a bit, and reorganize our goals so that we could move forward with development, and improve the most meaningful areas that are in need of attention.

It was with these things in mind that I mentioned in Monday's dev live stream that I thought it could be cool if those very advanced features we were getting ourselves into were available on an expansion to KSP, so that the stock game would fit it's intended scope, and these advanced features would still be available to advanced players. That, however, struck a wrong chord across our audience, and several heated discussions started to spread like wildfire.

So, to cut to the chase here, let me make a few key points clear, and hopefully try to to settle the discussion:


- What I said on the live stream were my own personal ideas, and those were meant in no way as any sort of official announcement on behalf of Squad. It was just me basically thinking out loud. There are no official plans for any sort of post-release project for KSP at this time.


- Regardless of the above, there seems to have been a big misunderstanding of what I meant with 'Expansion' in the first place. To me, an Expansion pack to a game is something that is almost a whole other game in itself, not a small pack of content that could have been done as a mod. I would never even think to do something like that, and I sincerely hope no one really thinks we would ever betray our players like that.


- And lastly, I realize that it was a big mistake to even bring up this topic, and for that I sincerely apologize. We are not an evil company, and you can rest assured we will do everything we can to make sure the complete version of KSP is as satisfying to everyone as possible, and that it becomes all that we hope it will be, a complete version that you can play for years to come.



Thank you for you understanding, and sorry again for all this confusion. I'll do another post soon about what our plans for Career mode are, and the features that are coming up on the coming updates (which will be completely free, of course).

Happy Launchings!

Cheers