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Kerbal Stuff Closed to the public

Rigel Agar

By Rigel Agar
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Delta_8930

Delta_8930

Posted
Posted (edited)

Why?!?! Kerbalstuff has been my go-to place for all of my mods. Never even visited curse just because of this. i just hope that someone rebuilds kerbal spaceport or ckan that is built onto a permanent database...

Edited by Delta_8930
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BloodDusk

BloodDusk

Posted
Posted (edited)
2 minutes ago, Atlas2342 said:

Don't start the blame game guys....

Well, needless to say that the blame is kind of exchanged as some members of the staff seem to be kind of trying to make the owner of KerbalStuff the villain. So, it shifts both ways.

Edited by BloodDusk
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JxV1232

JxV1232

Posted
Posted

Kerbal Stuff is shutting down

On June 1st 2014, I started working on Kerbal Stuff. 20 months have passed. 1,191 mods have been uploaded and 20,407 users registered with the site. Today, I am officially closing Kerbal Stuff. I'll explain how it came to this.

I built Kerbal Stuff after the announcement that KSP mods were to be officially moved to Curse. At the time, and still today, I did not feel that Curse would do right by the kommunity. I stepped up to build an alternative that would be much better than the mess Curse would provide. I built Kerbal Stuff to do right by the kommunity where Squad wouldn't.

I opened up a beta and got some modders on board, and Kerbal Stuff was very well received. It's fair to say that Kerbal Stuff decisively won the battle over Curse, providing hosting for nearly double the number of mods. It boils down to Kerbal Stuff simply being better at it. Kerbal Stuff had no ads for its entire lifetime, emailed users when their mods updated, and cared more about the modders and the players.

Undoubtedly Kerbal Stuff has had a direct impact on Squad's revenue - how many players must have hopped back into Kerbal Space Program after getting an email about their favorite mod receiving an update? In the past month, despite frequent downtime and slow page loads, Kerbal Stuff has served 1.2 million page views over 279 thousand sessions for over 84 thousand unique visitors.

As thanks, Squad continues to endorse Curse as the official source for KSP mods. They refuse to even mention Kerbal Stuff in public. During the early days, they even pursued me legally for the use of the word "Kerbal" in the name (this was before they registered the trademark).

Even setting Squad aside, running Kerbal Stuff is a largely thankless job. In fact, for the most part, I just hear complaints. Most people don't actually care about the effort put into it. Whenever I've taken the time to add features or make improvements or meet the requests of users, no one has shown any appreciation. I stopped volunteering my time and energy to extend this website, because my efforts were always met with silence or complaints.

I don't have expectations of anyone. I don't expect anyone to gush over how great any new features I implement are. I don't expect Squad to support Kerbal Stuff as the official source for mods. However, these factors have contributed to the apathy I have for the ongoing maintenance of Kerbal Stuff. I'm not willing to invest more of my time and energy into making Kerbal Stuff faster or more stable. I have been well aware of the slowness and instability, but I simply have no motivation to fix it.

I would like to thank those who have been supportive. Thanks to the volunteer admins for helping maintain the site. Thanks as well to the modders who chose to host their mods on Kerbal Stuff, and the users who chose to use it as their source for mods.

All of the mods hosted on Kerbal Stuff are available via this torrent. The source code for Kerbal Stuff will continue to be available on Github. I can be reached at [email protected].

- Drew "SirCmpwn" DeVault

Interesting stats from Google Analytics:

  • 4,948,349 total sessions
  • 993,550 total unique visitors
  • 19,083,579 total page views
  • 03:11 - average length of visit

Kerbal Stuff costs about $100/mo to operate. After upgrades to support the high traffic, it would be about $180/mo.

Fun fact: Squad keeps the numbers secret, but as of April 2015 the estimated copies sold of KSP on Steam were about a million.

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Umlüx

Umlüx

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, MannaroThePatient said:

KSP lives because mods and mainly with CKAN and KerbalStuff. When Squad start loses $$$ they will up again.

Bad move Squad, bein nice with ppls that help you gain money is the 1st rule to gain more and more...

why would they lose money?
we already paid for our copies. and i think the game is now big enough to not solely rely on our word of mouth anymore...

squad is in the sheets with curse and as far as i know never supported nor opposed KerbalSuff

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MannaroThePatient

MannaroThePatient

Posted
Posted (edited)
3 minutes ago, Umlüx said:

why would they lose money?
we already paid for our copies. and i think the game is now big enough to not solely rely on our word of mouth anymore...

squad is in the sheets with curse and as far as i know never supported nor opposed KerbalSuff

That's more complicated. They gain money even for advertising and for good reputation. If you start get bad reputation less ppl play game, surf your website, click your ad banner, etc...

Edited by MannaroThePatient
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igor_perusco

igor_perusco

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, Delta_8930 said:

mods that aren't on ckan...?

oh if you got your mods from ckan, you now probably have a more urgent problem

1 minute ago, MannaroThePatient said:

That's more complicated. They gain money even for advertising and for good reputation. If you start get bad reputation less ppl play game, surf your website, click your ad banner, etc...

there's ads on the forum? that's news to me :huh:

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Eskandare

Eskandare

Posted
Posted (edited)

 

6 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Read the posting, it has nothing to do with Squad

 

No it doesn't except for some minor legal over the name Kerbal. Too bad I didn't know of the hardship he was having before hand, I would have thrown him the $180 per month to keep it running. I'm on reddit too, there sounds like some possible hope in the near future to reboot Kerbal Stuff.

Edited by Eskandare
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linuxgurugamer

linuxgurugamer

Posted
Posted
Just now, Eskandare said:

 

 

No it does't except for some minor legal over the name Kerbal. Too bad I didn't know of the hardship he was having before hand. I would have thrown him the $180 per month to keep it running. I'm on readdit too, there sounds like some possible hope in the near future to reboot Kerbal Stuff.

That legal stuff was last year, had nothing to do with the shutdown, other than being history

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technicalfool

technicalfool

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, igor_perusco said:

there's ads on the forum? that's news to me :huh:

 

Just now, BloodDusk said:

It's supposed to be a secret that some people use various forms of ad blocking to not see any ads.

The KSP forums used to have an ad banner. As I recall, there was a problem one day with a badly-made ad tripping Chrome's malware warning and preventing people from accessing the site.

The banner got removed, quite quickly. It's never been placed back since.

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GDJ

GDJ

Posted
Posted

RIP Kerbalstuff. It's a shame, but if what Drew said is true, we need to look in the mirror for the reasons why it finally shut down.

If Drew had to deal with an onslaught of negativity from users everyday, yeah I can see why he lost his zeal for keeping the site up.

 

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Atlas2342

Atlas2342

Posted
Posted
Just now, GDJ said:

RIP Kerbalstuff. It's a shame, but if what Drew said is true, we need to look in the mirror for the reasons why it finally shut down.

If Drew had to deal with an onslaught of negativity from users everyday, yeah I can see why he lost his zeal for keeping the site up.

 

Like what they always say, regret is in the end....

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GDJ

GDJ

Posted
Posted
11 minutes ago, Atlas2342 said:

Like what they always say, regret is in the end....

Well, that was the PC way of expressing what I thought. Best I can muster this morning.

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