Lost Sale Here!

[Brotoro]

KSP was the best entertainment purchase I've made in my entire life, hands down, on the basis of hours of fun per dollar.

[stenole]

I respect that people value their money differently. Even if the price has increased gradually since early access, the game has evolved and its value has actually increased. You would not see the sort of changes that have been made up to version 1.1 in any other game. And remember that $40 is the current full price of this game, but it is frequently on sale for less.

Back when I bought the game, I thought the price was pretty stiff too, especially for an early access game from an unknown developer. The screenshots were pretty underwhelming (and the game still looks somewhat ugly). The demo is what convinced me that it was worth the money. It had a different kind of fun to it than you usually see in games.

[Renegrade]

6 hours ago, Hary R said:

Well your're in the KSP forum, what kind of people did you expect here, people that hate the game?

I could list a million faults and flaws and issues with both Squad and KSP, so you might actually include me in the 'hate' category.  I ain't no fanboy.  Not even slightly.

However, it would be a LIE to say that I did not get my money's worth.

I've played (on Steam):

• Far Cry III - 3 hours.  BLAH.  Was about forty by the time I bought it.  Gorilla nads skinning simulator, would skin gorilla nads again 11/10 - IGN.  HOLY EFFING GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK. 
• Tomb Raider Reboot.  24 hours, 25 dollars.  Almost had a story there.
• Assassin's Creed IV - Black Flag.  40 hours, about 40 bucks.  Wouldn't have played more than 5 if it wasn't for the ship combat.
• Grand Theft Auto V - ("autov") 82 hours - 80 bucks.  Big hype. Big bucks.  Little story.
• Prison Architect - I forget how much, but it's currently $33 CDN.  116 hours.
• Saints Row III - 196 hours.  Not sure how much, currently $17 CDN.  196 hours.
• Space Engineers - currently 28 bucks, 745 hours
• Kerbal Space Program - currently 40 bucks, 700-ish hours prior to first reset, 682.6 hours since reset, over 3000 hours with Store versions

(to hit the highlights at least, I didn't include a bunch of free or $5 games that were 5 or less hours etc)

I'm seeing a definite mathematical pattern there in that list.  The conclusion is obvious and denying it would be like sticking my head in the sand.  KSP is BANG for the BUCK.  Even if it is a big steaming pile of bugs (well not like the others on the list were bug-free either.)

8 hours ago, InsaneDruid said:

"Nachtstrom" (night time energy prices) where a thing in the past here. There where even "Nachtspeicheröfen", electrical furnaces that ran on night energy and stored it using stoney material for the day. Today such pricing can be bought in special tariffs, but the usual tariffs are one price for any time of day. The average price here is about 28,8 Cent/ kWh!

O.o

That's one thing I love about an international community, I learn a bit about other places almost every day

 

[Perry Apsis]

On 4/28/2016 at 5:07 AM, InsaneDruid said:

Looking at the Playtimes of somewhat in the thousand hours for most of us here it's probably more expensive to just run the computer for that long time than the cost of KSP itself.

• Given an Price of about 25 Cents per kWh (which would actually be on the "low" side here in Germany),
• an average consumption of 150Watt of a running low-end Gaming PC (for example: http://www.computerbase.de/2016-04/asus-geforce-gtx-950-2g-test/2/ they are measuring the whole system with about 150Watt with an entry-level 750 / 950 GPU, so, my 980ti G1 will be far away from that^^)
• and a price of 40 Euros for KSP (without any discounts)

After 1080 hours, just running the computer for that time will cost 40,5 Euros, and thus more than KSP itself.

 

So Squad is contributing to global climate change by creating an open-ended game where the only limit is your own imagination, and the only reward is the satisfaction of achieving your own goals.

Truly evil.

[Kerbart]

1 minute ago, Perry Apsis said:

So Squad is contributing to global climate change by creating an open-ended game where the only limit is your own imagination, and the only reward is the satisfaction of achieving your own goals.

Truly evil.

You forgot to mention Squad's connection with the Illuminati. Or did I just blow your cover? Whoops...

[Hodari]

48 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

You forgot to mention Squad's connection with the Illuminati. Or did I just blow your cover? Whoops...

You mean the Eeloominati...

[NeoMorph]

On 28/04/2016 at 6:43 AM, ghost_sox said:

Hello,

I created this forum account to voice my thoughts to SQUAD about Kerbal Space Program's price.

I watched videos of this game.   I have played the demo.   I saw the price was $23.00 on Steam.   I said "OK,  I'm going to get this on my pay day."      After  pay day,  I come back and it's $40.00???!!!!   REALLY???    I was all kinds of ready to shell out the $23.00!   I would even pay $29.00....     So,  let me get this straight....  you nearly DOUBLE the price after the update 1.1  (the price was always in the $20.00 to $25.00 range, I had been watching).   I wouldn't get DOUBLE the game would I?   I doubt it.    So you want double the money and without doubling the game content.  Not from me,  not today.    

You have lost this sale,  and my son's sale,   as well as my flight sim addicted father's sale.    This game is not worth $40.00 as it sits now and Squad knows it!

A very disappointed lost customer.   Put the price back to ~25 and I'll buy but until then,  see ya....

Hi ghost_sox... Welcome to the forum and PLEASE... please don't think this is just one of those games that you play for a while and then never play again. You only need to see the activity on these forums to see that players have been here for a while... do you think that a game made by an indie would keep their community going for this long without the game being fun and addictive.

You have to look at a game like COD... how much does a single map pack cost (on top of the price of the game). Then look at KSP. I personally have been playing almost non-stop since 2013 (thanks to the wonderful Nerdcubed video).

Just look at this video and then look at what KSP is today... AND THEN tell me that this game is not worth $40 (note: KSP starts at 6:45 in the video below).

 

[RocketBlam]

If you don't want to pay $40, don't buy the game. No need to create a forum account every time you decide not to buy something.

[CloudlessEchoes]

KSP is definitely worth $40.

[theonegalen]

In hours played divided by dollars spent, KSP would be the best game I've ever had even if I had paid $100 for it. In days where five multiplayer maps and shiny graphics cost $60 (looking at you, NuBattlefront), $40 is not a bad price for what you get. But if it's more than you want to pay, sure, don't pay it.

[Vanamonde]

Please keep the discussion on-topic people. And while you are free to disagree with each other, please do not insult each other in the process. There's no need for an us-against-him attitude toward the OP. 

[ibanix]

My 0.2 credits:

I paid $20 for Firewatch (http://www.firewatchgame.com/), which was a great story and great experience. The entire game play was less than five hours. The experience was great, and that was what made it worth spending money on.

For KSP, I spent the $40. In KSP's case, I wanted to support the developers for making something I enjoy greatly.

My favorite model for things is actually to fund them. I helped crowd-fun Pillars of Eternity ( eternity.obsidian.net/) as well as the card game Exploding Kittens. I use Patreon to donate to creators I think make good things. I don't know Squad's business model, but I would like it if they could also use this model.

[Hary R]

9 hours ago, Renegrade said:

I could list a million faults and flaws and issues with both Squad and KSP, so you might actually include me in the 'hate' category.  I ain't no fanboy.  Not even slightly.

If you are still playing it, you are not in the hate category but not being in the hate category doesn't mean you are in the fan boy category.

The thing is the kind of reply the OP gets was expected. Most people are here because they find enjoyment with the game and want to share it.

[Accelerando]

Just because you got your money's worth doesn't mean it's absolutely necessary that other people accept a nearly doubly jacked-up price tag on a still-unfinished product (no matter what they crank the version number up to), especially when the primary reason that you get so much playtime out of the game is because you and your fellow players put massive amounts of work and time into creating and testing almost everything you can interact with aside from the buildings and rather featureless planets.

Squad doesn't build the Eve ascent vehicles and Mun bases, they give you the tools. And while credit and payment is due to the developers who made that happen, it doesn't change the fact that it's still a somewhat basic game on the whole of it. I find that this is true of most indie "sandbox" games advertised for their openness to creativity: the catch being that YOU (and/or the modding community) have to create most of the actually functioning content yourself.

Most of the value of the gameplay, as it currently stands, arises from a few challenges that are pretty simple when you get right down to them:

1. You have an large distance to cross, which means you have to spend a certain amount of delta-V.
2. Sometimes you need to be able to brake in an atmosphere.
3. Sometimes you need to be able to land on a planet.
4. You have a relatively small assortment of parts, and they are fragile in unintuitive ways.

And you have to design a vehicle to overcome the rather basic challenges the game puts in front of you. (To land on Laythe and return to Kerbin you need a heatshield and ~4K delta-V, and you need to accurately perform 2 liftoffs and 2 transfer/injection burns.)

"Career mode", in its current state, adds one additional imposition: You have to do these things to make money in order to keep doing these same things. Which is not really an imposition that adds much to gameplay, since it doesn't actually change anything that you have to do. It just means that you have to headache more over it.

The long-delayed implementation of stock mining was one step toward a better overall game experience, and what I've seen of the recent UI overhauls is, too. But it's still not really a finished game, for what purports to be a "space program simulator" inspired by Simcity and Tycoon games. It, like Minecraft, is more of a game engine that allows people to build the game they want to play in it, so long as they are willing to contribute a large amount of effort. The challenges of semi-realistic space travel are new enough to most people that this doesn't get boring for a while (and in this regard I think that KSP is lucky to have been one of the first such games), but once you have learned to land anywhere and understand basic principles of spaceflight, the game quickly becomes boring if you don't have the drive to pour endless hours of time into construction.

(On that note, building spacecraft remains entirely too finicky, fiddly, and inaccurate to retain my interest for very long. No, having a ruler doesn't make the game "boring" and "overcomplicated", it makes it easier for me to enjoy. Minecraft has a ruler: it handles everything in discrete blocks of 1 unit cubed side length, making it easy to tell how everything fits together. I don't see Minecraft fans, particularly Redstone engineers, complaining about having a precise building system! Or Robocraft fans, for that matter - or virtually any other sandbox game that allows you to construct your own vehicles from scratch.)

Edited May 1, 2016 by Accelerando

[Pecan]

7 hours ago, Accelerando said:

...Most of the value of the gameplay, as it currently stands, arises from a few challenges that are pretty simple when you get right down to them:

1. You have an large distance to cross, which means you have to spend a certain amount of delta-V.
2. Sometimes you need to be able to brake in an atmosphere.
3. Sometimes you need to be able to land on a planet.
4. You have a relatively small assortment of parts, and they are fragile in unintuitive ways.

Yeah, I'm with you there.  Space exploration is so simple.  Why do these rocket scientists make such a big deal about it anyway?

Seriously, I'm not sure what your point is.
The whole reason for sandbox games or simulators is so that we can use them to make, test and use the things we think of instead.of using a few pre-defined objects.  It's no surprise most "sandbox" games are like that, whether they're indie or not.  The exception being the Sims series, of course, which a) is full of bugs,, b) doesn't let you do much anyway, c) costs a fortune for every boring add-on.  It's not that were willing to put time into making things, but that that is exactly why we want a sandbox simulator - something that allows us to build the things we want to.

Are you suggesting that Squad should provide specific vehicles/bases instead and build the gameplay around traffic and economics?  It's an interesting idea and would be fairly easy for them to include, since they have stock ships already.  It's probably not a game I'd want to play for long but I can see the appeal for people who bought KSP even though they don't want to build rockets.

Totally with you on the 'tools are good' comment though.

[Accelerando]

5 hours ago, Pecan said:

Are you suggesting that Squad should provide specific vehicles/bases instead and build the gameplay around traffic and economics?  It's an interesting idea and would be fairly easy for them to include, since they have stock ships already.  It's probably not a game I'd want to play for long but I can see the appeal for people who bought KSP even though they don't want to build rockets.

I mean, I'm not saying I want to forego rocket construction (although having more stock vehicles that actually do something would be nice). Procedurally generated vehicles, if anything, would be my jam - procedurally generated NPC actors that you can interact with/work with.

But the point I was getting at is that people are billing KSP as this enormously complex game so full of content that it is entirely due to Squad that they are pouring hundreds of hours of time into the game. What I am saying is that SQUAD has significantly less to do with this than is being assumed.

What SQUAD does is provide you with is maybe 100 rocket parts and a small assortment of planets with extremely bland surfaces, such that you can barely tell any landing site from any other, and none of them are particularly interesting to look at. They set the orbital trajectories of the planets, and the heights of their atmospheres, if any. And they provide a movement engine for your rockets to go places in. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing in itself. But it's not a very large amount of content, it's definitely not a management sim game, and I definitely would sympathize with people not wanting to pay $40 for it. The vast majority of the content that makes the game interesting is the ships and vehicles players build by themselves. And if you want to do anything particularly interesting with them aside from "go places" or "dock", you have to download mods created by other players.

And yes, I agree that a large part of "the point" of games like these is for players to build their own spacecraft/vehicles/whatever! I love that aspect! But SQUAD provides absolutely nothing to do with your creations aside from going places or docking. And while learning how to do this is difficult/complicated, that isn't due to SQUAD's careful game design, it's due to physics!

That's what I wanted to get at, in essence. So again, I'd definitely sympathize with someone not wanting to pay a 2x jacked up price for a very small update to a game that is largely featureless if you consider SQUAD's contribution, and thus the portion of the gameplay that you are paying money for. People are talking about the game as though the hundreds of hours of enjoyment they got out of it were entirely due to SQUAD, but I don't think that this is true. It's like saying that you would be okay with paying someone else $500 for a ball peen hammer because of all the things that you can build with it using your own time and your own effort.

----

----

So with that said, yes, I would personally like there to be some kind of management aspect. The most defining aspect of management/strategy sim games, IMO, is that you have a lot of units (spacecraft modules, people, etc) that can interact with each other to produce novel situations that you must deal with. KSP right now has none of that. Your Kerbals don't serve any purpose other than to be cute impediments to your spacecraft's stabilization system. Your mining bases don't serve any purpose other than to refuel your ships to keep going somewhere else.

What I'd like is at least something akin to the Kolonization mod, where you have to manage resources across multiple long-term bases. But in the long run I'd like to actually have to... manage a space program.

1. Give Kerbals some degree of AI so they can do things without your direct command. Let Kerbals control and auto-manage spacecraft systems, and let them have basic personalities so they can be happy or satisfied or angry and they can help you out or revolt against their dire condition and mess things up.
2. Make it so that you actually have to take care of the health of your crew, and plan strategies for exploring and inhabiting the solar system that involve more than one spacecraft at a time without requiring you to constantly, exhuastingly switch around between ships and fiddle intricately with the flight controls of every single unit for minutes or hours at a time. Don't force me to build gigantic space stations piece by piece all by myself! There is nothing interesting to me about launching a payload to Kerbin orbit or rebuilding a booster for the fifteen thousandth time. Let me focus on building and launching the actual modules that do interesting things.
3. Make science actually interesting. There's nothing fun to me about clicking on some boxes to make a money counter called "science" tick up. Implement some actual science in the game if you're going to have it at all - collecting and recording observational data, and using it to make decisions that actually matter to your space program. Let my scientists refine their analyses and models of planetary/asteroid surfaces based on spectrometric data and sample collection missions. Let me share my results easily with other players so we can cross-reference and compare techniques. To make this interesting, I think to some extent the planets and asteroids will need to be seed-generated so that no two players can use the exact same results, but they will use the same techniques.
4. Make management actually interesting, too. Counting money isn't strategy in itself. There needs to be deadlines (or at least people to keep from dying), there needs to be catches, there needs to be NPC characters or factions who can actually get angry with you if you mess things up, and impose or threaten restrictions on you in a way that's meaningful to the other aspects of gameplay and the requirements of your hardware and your Kerbals.
5. And in the long run, let your Kerbals and space habitats develop their own dynamic community/economy and squabble amongst themselves. You don't need to simulate down to nose hairs - you can have Kerbals with a handful of stats and personality traits, and that's sufficient to allow for a wide range of interesting interactions. Likewise with habitats and economic interaction.

Flying rockets is nice, but I don't just want to fly rockets to places where there's nothing else to do.

This isn't to say that the way KSP is right now is necessarily bad or unfun. But once you've exhausted the challenge supplied by Kepler and Newton, there is not much else to it unless you want to do self-imposed challenges. I've squeezed out about all the fun I can from that. I don't think people ought to have to pay $40 for that experience when the game has already sold so well.

Edited April 30, 2016 by Accelerando

[Deddly]

You make some nice suggestions there, @Accelerando (maybe you should put them in the suggestions section as well?), but I do think you underestimate what Squad have achieved with this project. If I were a betting person, I'd wager that the total hours they have spent working on this game far exceed the number of hours any of us have used it for.

[Accelerando]

39 minutes ago, Deddly said:

You make some nice suggestions there, @Accelerando (maybe you should put them in the suggestions section as well?), but I do think you underestimate what Squad have achieved with this project. If I were a betting person, I'd wager that the total hours they have spent working on this game far exceed the number of hours any of us have used it for.

You're right, of course, and I have edited the relevant section. Still, the game has been out for four years. The range of content implemented in the game remains about the same now as it was in version 0.18. SQUAD has a consistent team of 10+ developers? And something like 16 "legacy" team members that they've gone through. They've implemented a few limiters that don't interact with each other - money limits spacecraft construction, science limits parts availability, Kerbal skill limits what stabilization capabilities are locked or unlocked. And they have given the game some degree of graphical overhaul, which is neat - but it's very limited. Planets are still almost exactly as bland as they were before up close. Bugtesting is great, but every release still comes with some gamebreaking bug or weird inconsistency in the way parts are implemented that awaits another release or three in order to iron out. It's been four years... and they seem to have progressed very little from their initial models.

Version 0.19 in March 2013 was the last major update to parts, with the addition of rover wheels. The last major update to Career mode was in 0.24, in July 2014, with the implementation of Funds, Contracts, and Reputation. Since those two dates the game's mechanics have remained largely unchanged in their respective areas, aside from various tweaks and new parts. Three years for parts and two for Career. They can't claim bugtesting as the reason why things are being drawn out for this long and say that stock KSP remains more bug-free than modded KSP when the game continues to break down every time they introduce some small degree of new functionality. I don't really see mods messing up my game much more than the game messes itself up.

Edited April 30, 2016 by Accelerando

[I_Killed_Jeb]

6 minutes ago, Accelerando said:

Still, the game has been out for four years.

the game has technically been out only since 1.0

[Deddly]

@Accelerando Whilst I do appreciate where you're coming from, and I would also like to see more detailed planets and things to explore and discover, I have to disagree with you on what's happened since 0.18 beta. It was great as it was, but it has improved and a lot of important physics concepts have been added.

As has been said, KSP is a tool. A milling machine is a tool, but you can't actually do anything with it other than make things yourself, so you could argue that it's not useful in itself. Lego is just a bunch of bricks that don't do anything at all apart from make noise when you shake the box. The whole point of tools like this is they stimulate your own creativity and let you do or experience things that you never could do or even imagine before.

It's this part of KSP that has improved over time. It's not the number of stock craft or big features that is impressive, it's the little tools like the "gizmos" that provide for almost endless variation and customisation that you, the user, can tweak and experiment with. It's the details, like heat transfer and atmospheric drag, that make us learn something as we go along.

Yes, KSP is not about the game, it's about what you and others can make out of it. Just like a quality tool costs something to buy, KSP has a value that increases as more customisation is added and improvements are made. But not everyone appreciates or needs a quality tool. Why buy a milling machine if all you need is an electric drill? Maybe the free demo is enough, in that case, but I think most of us appreciate the additional functionality of the full release.

[Accelerando]

18 minutes ago, Deddly said:

@AccelerandoYes, KSP is not about the game, it's about what you and others can make out of it. Just like a quality tool costs something to buy, KSP has a value that increases as more customisation is added and improvements are made. But not everyone appreciates or needs a quality tool. Why buy a milling machine if all you need is an electric drill? Maybe the free demo is enough, in that case, but I think most of us appreciate the additional functionality of the full release.

Well, yes. I'm also criticizing SQUAD's contribution as well. While the tools provided do allow for interesting constructions when put together, they are still built off of largely the same movement engine and model of gameplay balance as they were in 0.18. Yes, aerodynamics and re-entry heat have been added, but in lieu of an economic system that makes it matter to your hardware and Kerbals outside of "you don't have money for new missions", what do they constitute other than a slightly new flavor of flight control that was already implemented by modders years before the official release? And on that note I'm not saying that we should rely solely on modders for content - very much the opposite.

I do like the functionality provided by the full release versus the demo, but that doesn't really have much to do with any changed functionality or gameplay. It is nice to have a wider range of parts to construct things which are aesthetically interesting and different, and which I could share with friends and other players. It's also nice to have rockets fly a bit more realistically than before, with aerodynamics and so on. But the difference between 0.18 and the full game, in terms of my actual gameplay enjoyment, is mostly the fact that I have to pay for one and not the other. I like being able to land on Laythe versus having only the Mun to target, but the gameplay between the two is not really significantly enough changed that I'd want to pay $40 for it. Having access to larger SLS parts doesn't do anything except make certain missions somewhat easier. Having access to more science parts just means I have more things to click to make my science go up. Having access to aircraft parts is nice for about 30 minutes before I get bored by the bland terrain. More realistic aerodynamics mostly means I have to bend my flight trajectories a little more carefully, in lieu of anything else to do in the air. And so on.

As I've said, these things are all nice if you intensely appreciate carving out your own challenges, but I still don't think that that makes them very large improvements in quality. That is why I say that most of the interesting content in KSP (that is, the things that you as a player interact with in the course of gameplay) comes from player contributions.

Edited April 30, 2016 by Accelerando

[Deddly]

Looks like we come at KSP from two completely different angles. That's great, and I think having players like you will eventually move Squad to perhaps add more of the kind of content you are looking for, and the rest of us will appreciate that as well.

Even though we have wildly different views, I've really enjoyed this dialogue, @Accelerando. Thanks for putting your opinion forward in such a way that it encouraged discussion rather than confrontation.

[MrSnappyTurtles]

Glad i paid only 15 for this game

[ibanix]

This thread is the only time I have been ashamed of calling myself part of the "KSP community". 

[Deddly]

@ibanixWhy do you say that? I personally thought most of the replies were well thought out and respectful.