i have just read this on ksp wiki ...

[Slam_Jones]

1 hour ago, Red Iron Crown said:

If that were to happen you could just not buy it.

This is so very important.

If nobody buys it (or a significant amount LESS than they wanted) then they will NOT be repeating it in the future.  It's simple business.  You take a risk: if that risk pays off, you are more willing to take that risk again.  However, if that risk flops and you have nothing to show for, then you are much LESS willing to try it again.

TL;DR - If nobody buys it, they will stop making it.

Edited September 14, 2016 by Slam_Jones

[Kerbart]

1 hour ago, Combatsmithen said:

NO! MP is a stock feature of any game!

EA be like. $60 to unlock Multiplayer, $60 to actually use matchmaking, $1 dollar every time you enter matchmaking

That's not DLC. That's Pay to Play which is par for the course for Freemium games.

DLC is DownLoadable Content. In a way, mods are DLC but in general it's delivered by the vendor after paying some amount.

Personally I wouldn't mind DLC like extra planets and parts, provided:

• It's reasonably priced. That'd be my biggest worry. While per-minute-playtime KSP is incredibly cheap, the current price tag is quite steep especually when looking at code quality and the amount of content offered. 
• It's optional and not a requirement to play the game. Ship parts, surface bases, extra planets; all that's fine. I'd be upset though if the base game suddenly is just Kerbin and its moons, and you'd have to pay for an "inner planets pack" and an "outer planets pack," and if extended information KER style (we can't implement it for reasosn") magically IS available as DLC.
• It would mean extended development of KSP. With development solely depending on fresh copies of the game, sales ARE going to taper off, and I expect that to be sooner rather than later (it's been on the market for a couple of years now, after all). While 1.2 looks very polished (especially with Porkjet's new parts) it also means that I fear we're nearing "completion" of the game. I'd rather see more stuff coming out in the next five years and I'm more than happy to pay for that.

[klgraham1013]

I would gladly pay for a USI suite dlc.  I know it's already free, but @RoverDude deserves some kick back for all that work.  Doesn't he have a patreon?  I should put my money where my mouth is.

[pandaman]

There was some confusion about this a few years ago.  

Due to the wording in the T&C buyers were under the impression that they would get all future updates and additional content at no extra charge.  Whereas Squad's intention was that all updates would be included in the purchase price, but not additional stand alone 'expansion' packs.

This resulted in the decision (as mentioned earlier in the thread) to clarify that this would be the case going forwards, but that they would honour the previous 'all inclusive' understanding for all those that purchased the game before a certain date (which was a few weeks in the future from when they announced it) to give those considering buying, but hadn't done so yet, the opportunity to buy without losing out.

So the current situation (as I understand it) is that any purchasers (since that date) will receive updates, patches and fixes etc to the game itself at no extra charge. But SHOULD Squad decide to release additional 'expansions' etc at some point in the future then they reserve the right to make an additional charge for that content.

So, examples of that could be the Asteroid Day and Kerbin Cup 'official mods',  which they decided to release free of charge anyway,  and things like additional/alternative planet packs etc. Which they haven't done yet, but would be quite a lot of work to produce if they did.

[Curveball Anders]

3 hours ago, Combatsmithen said:

NO! MP is a stock feature of any game!

MP isn't an obvious stock feature for an inherently single player game.

[Diche Bach]

I'll never understand the mentality that gaming studios should provide perpetual content expansions and updates for the price of a preliminary purchase. Agree many studios take it too far and milk the expansion thing for maximal cash for minimal quality. But there is a happy medium by which a studio and its owners/publishers provide both ongoing updates/expansions for free AND for fee. I would hope Squad will strive toward such a middle ground for the simple reason that I would like Squad to make many games for many decades to come, and not simply grind themselves financially into the grave by trying to live up to an expectation of providing infinite free updates when/if their continued sales do not afford such infinity.

[klesh]

2 hours ago, klgraham1013 said:

I would gladly pay for a USI suite dlc.  I know it's already free, but @RoverDude deserves some kick back for all that work.  Doesn't he have a patreon?  I should put my money where my mouth is.

 

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=368973

[StahnAileron]

7 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

I'll never understand the mentality that gaming studios should provide perpetual content expansions and updates for the price of a preliminary purchase. Agree many studios take it too far and milk the expansion thing for maximal cash for minimal quality. But there is a happy medium by which a studio and its owners/publishers provide both ongoing updates/expansions for free AND for fee. I would hope Squad will strive toward such a middle ground for the simple reason that I would like Squad to make many games for many decades to come, and not simply grind themselves financially into the grave by trying to live up to an expectation of providing infinite free updates when/if their continued sales do not afford such infinity.

You have to blame the evolution and current mentality of software development. (In short, the Internet.) When software used to be a physical distribution model, developers had the pressure to make sure the software was complete and as bug-free as reasonably possible before sale. There was no way to distribute fixes after the fact. The internet came along and slowly affected that. Once connectivity was relatively common, patching became viable and started on the PC side. (Console patching wouldn't hit until the 7th gen systems.) You could get bug-fixes after the fact, maybe gameplay balances as well. No online extra content yet. Those were too big and had to be physical like the games were still at the time.

Smaller games eventually migrated to online distribution, but it wasn't a thing yet. Not until internet connection speeds caught up to game sizes to make download times reasonable. That's when the "release now, fix later" mentality started to show up. This in turn help feed the "pay once now but still get more later" mentality. Honestly, the gaming industry (and consumer reaction to it) essentially shot themselves in the foot over the long-term. "Early Access" and "crowd funding", along with the expectations that evolved from them, made things worse. The internet changed a lot of things, for better or for worse. In this case, you can blame the both the industry and the consumers at large for the results. This is why people thing buying a game entitles them to ongoing support for however long they think they deserve. (Humans are inherently selfish, after all.)

As for the topic at hand: Paid DLC (I miss the days of "expansion packs") is fine if it actually adds new content to the game. Especially if it a one-shot purchase with significant content. It's micro-transactions and the need to milk consumers with a hundred $1 purchases instead of a single $50 purchase that peeves. They're just hiding the added costs by making everything "impulse buy" priced. (I fell to this once on PS3; it's not happening again. Though I didn't fall for it 100%; I recognized the problem before I committed to everything. It was a mediocre game, too...) I play Japanese console games (JRPGs) and they can be notorious for micro-transactions, even giving the likes of EA and Activision Blizzard a run for the money. (The differences being cultural: westerners are far more likely to vocally complain.)

[W. Kerman]

5 hours ago, luizopiloto said:

Multiplayer DLC?

I for pay $40 dollars for a real, nonlaggy multiplayer. That would be AWESOME!

[UomoCapra]

2 hours ago, woo_reentry_is_cool_dude said:

so , i was reading trough ksp wiki and i found this : Expansion packs/DLCs (different from updates, will be purchased separately and include features distinct from the original game's main idea)[4] (Partially implemented by the official Squad mods Kerbin Cup and Asteroid Day)

if you don't see the problem , i'll show you again : "will be purchased separately and include features distinct from the original game's main idea"

squad , you're not EA . why would you make paid DLCs ? kerbin cup and asteroid day are good things . but i don't want to end up with paid dlcs , OR EVEN PAID MODS . squad , i thought (and still think) , that you are not that type of company . (feel free to share opinion)

Hi!

We would like to assure you that we have no plans to monetize user created content, this has unfortunately become a concern amongst gamers in recent times, and we do not agree with it.

Furthermore, I think it's important to consider that the wiki is editable by the community and therefore, it shouldn't be taken as Squad's word. We haven't made any official statement about any Expansions and/or DLCs, since a 3 year old blog entry made by Felipe, where he mentioned DLC as a possibility for KSP's future. 

We've always taken feedback of the community seriously and we will continue to do so

[KerbMav]

It all depends on price and content (what is it and how big).

Something I might put a few bucks into would be personalized Kerbals, new textures and some more "3D features" for the standard model.

Interstellar travel to reach new star systems to visit and explore would be nice.

I guess a coop with the guys from No Man Sky for more interesting planets (sans flora and fauna, but interesting geological formations) is a compellig idea.

[KerikBalm]

8 hours ago, UomoCapra said:

Hi!

We would like to assure you that we have no plans to monetize user created content, this has unfortunately become a concern amongst gamers in recent times, and we do not agree with it.

Furthermore, I think it's important to consider that the wiki is editable by the community and therefore, it shouldn't be taken as Squad's word. We haven't made any official statement about any Expansions and/or DLCs, since a 3 year old blog entry made by Felipe, where he mentioned DLC as a possibility for KSP's future. 

We've always taken feedback of the community seriously and we will continue to do so

There you go OP... as I said, its the wiki, not squads word.

You're getting upset about something that someone put in the wiki as their interpretation of something said just once in a 3 year old blog.

[Sharpy]

I think, when it concerns PC:

- with the number of bugs still present in the game, that need fixing

- with the class and quality of mods being created by the community

the idea of paid DLC simply died a quiet death of a pipe dream that is never to be.

They lack manpower to create any new "big" content, and whatever they create as paid DLC, better be really great if it's to compete with the ubiquitous (free!) mods.

 

OTOH: The Xbox and PS players are left out in the cold when it comes to mods. And I'm not sure "free DLC" is really an option for them.

Squad packaging and releasing some of the best cool mods out there for the consoles wouldn't be that bad. I'm not sure how the monetization would go though.

I'd easily see three nice modpacks.

One aimed at improving stock flight experience - stuff like Rasterprop, Mechjeb or KER, Docking port alignment, KAC, PreciseNode, Trajectories, Stage Recovery and Transfer Window Calculator,

One aimed at construction - KIS/KAS, Tweakscale, RCS build aid, EditorExtensions, Infernal Robotics and some part packs, like MK4 or SpaceY

And one providing more "hardcore" gameplay - RemoteTech, USI, Kerbalism, Scansat, Kethane, NearFuture everything, a bunch of extrasolar planets.and Real Solar System.

Maybe fourth, with BDArmory and DarkMultiplayer.

They'd need to write some mod management system to replace moving things into and out of GameData, but that's a small and easy thing.

 

(and some gameplay improvement mods really should make their way into stock. Easy Vessel Switch... I really don't understand why this isn't stock yet. If you're building a planetary base, and have 30 different pieces of junk from landers scattered about, six rovers to manage, two engineers, and the actual base pieces, without EVS this becomes a totally impossible task.)

Edited September 15, 2016 by Sharpy

[Van Disaster]

2 hours ago, Sharpy said:

They lack manpower to create any new "big" content, and whatever they create as paid DLC, better be really great if it's to compete with the ubiquitous (free!) mods.

They do not, given their continual and growing employment of the modders who make quality mods However there'd have to be something *really* special to stand out enough to be a purchase ( or for those of us who bought pre-DLCGate, not-a-purchase ). Something that possibly needed core support like autonomous NPC space agencies/ships/stations perhaps. It's worth anyone looking up the community response to the DLC idea the first time round, it wasn't terribly pretty.

MP is OK but generally there isn't *all* that much to do with other people in the vastness of space, and considerable technical issues like handling timewarp.

[Sharpy]

8 minutes ago, Van Disaster said:

Something that possibly needed core support like autonomous NPC space agencies/ships/stations perhaps. It's worth anyone looking up the community response to the DLC idea the first time round, it wasn't terribly pretty.

Personally, I'm dreaming of a "Story Mode."

A Career game, with actual thread of contracts that have you travel all across the system unraveling a great mystery (and possibly facing a secret enemy?)

Creating the plot is quite easy within current framework, but to make its progression interesting would require creating lots and lots of ground- and space-based assets, a'la current easter eggs.

[Diche Bach]

Enhancements to the flight planner, edits/revisions to game physics, tweaks to the UI, texture touchups, a modicum of new parts (to fill gaps in existing stock parts), optimizations that improve performance/enhance use of mods, bug fixes, etc. : I agree these should be free to all who have bought any version of the game for as long as Squad can manage to continue to improve those areas of the application. In sum, anything that is integral to the core vision of the game should never have a price tag; but expecting such updates to come infinitely is nonetheless unrealistic. The game will NEVER be perfect, but the effort to benefit ratio from continuing to pin down issues and move toward perfection gets smaller and smaller and no one should expect Squad (or any studio/developer) to keep tweaking until it truly is perfect (not to mention the fact that subjective differences between users mean that even if the game is technically perfect it can never be "perfect" in everyone's eyes).

Significant new parts packs (as in, a couple score or more and covering two or more new themes within the game), brand new functionality (too myriad to list but the possibilities seem virtually limitless), "re-releases" of existing mods by Squad staff which also include significant new stuff : In my opinion such things as this are perfectly legitimate for Squad to consider as ethical, reasonable, and appropriate realms for pay-for DLC, and as a fellow user and forumite what I will say to anyone who has a strong allergic reaction to such a suggestion is: go jump in a lake. You shouldn't expect anyone to work for you for free, and indeed, if someone is a favored client you should be generous enough to allow them to make a decent living. Squad and its people deserve to prosper and they will only do that if we are willing to continue to patronize them, and that doesn't mean being a forum fly or making mods (though those things 'help') it means buying their products.

[magnemoe]

18 hours ago, RoboRay said:

I'd happily pay $20 for an official Outer Planets expansion on the scale of OPM, once there's more to do on the surface of planets and more reason to explore them.

Yes, I know OPM is essentially the same thing for free, but I'm thrilled with the value of entertainment hours versus price of KSP so far.  I even bought a second copy on Steam (I originally bought before it was available on Steam) just because KSP is easily worth double the list price and it gives me two ways to access updates.

PC games with mod support have an build in security against scam level DLC. With scam level I say selling easy to make small stuff for an price who is more like that you pay for an full DLC.
This is most common on consoles and online only games you can not mod.
I don't say the Sims is an good example here, the expansions has real expansion size. That make people angry is that many key features in the last game who was added by expansions and they are used to get removed in the new base game while most include them if fitting. 

 

[DaMachinator]

I'd pay at least $60 USD for a KSP 2.0 that uses a physics engine designed specifically for orbital spaceflight with an infinite load range or the ability to force load vessels without being directly player controlled. If this engine also included a FAR-level aero model I'd pay at least $20 USD more.

Edited September 15, 2016 by DaMachinator
Clarification because USD is not the only currency that uses $.

[gmiddlemass]

I'd have no problem with paid DLC for the game if it funds further development and/or a sequel. The game has given me so much more enjoyment so far than many AAA titles costing two or three time the price. 

[TheSaint]

23 hours ago, tater said:

I've already gotten ridiculous value for the puny amount I paid for KSP. I'd prepay right now for new content, just because I feel guilty for having gotten well past my $30 worth (or whatever I paid). Seriously, I've had many hundreds of hours of enjoyment for the cost of a cheap bottle of wine.

I want to say I paid $18 for the game over three years ago, and I've played over 2,100 hours according to Steam. I can't think of any other purchase I have made in my entire life that has provided that kind of value. They could toss the entire game on the trash heap at this point and I would have no cause for complaint. 

[Diche Bach]

9 hours ago, TheSaint said:

I want to say I paid $18 for the game over three years ago, and I've played over 2,100 hours according to Steam. I can't think of any other purchase I have made in my entire life that has provided that kind of value. They could toss the entire game on the trash heap at this point and I would have no cause for complaint. 

Same here, though I leave Steam in Offline mode 98% of the time, so all I can muster is a "hundreds of hours" estimate of total play time. Even at $100 for 100 hours of enjoyment, that is far better value than most forms of entertainment, and even better than most forms of non-subsidized post-secondary education! I've paid $45 for games I literally could not stand to play after 6 hours (Call of Juarez comes to mind) and been suckered into buying some distributors "deal' of an old game for $5 and then realized it did not improve with age and there it sits in one of my digital libraries or on a shelf collecting dust.

[razark]

On 9/14/2016 at 10:54 AM, woo_reentry_is_cool_dude said:

OR EVEN PAID MODS

What's wrong with paid mods?  There's a number of companies that have made a business out of it.

[Van Disaster]

On 15/09/2016 at 1:57 PM, gmiddlemass said:

I'd have no problem with paid DLC for the game if it funds further development and/or a sequel. The game has given me so much more enjoyment so far than many AAA titles costing two or three time the price. 

This I agree with, which is why I generally buy everything a couple of other small houses put out for their game even though I'm not always that interested in what's in them - because also those houses keep releasing huge game updates & someone has to pay for that time. The two I'm thinking of were rather more polished at release than KSP is now, though.

[DaMachinator]

11 hours ago, razark said:

What's wrong with paid mods?  There's a number of companies that have made a business out of it.

Steam tried it. It very much did not end well.

[razark]

3 minutes ago, DaMachinator said:

Steam tried it. It very much did not end well.

It seems to work pretty well in the flight sim world, though.