Kerbal Space Program 2: Master Post

[rmaine]

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

It's not about technicalities. It's about environment, culture, internal politics and, most of all, about who is paying for this party and what they is wanting back as interest - and why I should put my money on it.

Using a somewhat dramatic comparison from the Aeronautic Industry: you can bet your SAS that every single engineer on Boing is pretty competent as an individual. But, yet, there's the Starline Capsule fiasco (not to mention 737 Max). Once the problems on the Max was solved, it ended up being a pretty good aircraft - but had you checked Boeings stocks price lately? It's slowly recovering, but there's a thingy called Opportunity Cost: why I would invest 1000 bucks to earn 1010 on something while I can invest the same 1000 bucks and get 1020 on something else?

 

A bit wide of topic, but we clearly have vastly different perspectives on the 737 Max. Not the time or place to detail everything now, but the 737 Max concept was flawed from the start and is not really fixable. The very short version is that Boeing needed something to compete with more fuel efficient planes, but did not want to spend the time and effort to actually design a new one. So they hacked new engines onto the old plane. Those new engines didn't physically fit, so they substantially moved them, which did all sorts of bad things to the basic stability. They tried software hacks to work around that and then did a horrid job on those hacks. Even when the software is improved, it remains a hack around a basically poor design. P.S. And there is a new 737 Max grounding just this week from yet another problem.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, rmaine said:

Not the time or place to detail everything now, but the 737 Max concept was flawed from the start and is not really fixable. 

You are wrong (there was no fundamental flaws on the Max - only a bunch of badly implemented features, badly integrated), the 787 is the one that you should be looking at. But you are right - this is not the place for discussing Boeing, I used it as a (already admitted dramatic) example of how a series of bad decisions can weaken the Company to a point it may not survive a major crisis.

 

17 hours ago, Dientus said:

[Note from me: about KSP2 costing about USD 60 bucks]

That's the industry standard for games and has been for a few years. So it's not bad as long as it lives up to the A rated expectations.

What has me worried is with this covid economy fluctuation and subsequent trillions of dollars spent by USA alone, they may not be able to keep it at that price by release date due to inflation and high taxation.

Worse, the inflation and taxation will grass around the whole World. Economies are shrinking as a cheap shirt washed on cheap soap - with one exception, but this is not the place to discuss it neither.

You cannot expect to sell too much copies of KSP2 on Brazil, where the USD <-> BRL jumped from 3.5 to 5.7 in less than an year. 60 bucks, now, is something about 342BRL, about 25% of the minimum wage around here.

And I will not even touch the problem of acquiring hardware - lots of people (including myself) are postponing hardware upgrades for some time - computers for gaming are now costing more than cars here.

The shrunk economies around the word and the unavoidable retraction on the consumer market for non-essentials suggests that KSP1 should be the tittle having some attention right now, as it is way easier to get some bucks using it to do many and many small sales of 10 to 15 bucks every year than to try to sell a 60USD, supposedly A class tittle.

But KSP1 now is losing players (or at least is what Steam is telling me) from some time now in a way that was not happening in years.

Now put yourself on the investors' shoes: where is the best place to put their money now?

Edited April 18, 2021 by Lisias
tyops, tyops, tyops everywrhere!!!

[dprostock]

53 minutes ago, Lisias said:

And I will not even touch the problem of acquiring hardware - lots of people (including myself) are postponing hardware upgrades for some time - computers for gaming are now costing more than cars here.

The shrunk economies around the word and the unavoidable retraction on the consumer market for non-essentials suggests that KSP1 should be the tittle having some attention right now, as it is way easier to get some bucks using it to do many and many small sales of 10 to 15 bucks every year than to try to sell a 60USD, supposedly A class title.

 

Yeeeepppppppppppppppppppp..............................................................................................................................

[MechBFP]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

Now put yourself on the investors' shoes: where is the best place to put their money now?

Clearly not KSP 1, that would simply be running into the sunken cost fallacy and putting more money into a sinking ship, right?

[Lisias]

48 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

Clearly not KSP 1, that would simply be running into the sunken cost fallacy and putting more money into a sinking ship, right?

And clearly not on KSP2, an eternal Work In Progress game aimed to be on a more expensive class where bigger players will fight to their teeth to dispute on shrinking market. And I will not even extend into the fact where the people that were unable to prevent a ship to sink [for more then 6 years now] are now working on the boat.

And it is exactly because investors (that wish to keep their money, at least) usually don't fall on the sunken cost phallacy that I think we have a big problem here: there are way more profittable or safe investiments out there - is the Opportunity Cost on keeping my money here bigger or smaller than the money I will lose by bailing out?

Edited April 18, 2021 by Lisias
Tyops! surprised?

[MechBFP]

39 minutes ago, Lisias said:

And clearly not on KSP2, an eternal Work In Progress game aimed to be on a more expensive class where bigger players will fight to their teeth to dispute on shrinking market. And I will not even extend into the fact where the people that were unable to prevent a ship to sink [for more then 6 years now] are now working on the boat.

And it is exactly because investors (that wish to keep their money, at least) usually don't fall on the sunken cost phallacy that I think we have a big problem here: there are way more profittable or safe investiments out there - is the Opportunity Cost on keeping my money here bigger or smaller than the money I will lose by bailing out?

The simple fact that the game (KSP 2) is still being worked on proves you wrong.

Unless you think Take Two is planning  to commit seppuku with their company using the KSP franchise as the sword?

EDIT: As a side note someone ought to update the first post with the correct links/information. 

Edited April 18, 2021 by MechBFP

[Lisias]

On 4/18/2021 at 11:30 AM, MechBFP said:

The simple fact that the game (KSP 2) is still being worked on proves you wrong.

The History is plenty of examples that proves YOU wrong. I may be right or I may not, but your statement is wishful thinking at best.

 

On 4/18/2021 at 11:30 AM, MechBFP said:

Unless you think Take Two is planning  to commit seppuku with their company using the KSP franchise as the sword?

As much as CD Projekt Red were wishing to do it when they launched CyberPunk 2077 some months ago. But yet, last time I read about, the losses were on the 1Billion USD scale. One Billion Dolars lost in less than 6 months.

On a personal note, I think they will recover. But you can bet your wallet the investors are cutting some throats around there. 1 Billion USD could had generated a lot of interest anywhere else.

[Dientus]

4 hours ago, MechBFP said:

A few years? More like a few decades. 

LOL, well..... but I understand your point, it has definitely stayed at this rate for quite a while where A rated games are concerned. I think platforms such as Steam and GOG can be thanked for that.

 

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

You cannot expect to sell too much copies of KSP2 on Brazil, where the USD <-> BRL jumped from 3.5 to 5.7 in less than an year. 60 bucks, now, is something about 342BRL, about 25% of the minimum wage around here.

And I will not even touch the problem of acquiring hardware - lots of people (including myself) are postponing hardware upgrades for some time - computers for gaming are now costing more than cars here.

Yes, in the USA my industry (automotive) is still hit hard by the severe lack of computer chips, we are still 24 months out on waiting for the tools and software for Nismo alone, let alone other OEM's. One thing will stay the same, supply and demand. Consumers often forget they drive the economy. Demand for some things is very high, for others it's very low. We can make educated guesses but the truth is economy forecasts carry as much credit as weather forecasts. Afterall, they didn't predict the time or the extent of this COVID ... situation (gotta stay PC) Anything can happen between now and KSP2 release... literally ANYTHING.

 

[dave1904]

26 minutes ago, Lisias said:

As much as CD Projekt Red were wishing to do it when they launched CyberPunk 2077 some months ago. But yet, last time I read about, the losses were on the 1Billion USD scale. One Billion fscking Dolars lost in less than 6 months.

On a personal note, I think they will recover. But you can bet your wallet the investors are cutting some throats around there. 1 Billion USD could had generated a lot of interest anywhere else.

CDPR was totally overvalued. Cyberpunk was still financially successful at the end of the day. CDPR was more valuable than ubisoft. There was no way that was sustainable. 

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

KSP1 should be the tittle having some attention right now, as it is way easier to get some bucks using it to do many and many small sales of 10 to 15 bucks every year than to try to sell a 60USD, supposedly A class tittle.

1. Most of the community paid KSP years ago and a sizeable part of it gets any DLC for free, economically speaking, that's just dead weight, a new game would mean at least a sizeable portion of the community getting the game as soon as it releases and most of it in the following couple of years.

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

But KSP1 now is losing players (or at least is what Steam is telling me) from some time now in a way that was not happening in years.

2. Numbers of concurrent players on Steam for single player games are used only by people wanting to picture a worse scenario than reality. For a single player game without microtransactions you playing 1 hour or 1000 changes nothing, the only thing that matter is how well the product is received by the public and how much it sells over time.

 

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

And clearly not on KSP2, an eternal Work In Progress game aimed to be on a more expensive class where bigger players will fight to their teeth to dispute on shrinking market.

3. KSP lives and dies in its niche, it's the only game in a whole genre, there are no "bigger players", no one is even trying and the only noteworthy competition is made up by a bunch of indie project that already struggle to compete with KSP1 and thus have no chance at all to actually bother KSP2.

 

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

You cannot expect to sell too much copies of KSP2 on Brazil, where the USD <-> BRL jumped from 3.5 to 5.7 in less than an year. 60 bucks, now, is something about 342BRL, about 25% of the minimum wage around here.

4. Regional pricing is a thing, easier to implement, it makes much more sense than stop working on the sequel, if it isn't already planned.

[Jacke]

7 hours ago, rmaine said:

A bit wide of topic, but we clearly have vastly different perspectives on the 737 Max. Not the time or place to detail everything now, but the 737 Max concept was flawed from the start and is not really fixable.

Going on less than perfect information, but I think the problem with the 737 Max wasn't that it wasn't sufficient a redesign.  Boeing wanted to sell it as a version of the 737 for which pilots with previous 737 ratings needed at most a single-day conversion course.  This was to make it look very attractive to airlines.  But to jump through this hoop including the almost rubber-stamped certification, the features besides the new engines weren't that well integrated.

The 737 Max didn't need a new automated pitch trim system.  It needed a readjusted trim system that accounted for the aircraft changes that would give pilots the pitch trim range they would need for all flight conditions.  But the procedures for trim especially in certain conditions like engine-out would need more adjusting, which would mean more testing, more re-documentation for new checklists.  And for pilots to be thoroughly retrained on the new model and also realise they would need to adjust when moving between 737 versions.  The changes were such that the aircraft should have gotten a new model number.  But that would increase the cost of pilot retraining as well as other costs for the aircraft.  Boeing tried to avoid that and people died.

Back to the cost of KSP 2.  Yes, USD 60 has been a common game price point for a long time.  But what that gets has been getting less and less over the years.  And as others have pointed out, that price transferred to many other countries, even next year, will give crap sales.

I also worry that the biggest competitor for KSP 2 will be KSP.  That could lead to unpleasant things.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, Dientus said:

One thing will stay the same, supply and demand. Consumers often forget they drive the economy. Demand for some things is very high, for others it's very low. We can make educated guesses but the truth is economy forecasts carry as much credit as weather forecasts.

A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weatherapproximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.

Source.

Good comparison. And since we are here:

In 2020, world output shrank by 4.3 per cent, over three times more than during the global financial crisis of 2009. The modest recovery of 4.7 per cent, which is expected in 2021, would barely offset the losses sustained in 2020. 

Source.

We can't be able to predict correctly the Weather in 6 months, but we can affirm for sure that Siberia will not have a Summer day on the peak of their Winter.

The prospects are not good, not matter from what edge you see the thing. At least on the short term.

 

2 hours ago, dave1904 said:

CDPR was totally overvalued. Cyberpunk was still financially successful at the end of the day. CDPR was more valuable than ubisoft. There was no way that was sustainable. 

Perhaps. But I fail to understand how this would comfort CDPR's investors that lost that money, and now have a perfect escape goat to use (or sue) for such losses.

 

51 minutes ago, Master39 said:

1. Most of the community paid KSP years ago and a sizeable part of it gets any DLC for free, economically speaking, that's just dead weight, a new game would mean at least a sizeable portion of the community getting the game as soon as it releases and most of it in the following couple of years.

I was expecting you to use that card. AGAIN.

If the userbase that are entitled to get DLCs for free are still significant enough to prevent profit from the DLCs, even after 10 YEARS, I need to tell you that the problem is not the userbase, but the failure on the Company on inject new blood on the franchise and expand the user base.

How do you expect this will affect potential investors' attention?

 

55 minutes ago, Master39 said:

2. Numbers of concurrent players on Steam for single player games are used only by people wanting to picture a worse scenario than reality. For a single player game without microtransactions you playing 1 hour or 1000 changes nothing, the only thing that matter is how well the product is received by the public and how much it sells over time.

What you already depicted on item 1 : if the current userbase entitled to get free updates are still so significant that this makes selling new DLCs unprofitable even after 10 years, the sells of new copies must had been abysmal...

 

56 minutes ago, Master39 said:

3. KSP lives and dies in its niche, it's the only game in a whole genre, there are no "bigger players", no one is even trying and the only noteworthy competition is made up by a bunch of indie project that already struggle to compete with KSP1 and thus have no chance at all to actually bother KSP2.

So there're very few attention of the public on it. So the demand must be small.

Again, how do you expect this to keep investors happy, once the sequel is being postponed and postponed again? (Had I mentioned that the development team that failed to keep the product healthy in its life is now working on the sequel, what can be a bad sign?)

 

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

4. Regional pricing is a thing, easier to implement, it makes much more sense than stop working on the sequel, if it isn't already planned.

On Steam, current price for KSP in Brasil is 72BRL, what converted is about 13.06USD. The price for the United States is 39.99USD.

So you need about 3 sold copies on Brasil to get the revenue from a single one on US.

On Argentine, the converted practiced price is 4.65USD. You need 8.6 sells on Argentina to get the revenue from a single on on US.

I fail to see how this would please investors, mainly because as you said yourself, "KSP lives and dies in its niche".

3 minutes ago, Jacke said:

I also worry that the biggest competitor for KSP 2 will be KSP.  That could lead to unpleasant things.

We posted at the precise same second!

Given the current losses on the Steam's charts for concurrent players, I fear that KSP being the biggest competitor for KSP2 would be the good scenario...

(posts were merged)

[MechBFP]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

The History is plenty of examples that proves YOU wrong. I may be right or I may not, but your statement is wishful thinking at best.

History of what exactly? I assume you aren't referring to Cyberpunk because on one hand you complain about KSP 2 being in "eternal development" but at the same time complain about Cyberpunk being rushed out the door and devaluing CDPR. I mean, which is it exactly that you want here?

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, MechBFP said:

History of what exactly? I assume you aren't referring to Cyberpunk because on one hand you complain about KSP 2 being in "eternal development" but at the same time complain about Cyberpunk being rushed out the door and devaluing CDPR. I mean, which is it exactly that you want here?

You are misleading the discussion, trying to minimize my argument to mere launch times. Forum rules prevent me from vocalising exactly what you mean.

Go back, read again. I'm talking about Money, Opportunity Costs and, implicitly, Return Of Investment.

[Dientus]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

On Steam, current price for KSP in Brasil is 72BRL, what converted is about 13.06USD. The price for the United States is 39.99USD.

So you need about 3 sold copies on Brasil to get the revenue from a single one on US.

On Argentine, the converted practiced price is 4.65USD. You need 8.6 sells on Argentina to get the revenue from a single on on US.

I fail to see how this would please investors, mainly because as you said yourself, "KSP lives and dies in its niche".

The sales price you quote tie in a very large part to supply and demand remember. This is just food for thought using pre-COVID stats. In all of 2019 Brazil sold about 5.82 million computers that could potentially run KSP. In the fourth quarter ALONE United States sold about 19 million computers. Huge difference. The demand is just not there in Brazil for games let alone niche games like there is in the USA, hence the price is lower. True there are other factors in play, economics is a vastly complex subject, but this related to my original statement that consumers often do not understand their role in driving prices locally let alone globally.

 

Base reference for numbers. I fully acknowledge they may or may not be 100% accurate, however the difference is inescapable:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525711/sales-volume-of-personal-computers-in-brazil-by-device/

 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/576151/unit-shipments-pcs-united-states/

 

[Lisias]

39 minutes ago, Dientus said:

The sales price you quote tie in a very large part to supply and demand remember.

Yep. I remember somewhere in the past quoting the price of the Warcraft Trilogy, those full price was about 86BRL (while KSP's full price was 72BRL).

Supply and demand concept doesn't apply to infinite supply items, as digital downloads are - the supply is virtually endless, the only cap is the broadband available to deliver the good. You can try to artificially create some scarcity, but immediately you will be fighting piracy where the costs of such endeavour not rarely are greater than any loss it would incur to you.

On purely virtual goods (as digital download games), the key word is PERCEPTION OF VALUE.

What's the perception of value of KSP1? Frankly, pretty low by now.

What's the perception of value of KSP2? Pure speculation, but at least for me, is risking plummeting. (see below for MOAR REASONS)

 

39 minutes ago, Dientus said:

This is just food for thought using pre-COVID stats. In all of 2019 Brazil sold about 5.82 million computers that could potentially run KSP. In the fourth quarter ALONE United States sold about 19 million computers. Huge difference. The demand is just not there in Brazil for games let alone niche games like there is in the USA, hence the price is lower.

No argument on that. Huge market, huge demand - and a hell of a huge competition. Tough life for a game that "lives and dies in its niche".

Facing a shrinking and highly competitive market, what's the strategy to explore new options and how this will affect the expected RoI of the current investors?

On a side note, there's yet another handicap for game computers around here: electricity cost. Inflation affects way more that only the hardware and software prices, I expect that power efficient computers would be way more used around here than power hungry ones.

Spoiler

My current bill jumped from 170BRL last year (on a time where I was using my Xeon machines regularly) to 250BRL this month (and I didn't fired up any one if them for two months already).

So, bear with me.

In order to play KSP2, I will need a new rig. I will need to reserve more money for the power bill. I will need to pay for a Windows License (250 to 350 BRL , but  you can risk your SAS buying keys fro 90BRL from some shady sources). The expenses just piles up - for a game that I'm loosing confidence of being worthy the very price tag, what to say the lateral expenses.

In order to play KSP1, all I need to do is to just keep doing what I'm doing right now, without any additional investment. Me and a lot of Brazilians - and I suspect this will not be something specific to my country.

 

39 minutes ago, Dientus said:

True there are other factors in play, economics is a vastly complex subject, but this related to my original statement that consumers often do not understand their role in driving prices locally let alone globally.

I understand. But my argument is about investors. How any of this would counter-argument me from an investor point of view?

Someone still need to pay for the party. And they want their interest back.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Lisias
Hit "save" too soon.

[Dientus]

16 minutes ago, Lisias said:

I understand. But my argument is about investors. How any of this would counter-argument me from an investor point of view?

Someone still need to pay for the party. And they want their interest back.

 

This is a valid point. We need to know the kind of investments and type of investors involved. Professional investors will wait years, amateurs will not. If the investment is their main source of return they may feel pressure for quicker returns to paybthe bills where if it is only as a side, they may feel they can wait if they believe what they've invested in. But of course the end game is to make money.

 

I am honestly not trying to counter-argue anything so much as I am trying to drive home a single idea. Unless you know the investors personally or the money involved and the why, you are doing the same as everyone else (yes myself included) just making guesses based on your knowledge. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

At the end of the day you could be close, but at the same time you could be way offbase. There are just too many unknown variables.

 

* There are more things discussed but I myself think it's a pointless discussion due to the unknown. Plus it's late here and RL is calling LoL

Edited April 19, 2021 by Dientus
added last part

[Lisias]

20 minutes ago, Dientus said:

you are doing the same as everyone else (yes myself included) just making guesses based on your knowledge. Nothing more, nothing less.

At the end of the day you could be close, but at the same time you could be way offbase. There are just too many unknown variables.

Do you own a Company? I do. A fraction of a Company, to tell you the true - so I'm used to justify my opinions in order to get consensus on my partners.

Taking good decisions based on insufficient data is exactly what every investor do for living. And it's exactly due this that now and then we end up "wasting" some time and/or money on things and tasks that would not directly improve our product (in which we get moderate success): we need to convince our customers (who play the role of "investors" for our company) about the perception of value of our products we need them to have in order to stay afloat.

They lose confidence on us, we are toast. They are the ones paying for our party.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Lisias
Hit "Save" too soon.

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

I was expecting you to use that card. AGAIN.

If the userbase that are entitled to get DLCs for free are still significant enough to prevent profit from the DLCs, even after 10 YEARS, I need to tell you that the problem is not the userbase, but the failure on the Company on inject new blood on the franchise and expand the user base.

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

What you already depicted on item 1 : if the current userbase entitled to get free updates are still so significant that this makes selling new DLCs unprofitable even after 10 years, the sells of new copies must had been abysmal...

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

So there're very few attention of the public on it. So the demand must be small.

A niche game on the market for 10 years with no plan at all for long term profit and sales, it did go from being an unknown game to be universally praised and, after this incredible life cycle the sales start to decrease, and you consider this a failure of some sort?

Basically every franchise that ever had a sequel in the whole gaming history is failure after failure for you?

"The sales of Portal1 are abysmal in 2021, man that game must suck!"

 

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

investors happy, once the sequel is being postponed and postponed again?

You really think that the developers can choose not to release the game and postpone it? They work with the time they're given, keeping the studio running cost money, the game being delayed for a whole year is the result of someone (not the devs) deciding to invest a crapton more money into the game.

I'm impatient to play it, but I'm happy they delayed it, lately the trend for games seems to be that is better to publish a broken game than to delay it.

 

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

(Had I mentioned that the development team that failed to keep the product healthy in its life is now working on the sequel, what can be a bad sign?)

Yes, and multiple people already explained to you that thinking that requires an absolute lack of knowledge of how gaming development works. Let me try to explain it to you again:

You have a house, that house was built by X, when X built that house he was not a professional, he did what he thought was right and fixed things and problems as they emerged. The house works but its a mess.

You decide to have a new house built by a professional company, an engineer draws the project and a full crew of professionals start building it properly.

During the process X, with all the knowledge he got working on your old house, finds a job working as a painter for the new one, when you see him painting your beautiful, round, green door, you get mad at the engineer because you think that him painting that door could somehow bring back the basement infiltration problems you had in your old house.

Except in this case X isn't even the same person who built that basement originally just the one you hired to try to fix the problem without rebuilding the whole house.

 

When the foundations are old, corroded and too many floors have already been added onto them compared to what the original project was, you can only do so much before having to start from scratch on a new building.

 

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

Tough life for a game that "lives and dies in its niche".

When you are the only game in your genre every niche is big enough, the market will never sustain a "city builder sim" published as a big AAA title every year by every big publisher as it happens on other genres, but that doesn't mean that Frontier, Paradox and a bunch of others can't make their fair share of success with niche game that fill very specific tastes.

That usually comes with the perk of not giving a damn about other "big releases" or "big players", GTA6 is not going to disrupt significantly KSP market.

 

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

I fail to see how this would please investors

And then here we are, a lot of games use regional pricing anyway, that means that something is useful for and no, it's not like they're doing charity, there are specific reasons why it works and is advantageous, but I'll leave that research for you.

 

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

Given the current losses on the Steam's charts for concurrent players,

Again, don't use concurrent players for single player games, it makes no sense. It's the standard procedure when someone wants to picture a single player game worse than it actually is. 

It's the literal equivalent of saying "this 20 hours long story game is worse than Fortnite because people play it only for 20 hours and not hundred of hours like they do Fortnite, and also is less popular so it must suck"

You can tell whatever story you want with steam charts and single player games and you would be almost always wrong, let me give you an example:

Hey look! Doom Eternal is worse than Kerbal Space Program, id Software lost to an indie game, I'm not making it up, I have data!

And both game suck when compared to a 2007 game! How, Valve wins the day again:

 

You see? Concurrent players data make no sense as a metric for single player games since is mainly driven by factors different from the success of the game. Please stop using it.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Master39

[dave1904]

10 hours ago, Lisias said:

Perhaps. But I fail to understand how this would comfort CDPR's investors that lost that money, and now have a perfect escape goat to use (or sue) for such losses.

They obviously invested in the wrong company if they expect a company that has a major release once in 5 years to be worth 8 billion. Even now at 5 billion they still not worth it.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, dave1904 said:

They obviously invested in the wrong company if they expect a company that has a major release once in 5 years to be worth 8 billion. Even now at 5 billion they still not worth it.

And exactly what is being done to signal that anyone investing on KSP would not do the same error (in minor scale, of course)?

 

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

A niche game on the market for 10 years with no plan at all for long term profit and sales, it did go from being an unknown game to be universally praised and, after this incredible life cycle the sales start to decrease, and you consider this a failure of some sort?

Success from the Part don't pay bills on the Present.

 

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

You really think that the developers can choose not to release the game and postpone it? They work with the time they're given, keeping the studio running cost money, the game being delayed for a whole year is the result of someone (not the devs) deciding to invest a crapton more money into the game.

Nope. From the very beginning of this discussion (as well from another ones), I'm repeating ad nauseaum that I think the problem is environmental, ergo related to management - not the developers.

What doesn't really matters from the investor point of view.

 

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

Yes, and multiple people already explained to you that thinking that requires an absolute lack of knowledge of how gaming development works. Let me try to explain it to you again:

Ok then.

I'm absolutely sure that every investor on this World has a Master Degree on Game Development...  

 

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

You have a house, that house was built by X, when X built that house he was not a professional, he did what he thought was right and fixed things and problems as they emerged. The house works but its a mess.

You decide to have a new house built by a professional company, an engineer draws the project and a full crew of professionals start building it properly.

During the process X, with all the knowledge he got working on your old house, finds a job working as a painter for the new one, when you see him painting your beautiful, round, green door, you get mad at the engineer because you think that him painting that door could somehow bring back the basement infiltration problems you had in your old house.

Except in this case X isn't even the same person who built that basement originally just the one you hired to try to fix the problem without rebuilding the whole house.

You build a house. The dude the initially worked on it was not professional house builder, but he did a splendid job on building a house that everybody wanted to have.

So the House Building Company hired some professionals on the field in order to be able to accomplish the task.

But these new guys are not Architects, they are Engineers (with variable degree of professionalism), and so they stopped to listen to the people that was wanting the house and started doing engineering stuff that sounds solid on a first glance, but pushed away the very same people that WAS wanting a house like that.

Now the Company decides to retroject the whole house, trying to bring some sanity to the mess. And they bring that very same engineers that screwed up the last project on it.

There's a planned neighbourhood called Kyssia in a city called Manaus in which I lived some decades. The interesting thing about Manaus is that on the XIX Century, it was one of the richest cities of the World due the huge success of the Latex Extractivism, then they gone through decadence some decades, and suddenly on the 60s, by government initiative, a Industrial Pole was created there and suddenly that city got a lot of money again - but with a twist, they need to suddenly bring specialised professionals  from the whole country to work on that Pole (my father was one of these). And there were not houses for everybody.

So they had to build whole neighborhoods from the ground. But since the guys that have money at that time (and was the ones investing on building houses) had no experience on building houses this way, they brought engineers for doing this job. But they hired no Architect.

Well, that houses were a tragedy. They were big houses, people from Sao Paulo and other regions from Brazil would like to live on such houses - if they were built in Sao Paulo or in the other regions, as on Manaus, 4 degress south of the Equador Line, what they had built were stoves, not homes. Oh yes! The W.C. were built in the center of the house, with not direct access to the outside (they put the kitchen between the W.C. and the outside wall), so no proper ventilation on a neighbourhood built on a city where 36oC (about 96F) is the common temperature of the air... at midnight, because on noon we had to endure 45 to 50 sometimes (113 to 122F). Oh, yes!!! The Manaus Sewerage was still the one built by the British on the  Amazonian Belle Époque, and only on downtown - so anything else had to rely on private sanitary pits that had to be emptied regularly...

Someone already did the math? W.C.s built in  the middle of a inadequate built house for the Equatorial climate without proper ventilation and relying on sanitary pits? Good thing you could sleep outside, believe me.

And that were very expensive houses built for rent and make money from the specialised professionals that were being "imported" by the new Local Industry.

Why I told you this history?

Because something is smelling funny on KSP from some time,we want a new "House" and I want to be sure the guys building the new one will not make the same mistakes the guys that built the older one did.

However... The current house is on ruins, as the maintainers are giving the finger on it but the smell is still there, and the very same guys that didn't listened to the clients before are now working on the new house.

Do the math. The prospects suggest that the best option may be to leave.

 

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

When you are the only game in your genre every niche is big enough, the market will never sustain a "city builder sim" published as a big AAA title every year by every big publisher as it happens on other genres, but that doesn't mean that Frontier, Paradox and a bunch of others can't make their fair share of success with niche game that fill very specific tastes.

It's not the game being challenged, sir. I thought this was made clear already.

 

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

And then here we are, a lot of games use regional pricing anyway, that means that something is useful for and no, it's not like they're doing charity, there are specific reasons why it works and is advantageous, but I'll leave that research for you.

You are misleading, again, the discussion. What is being challenged here is the ability of the current developers on successfully compete profitably on this market.

 

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

Hey look! Doom Eternal is worse than Kerbal Space Program, id Software lost to an indie game, I'm not making it up, I have data!

Doom Eternal had TWICE the peak players over KSP, what suggests twice the number of sold copies are still interested on the game.

Additionally, the concurrent players are INCREASING on Doom Eternal, while KSP ones is DECREASING -worst, on a time where KSP has published a new Release with new Features - essentially, expending money to lose players.

Huge difference, sir.

 

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

You see? Concurrent players data make no sense as a metric for single player games since is mainly driven by factors different from the success of the game. Please stop using it.

Any statistics, by itself, are meaningless. You need to cross check them to get (imprecise, but still useful) knowledge about what you are looking for.

[Guest]

19 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Now the Company decides to retroject the whole house, trying to bring some sanity to the mess. And they bring that very same engineers that screwed up the last project on it.

And again, and again and again you're failing to understand (most likely pretending to) that no, the game is being planned and build by different people. Tasking the old developers with some work doesn't put them in charge of the project.

New devs, with a different look on thing, a different experience, a different budget (they have one, and thus are not forced to sell a prototype), different tools and different plans.

The old engineer painting a door on the new house is not going to change the project neither magically bring back the basement infiltration problem from the old house.

You can't even argue that the project is being managed by the same people at a publisher level since the publishing label, Private Division, didn't even exist while KSP1 was developed and as soon as they bought the IP in 2017 they started to work on the sequel.

 

22 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Any statistics, by itself, are meaningless. You need to cross check them to get (imprecise, but still useful) knowledge about what you are looking for.

Nope, concurrent players is always meaningless for any single player game whatever is the point you're trying to make.

Using that statistic automatically means that you're either don't understand the argument or that you're actively trying to be misleading.

[Dientus]

9 hours ago, Lisias said:

Do you own a Company? I do. A fraction of a Company, to tell you the true - so I'm used to justify my opinions in order to get consensus on my partners.

I did, I sold it. Everyone is different, every situation is different. I have seen many many years myself.

* This seems to keep going in a direction that I am not venturing to on a games forum.

 

As I said, I am not arguing and my statement stands.

 

Edited April 19, 2021 by Dientus
added line *

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

And again, and again and again you're failing to understand (most likely pretending to) that no, the game is being planned and build by different people. Tasking the old developers with some work doesn't put them in charge of the project.

Culture. Availability. Access to new blood. All of these matters.

You are failing to understand that we (not only me, I'm the one talking about openly) are not concerned about previous developers being used to help on the new product.

We are concerned about:

• Previous developers that utterly failed on keeping the previous product healthy are now on the new product
  • A previous product those last versions were utterly bugged
• A new version of the previous product that was released without the minimum set of tests required to get the most basic and evident of the problems (like the RCS Block V2 on 1.11.1).
• A new product being delayed for a long time
• A very harsh economic environment that will endure for years to go
• A (apparently) shrinking userbase, driven away by the current set of problems
• (something else? I think I'm missing something)
  • Yeah, I was missing a Company being sacked recently about the same product!

 

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

You can't even argue that the project is being managed by the same people at a publisher level since the publishing label, Private Division, didn't even exist while KSP1 was developed and as soon as they bought the IP in 2017 they started to work on the sequel.

Yes, we can. Once the appearances start to look similar, we can argue that the management appears to be the same.

If not the same people, apparently the same M.O.

And this matters.

 

1 hour ago, Dientus said:

I did, I sold it. Everyone is different, every situation is different. I have seen many many years myself.

Yep. Very different. We are managing to keep ours afloat, besides this tsunami. Being slightly paranoid is one component that is being used to accomplish this. Don't expect that I'm the only one doing what I'm doing.

Of course I may be wrong - but my logic stands with the information I have at hands. I expect this logic is being used by some people more. Some evidences appears to corroborate my assumptions.

You don't like it? Me neither. What we can do about?

 

1 hour ago, Dientus said:

* This seems to keep going in a direction that I am not venturing to on a games forum.

Point taken.

 

1 hour ago, Dientus said:

As I said, I am not arguing and my statement stands.

Well, I'm arguing. And mine statements stand too.

The confusion appears to be that you think I'm trying to prove you wrong. I don't - because I don't need it, you may be right without proving me wrong, so I don't need to even try to prove you wrong.

 

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Nope, concurrent players is always meaningless for any single player game whatever is the point you're trying to make.

It's not. It's an incomplete data that, added to some other incomplete data we are gathering around, can lead to a partially correct conclusion, that by itself can lead to a good decision nevertheless.

 

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Using that statistic automatically means that you're either don't understand the argument or that you're actively trying to be misleading.

We have a chain of events that suggests something nobody is going to like - shooting the messenger is not going to make it better.

Even with me being wrong on some assumptions, I'm not alone on it and repeating ad nauseaum I'm wrong and that I don't know about what I'm talking about will not make things better - because, you see, it's also another hint that something is not going that well.

People willing to gain trust listen to the concernings and then addresses them instead of trying to detract the concerned, distrusted contender.

You need to break that chain of events in order to get trust again. Do you know how we build trust, right?

Edited April 19, 2021 by Lisias
Missing points

[MechBFP]

4 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Culture. Availability. Access to new blood.

Throwing out buzz words/phrases doesn't mean anything or do anything to further your argument.

What about their culture? What about their availability? What about their access to new blood? How do any of those things have absolutely anything to do with your concerns that you keep re-stating ad-nauseam?

You are making assumptions about your assumptions, and then using buzz words to define why those assumptions are valid. It frankly feels like I am Alice going down the rabbit hole attempting to piece together what you seem to think makes sense.