KSP2 Potential EA?

[DrunkenFROG]

Seeing that the release date has been pushed to late 2021, I'd love to see something about an Early Access release on Steam or something. Or a Demo to quench my thirst. 

 

Maybe taking the KSP1 route is a good idea, because that means you have countless people constantly testing your game, finding bugs, and giving feedback in general. I feel like a lot of people on this forum would be up for testing KSP2 even if it was in a half broken state. They could keep it a closed alpha as well where you have to sign NDA against surprises for the community and stuff. I for one would love an opportunity like this.

But, that's just a thought.

Keep it up Devs, I love you guys.

 

[Spectacular_Vernacular]

That would be a great idea! In fact, I deem it almost necessary. I will buy a game in early access (so I'll be the tester), but I will not buy a game that hasn't been thoroughly tested. So first 2-3 months will not buy new game, that way all the people who need the latest/greatest game can "enjoy" all the bugs, and I'll just get it later on when it is stable.

[Guest]

Honestly for 60€ I want a 1.0 at the day of release, they already have a blueprint on what works and what doesn't, KSP1, now we need a polished and optimized product.

[pandaman]

IMHO, any early accesss type 'release' should be limited to a select few that can, and will, report and feedback on bugs etc. effectively... Which is pretty much what the QA team is.

A few hundreds of players just saying 'my ship explodes when I try to dock' doesn't help a great deal with finding out "why" it happens so they can fix it.  It just generates lots of reports for the same thing, and may mean that the one or two that do give valuable clues get lost amongst them.

[mattinoz]

14 hours ago, pandaman said:

IMHO, any early accesss type 'release' should be limited to a select few that can, and will, report and feedback on bugs etc. effectively... Which is pretty much what the QA team is.

A few hundreds of players just saying 'my ship explodes when I try to dock' doesn't help a great deal with finding out "why" it happens so they can fix it.  It just generates lots of reports for the same thing, and may mean that the one or two that do give valuable clues get lost amongst them.

Yep quality bug reports take hours to write, desire to write quality goes down the more you feel the report is just being cast into a void of noise. The bigger the beta the lower it's value.

[Lisias]

And now, for something completely different ™ :

Spoiler

I though that you were posting about Electronic Arts acquiring Intercept, KSP2 or something...

(yep, I'm a bit jumpy lately...)

Now, pretending I'm ontopic...

At the price they are asking, EA would harm them. Even KSP1 is having a bad time collecting the full fee, Steam Charts tell me that KSP1 user base grows only when the pack in on 50% promotion on GoG or Steam, hinting that the user's perception of value is 10 or 20 bucks maximum for KSP1 .

I think T2 will play a slightly different game on KSP2.

Edited June 7, 2020 by Lisias
trying to stay ontopic. :)

[Incarnation of Chaos]

Iv'e said it before and i'll say it again; NO AAA ACCESS, NO "BETA", NO BULLXXXX

On 6/6/2020 at 6:02 AM, pandaman said:

IMHO, any early accesss type 'release' should be limited to a select few that can, and will, report and feedback on bugs etc. effectively... Which is pretty much what the QA team is.

A few hundreds of players just saying 'my ship explodes when I try to dock' doesn't help a great deal with finding out "why" it happens so they can fix it.  It just generates lots of reports for the same thing, and may mean that the one or two that do give valuable clues get lost amongst them.

This would be fine though, and i've also expressed desires for the fantastic modding community to get a early build under NDA so they'd have a headstart.

[Lisias]

14 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

This would be fine though, and i've also expressed desires for the fantastic modding community to get a early build under NDA so they'd have a headstart.

And it doesn't even need to be the complete game. 

A pretty reduced set of features, as the Demo used to have - a planet, a launch base, an airstrip, a moon and an asteroid. With that, I think that 80 to 90% of the Add'Ons would be able to start the works on the migration.

This technical demo release doesn't need even to be static, can be something released once a month - so any breaking changes would be detected early.

Break early, break often - breakage is not bad. Unexpected breakage is.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 6/8/2020 at 2:51 PM, Lisias said:

And it doesn't even need to be the complete game. 

A pretty reduced set of features, as the Demo used to have - a planet, a launch base, an airstrip, a moon and an asteroid. With that, I think that 80 to 90% of the Add'Ons would be able to start the works on the migration.

This technical demo release doesn't need even to be static, can be something released once a month - so any breaking changes would be detected early.

Break early, break often - breakage is not bad. Unexpected breakage is.

Oh i know; you can't really fix issues if you never put the software in a position where they could potentially arise. I just have become very wary of any form of EA or "Beta" these last few years due to them either being used as excuses for a poor product, distracting from finishing it properly and encouraging feature creep or all of the above.

So i don't want KSP2 to be yet another game where the developers caved into pressure to release early and just used "Beta" as a scapegoat, but I'm perfectly fine with a limited number of people being allowed to get an early alpha or similar under NDA.

[klgraham1013]

I thought all games were already released unfinished these days?

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, klgraham1013 said:

I thought all games were already released unfinished these days?

As creative works, I don't know if you can ever say a game is "finished."

Though the percentage bar has lowered in the past decade or two.

[EchoLima]

Squad released KSP 1 EA because they had to. They didn't have the funds to develop KSP for years without income, and they needed the time to generate publicity before full release.

T2 doesn't have those problems.

[mcwaffles2003]

On 6/6/2020 at 11:31 PM, Lisias said:

hinting that the user's perception of value is 10 or 20 bucks maximum for KSP1 .

To be fair the game IS nearly 10 years old. Who wants to pay more than $20 for a 10 yr old game in general?

5 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

So i don't want KSP2 to be yet another game where the developers caved into pressure to release early and just used "Beta" as a scapegoat, but I'm perfectly fine with a limited number of people being allowed to get an early alpha or similar under NDA.

Hell, why bother with NDA if the it's released late enough. If the game appears good and only like 20 people are playing it and making youtube vids of it that would be amazing marketing for your product. Like hanging a bunch of food in front of a starving mob and telling the mob the food will be released in an hour, on release the game would explode

[Kerbart]

On 6/5/2020 at 6:55 PM, DrunkenFROG said:

Seeing that the release date has been pushed to late 2021, I'd love to see something about an Early Access release on Steam or something. Or a Demo to quench my thirst. 

Software development is incredibly expensive. For an A+ style game you will probably need a dozen developers, at, say $75k/yr each (on average and that is on the stingy side). Throw in rent, hardware, software licenses and you’re looking at $2M-3M for two years, and if you need another year you’ll need another million to prevent losing your entire investment.

So, what are the options? Kickstarter is an option, although No Man’s Sky has probably soured that route.

And then there’s Early Access. Of course now you have to bring an unfinished product to the market, for a lower price. Not only are you selling your first 100,000 copies or so at a heavily discounted rate (easily losing $1M-$2M in the process), you’re now also facing a lock-in of certain design decisions made early on.

Multiplayer? Oh well that really doesn’t jive with feature X introduced in 0.7, six months ago. Either tick off your paying fans or forego that feature...

 

I think that if you have a publisher who can upfront the development cost they’d rather go without EA. They don’t need the money and it saves development challenges and loss of income.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

3 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

To be fair the game IS nearly 10 years old. Who wants to pay more than $20 for a 10 yr old game in general?

Hell, why bother with NDA if the it's released late enough. If the game appears good and only like 20 people are playing it and making youtube vids of it that would be amazing marketing for your product. Like hanging a bunch of food in front of a starving mob and telling the mob the food will be released in an hour, on release the game would explode

Mostly because if the demo code is more intended for modders to get their hands dirty before release, then it very likely wouldn't be representative of the final product. So they'd be under NDA mostly for legal reasons.

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

To be fair the game IS nearly 10 years old. Who wants to pay more than $20 for a 10 yr old game in general?

You could not be more wrong, sir. Age is meaningless - just check the huge amount of money being spend on old games (and video games consoles).

Warcraft I & II Bundle with the current discount costs exactly the same as KSP at full price on GoG (at least, for me) - and let me tell you, the only reason I didn't bought it is because I still have my originals from the golden times.

The magic words are "Perception of Value", not age.

One can consider that perhaps GoG is a failing business model. It's a good argument, it could be true.

However, the stock price of CD Projekt (the parent organisation) appears to be doing pretty well (besides some falls now and then), so if they are failing, they are not there yet. By the sake of comparison, the T2I stock price is way more stable on the timeline, besides sharing some dropouts more or less at the same time (suggesting external events equality affecting them), offering a more consistent value growth (forget the numbers, look the curve's slopes - one is being traded on Europe, other in USA).

This hints me that the GoG business model is a bit less stable than T2I's one. But, at least for while, way from failing.

On a wild guess, I think that KSP1 will always have a roof over its head on GoG for the years to come - but not at the currently asked fee.

[Superfluous J]

6 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Who wants to pay more than $20 for a 10 yr old game in general?

 

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

You could not be more wrong, sir. Age is meaningless - just check the huge amount of money being spend on old games (and video games consoles).

Warcraft I & II Bundle with the current discount costs exactly the same as KSP at full price on GoG (at least, for me) - and let me tell you, the only reason I didn't bought it is because I still have my originals from the golden times.

I see the bundle you linked to as $12.69 after a 15% discount. That's $6.35 per game. Before the discount they were $7.50 per game or $14.99 for the bundle.

KSP on the site is $9.99 after a 75% discount, $39.99 regularly. With the discount it costs about 50% more than each individual WoW game, and without the discount costs - just itself - well over twice as much as the undiscounted WoW bundle.

That seems to confirm @mcwaffles2003 's assertion, not refute it.

[kerbiloid]

But WoW is just another game about goblins, while KSP is the only one in its class. So, a monopoly.

Edited June 10, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Regor]

52 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

But WoW is just another game about goblins, while KSP is the only one in its class. So, a monopoly.

yes

[Bej Kerman]

11 hours ago, Kerbart said:

So, what are the options? Kickstarter is an option, although No Man’s Sky has probably soured that route.

Except that NMS made a recovery.

[Lisias]

5 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I see the bundle you linked to as $12.69 after a 15% discount. That's $6.35 per game. Before the discount they were $7.50 per game or $14.99 for the bundle.

Interesting. Here at Brazil its being sold as R$ 72,69 (with 15% off), that it's almost the full price of KSP.

Spoiler

 

5 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

That seems to confirm @mcwaffles2003 's assertion, not refute it.

It's absolutely the other way around - it's, indeed, about Perception of Value. This game appears to worth way more on Brazil than on USA!

Edited June 10, 2020 by Lisias
moar pics!

[Superfluous J]

46 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Interesting. Here at Brazil its being sold as R$ 72,69 (with 15% off), that it's almost the full price of KSP.

  Hide contents

 

It's absolutely the other way around - it's, indeed, about Perception of Value. This game appears to worth way more on Brazil than on USA!

Or GoG is doing user specific pricing based on prior purchase metrics...

Though I wasn't logged in. I never buy from GoG anymore because I hate waiting for updates.

[mcwaffles2003]

9 hours ago, Lisias said:

Warcraft I & II Bundle with the current discount costs exactly the same as KSP at full price on GoG (at least, for me) - and let me tell you, the only reason I didn't bought it is because I still have my originals from the golden times.

Your link brings me to a game that is $15 at full price for the bundle on a remastered game that was released a year ago (based on games released over 20 years ago). Currently KSP at full price is $40 and often goes on sale for $10 - $20.

10 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

Mostly because if the demo code is more intended for modders to get their hands dirty before release, then it very likely wouldn't be representative of the final product. So they'd be under NDA mostly for legal reasons.

Is a game 2 or so months from release really going to change that dramatically after over 4 years of development?

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Your link brings me to a game that is $15 at full price for the bundle on a remastered game that was released a year ago (based on games released over 20 years ago). Currently KSP at full price is $40 and often goes on sale for $10 - $20.

What happened because you are not in Brazil, where pricing is different - what, look, ends up corroborating my argument: Warcraft Bundle is more expensive (with discount) here than KSP at full fee. See spoiler for details.

Spoiler

 

2 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

Or GoG is doing user specific pricing based on prior purchase metrics...

What's just another way of saying "Perception of Value".

[Kerbalnaut #55487]

'Perception of value' is an interesting term... I will never be able to justify spending £50+ on a game - EVER!

Because of this, I rarely (if ever) get new games on release these days. And 9 times out of 10 you end up having to purchase further DLCs to finish the main story - which is a disgrace!

I think I'd briefly heard about KSP at some point but never looked further into it... a possible regret since I now know how incredibly awesome this simulator is - how fun the stock version is and how difficult the RSS/RO/RP-1 mods make it!

The ONLY reason I now have this software is due to Steam having done a free play weekend (week) tied in with a longer standing discount. I found this free play option with 3 days left on it and it blindsided me, I paid the offer price of around £25 (steam full price £55), for the main game and both DLCs, before my 3 days were up and I've never looked back. Due to my perspective on the value of games, this discount didn't lose anyone, any amount of money, it gained them my £25. How many other people look at it the same way I wonder...

As much as I may be looking forward to KSP2, I will most likely have to wait until a similar offer comes along for that too. Old or new no game is worth more than its customer is willing to pay for it.

Given the unmitigated success of KSP1 (critical acclaim from various space agencies - not to mention NASA using the simulator to plan REAL WORLD asteroid avoidance strategies), I don't believe an Early Access is warranted or needed. This facility is primarily to showcase new concepts/indy games/small developers work. KSP 2 Release should be a fully complete polished version of an upgraded KSP.

 

And yes, I cried a bit at the topic title as I thought the epic ruiners that are Electronic Arts were getting involved...