Kerbal Stuff is shutting down
On June 1st 2014, I started working on Kerbal Stuff. 20 months have passed. 1,191 mods have been uploaded and 20,407 users registered with the site. Today, I am officially closing Kerbal Stuff. I'll explain how it came to this.
I built Kerbal Stuff after the announcement that KSP mods were to be officially moved to Curse. At the time, and still today, I did not feel that Curse would do right by the kommunity. I stepped up to build an alternative that would be much better than the mess Curse would provide. I built Kerbal Stuff to do right by the kommunity where Squad wouldn't.
I opened up a beta and got some modders on board, and Kerbal Stuff was very well received. It's fair to say that Kerbal Stuff decisively won the battle over Curse, providing hosting for nearly double the number of mods. It boils down to Kerbal Stuff simply being better at it. Kerbal Stuff had no ads for its entire lifetime, emailed users when their mods updated, and cared more about the modders and the players.
Undoubtedly Kerbal Stuff has had a direct impact on Squad's revenue - how many players must have hopped back into Kerbal Space Program after getting an email about their favorite mod receiving an update? In the past month, despite frequent downtime and slow page loads, Kerbal Stuff has served 1.2 million page views over 279 thousand sessions for over 84 thousand unique visitors.
As thanks, Squad continues to endorse Curse as the official source for KSP mods. They refuse to even mention Kerbal Stuff in public. During the early days, they even pursued me legally for the use of the word "Kerbal" in the name (this was before they registered the trademark).
Even setting Squad aside, running Kerbal Stuff is a largely thankless job. In fact, for the most part, I just hear complaints. Most people don't actually care about the effort put into it. Whenever I've taken the time to add features or make improvements or meet the requests of users, no one has shown any appreciation. I stopped volunteering my time and energy to extend this website, because my efforts were always met with silence or complaints.
I don't have expectations of anyone. I don't expect anyone to gush over how great any new features I implement are. I don't expect Squad to support Kerbal Stuff as the official source for mods. However, these factors have contributed to the apathy I have for the ongoing maintenance of Kerbal Stuff. I'm not willing to invest more of my time and energy into making Kerbal Stuff faster or more stable. I have been well aware of the slowness and instability, but I simply have no motivation to fix it.
I would like to thank those who have been supportive. Thanks to the volunteer admins for helping maintain the site. Thanks as well to the modders who chose to host their mods on Kerbal Stuff, and the users who chose to use it as their source for mods.
All of the mods hosted on Kerbal Stuff are available via this torrent. The source code for Kerbal Stuff will continue to be available on Github. I can be reached at sir@cmpwn.com.
- Drew "SirCmpwn" DeVault
Interesting stats from Google Analytics:
4,948,349 total sessions
993,550 total unique visitors
19,083,579 total page views
03:11 - average length of visit
Kerbal Stuff costs about $100/mo to operate. After upgrades to support the high traffic, it would be about $180/mo.
Fun fact: Squad keeps the numbers secret, but as of April 2015 the estimated copies sold of KSP on Steam were about a million.
