Chilkoot

KSP2 the game is crap - no argument. KSP2 the IDEA is awesome. A new KSP built for performance and extensibility from the ground up, that has all of the most popular mods built in is the right vision. We know now why it didn't work, finally. There's a fleeting but non-zero chance to fix it.

Odds-on, you're right, and this is why Paradox balked. There's a lot of baggage with PD, and not many current revenue generators to offset initial outlay over projected 36 months. The few golden geese in their stable are dry on eggs, but T2 still thinks that farm is pouring out milk and honey. After some cooling off - and some quarters writing off - T2 may be more amenable to slicing the property out and taking what they can as a one-time when the IP has less weight on the balance sheet. The funny thing is that for a capital venture, raising $30MM USD is not too heavy a lift - I work in the industry, and actual investment capital is pretty accessible right now in many sectors. However, for something open-source, community owned (i.e., no return), $30MM is a very long yard stick, and 90% of your jar will be stuffed with $10's and $20's. With that yardstick in mind, if I had to sit across the table from T2 to hammer something out, I'd be planning to leverage their reputational risk/loss calculations on KSP, and promote what could be gained by a perpetual non-commercial open-source license or similar - with restrictions - rather than a full IP buyout. No one is going to be paying for a new KSP 2 any time soon - the title will not generate new revenue for 2+ years min no matter who buys it - so get that carrot of good will and some financial restitution front-of-mind. T2 knows they they monstrously screwed the pooch on KSP 2, so negotiations would be about presenting options both to save face and a sliver of the balance sheet. It's always a human on the other side of that table, and surprisingly, when you can isolate them, humans are usually pretty reasonable.

The most viable path I see for KSP right now is a community-funded (e.g., Kickstarter) project to buy the IP and take it fully open source, community owned and operated. It would require some herculean volunteer effort to coordinate that kind of distributed development and keep it on the rails, but there are real-world models for success out there. Let's be honest: KSP's greatest strength has always been its community contributors, and any "KSP 2+" developer picking up the property today would need extremely deep pockets and resolve to deliver on the promises made by StarTheory/Intercept/PD without community contribution. A completely new ground-up, community-developed build would also be the only way to guarantee against in-game commercialization (micros/pay-to-wins), and still eventually offer the next-gen KSP experience fans really want. It's hard to even guess what T2 wants for the IP. Likely in the ballpark of $30MM, and they would never decouple that from the code base and assets for costing, either. Probably a pipe dream, but I really don't see any other way this ends well for both fans and some future developer.

I don't see Take Two as the bad guys here. Sure, TT may have pulled the plug on the game (TBD), but they also bankrolled a large team for years, well beyond the developer's/producer's agreed completion date and budget. IG's job was to spec out the game features and development effort within the budget parameters, develop a project timeline and then pump out assets and functioning code per the plan. PD's job was to shepherd that financing and keep the project on the rails to make sure Intercept delivered on time and budget against the agreed (and advertised) features. Take Two is just the moneybags in this equation, and from all external appearances, they extended additional financing to the project several times. Speaking of TT, I had some inside scoop when that poostorm went down at Star Theory, and I can say unequivocally that, based on my discussions with a trusted insider, TT were not the bad guys in that situation, either. Star Theory's owners tried to (significantly) over-leverage their position, and eventually pushed too far. This is when TT - who really held all the legal cards - said "enough" and pulled development back in-house.* There were several points of break-down leading to KSP 2's current situation. Pivotal though, was the fact that the project plan did not correctly account for the real effort required to develop the intended features. It was off by miles. That's inexperience on the developers' part for the plan, and lack of diligence on PD's part for agreeing to it as presented. The idea that "oh, a small team did this over a few years" (re: KSP 1) is ridiculous and a critically ignorant perspective. This is what everyone seems to be missing: the major advertised features of KSP 2 were developed by legions of impassioned modders over the better part of a decade. Think of all the people and time involved in making these KSP2-advertised features generally playable in KSP 1: Terrestrial and space-borne Colonies Multiple farmable ISRU resources Logistics pathways Robust rovers and vehicles KIS/KAS-type function Off-world Kerbal Space Centres (build and launch from new places) Near-future propellants and engines Far-future electrical and propulsion technologies Extrasolar systems and planets Interstellar travel mechanics Scriptability (all parts in KSP 2 were LUA scriptable) Multiplayer Etc., etc., etc., This is without even touching on all the visual and effects overhauls, also planned as baked-in KSP 2 features. The combined human effort that went into making modded KSP 1 what it is today is staggering - next time you start a KSP 1 campaign, have a look at the number of "must have" mods you install before first launch. The plan to recreate that functionality as a fully integrated and polished experience is an admirable vision, but it's also a monumental undertaking IRL. I don't like the word "blame", but responsibility and accountability are real things in the real world. No matter what happens, people are going to point fingers at "the evil corporation", but if you want to know where the real break-down happened, have a look at the game feature scoping, the projected budget and the work-a-day management decisions (both IG and PD) that led to a near-unplayable game being delivered years late and waaaay over budget. * NB: I don't have any visibility on whether code or art assets were "repossessed" from Star Theory, so don't ask lol. Whether development hit a major speedbump at that juncture or literally started over from scratch is conjecture. I do know that b/c everything at Star Theory was developed under contract, it remained the intellectual property of TT - unsure if any was integrated into what is KSP 2 today.

Truth.

You're spot on here. I've been on the other side of these transitions, and it's likely "in both states" meaning some critical decisions are made/imposed (financial axe falling) and some are still being hashed out - even very fundamental ones related to IP ownership, forward distribution channels, studio financing (if any), etc. Typically, cards will be played extremely close to the chest by senior leadership until there is ink on paper. That means even senior studio folks and publisher staff won't have a clue what's going on. Providing too much insight before things are solidified runs the risk of crossing into "insider info" territory, which is kind of monumentally bad for a publicly traded company, esp. a few days ahead of an earnings call. Why are things still undecided? Whoever holds this IP when the dust settles inherits a huge risk factor: Steam. Steam reviews can make or break a title, and KSP2 reviews/public sentiment are in the gutter. The problem is that Steam has rigid controls to prevent "rebranding" a game with a new store entry, changing prices, and in general cutting bait and trying to start fresh. The only time I recall seeing a game successfully wipe the review slate clean is when Microsoft bought out inXile and the flailing Bard's Tale IV game was given a new ID/store entry under "Director's Cut". I've def. been on the inside when publishers inherit a mess and then fail to turn it around b/c of the unshakable ball-and-chain imposed by Steam. There is no easy path to "just sell the IP and get a small/hungry studio working on it". There is too much baggage, and there's a ton of financial+liability mess around shutting it down and starting up "KSP 2.5" or even"KSP 3". If anything rises from the ashes, it will be heavily burdened already.

I use MSI motherboards and vid cards in my builds, and they have been great. The only problems I've had with MSI are their laptops, and always related to laptop-specific parts like the housing, air flow design, etc. I'd bet your MSI desktop will be really solid. What kind of vid card did you get? Pretty much everything Apple makes is top-shelf, but you pay for that. You can do the same with a PC by getting a first-party premium brand, but it will be approaching price parity with a Mac. The problem with PC's is that it's a commodity market, and that means race-to-the-bottom pricing and everything that goes with it. In car terms, Apple only makes Mercedes. Well, the 80's Mercedes that ran for decades. For PC's you can buy anything from a Ladda up to a custom Koenigsegg. And just like with cars - in the PC market - you can get ripped off with something that markets itself as premium. Looking at you, Maserati - don't get me started! Hope you have a good experience with the new rig. It's always a pain switching to a new ecosystem, though I will say Windows has come a long way since the bad old days.

Not sure if you're hooked up yet, but Alienware is worth a look again if you're in the market for a gaming rig. Dell seems to have righted the ship wrt/build quality and service after those dark years. Premium price, tho. I'd also recommend ASUS for gaming laptops, at least. Build is usually pretty solid on those. Unsure about support as I haven't needed it (which says something). MSI has given me problems in the past, esp. with their gaming laptops. Build, heat dissipation, keyboard+panel quality were all poor. YMMV.

The fat lady has not officially sung yet, so I maintain a few shreds of hope. TT knows this title is a very hot PR potato. Flat-out cancellation would carry a heavy goodwill price ("reputational risk" in corpo speak), though how that compares to the cost of throwing still more good money after perhaps $20+M invested so far is hard to quantify. Sales are in the absolute gutter, and the Steam reviews would be near-impossible to swing back into seriously positive territory at this point. Those are very strong headwinds to overcome on a path to success - potentially impossible to overcome for this specific title/release, so there may be some branding/ownership strategizing going on behind closed doors right now, hence the silence. Properties with a strong cult following are notoriously hard to kill, even after some serious blunders. The current release of KSP 2 is actually quite playable, and it would be surprising to the see the axe fall fully at this point with the game fundamentals now in a pretty good state. I would have expected PD to drop the hammer after the disastrous initial release, not when there is light visible far down the tunnel. So maybe it's hard to be a passenger on the Hype Train right now, but I'll keep my ticket for the Hope Train firmly in hand. KSP is a pretty small drop in the Take Two bucket, but it's made it onto the radar in previous earnings calls, so we may have some non-speculation to clutch our pearls over by the 16th.

So... I don't want to start a holy war here, but Steam Remote Play is a little more laggy than a couple of other free solutions. It also has some benefits over other solutions, such as Steam integration and ease of setup which are important as well. If you decide to try any twitch-type games like Doom or even Halo, you may want to have a look at Parsec or Moonlight - that's another holy war as to which is better and why, but they can both deliver 100FPS reliably on wired gigabit with ballpark 10ms lag including the encode->network->decode phases (depending on your video card). If you want to get more info on either of those, pop over to https://old.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer

That's unfortunately going to hurt on either title at least for now. Both have seen significant FPS bumps over the past few months, and much more planned. If you've got a solid network setup, check out streaming over your LAN - you might be surprised. If you can get both machines on wired GbL, the latency when using Parsec or Sunshine/Moonlight for in-home streaming is really, really good now. I used to game competitively, and I'm an absolute framerate and latency junky, but I'm in-home streaming now probably 50% of my gaming time without issue. If you want to try this out, I can point you to some resources.

Are we even sure that Colonies is still the next roadmap item? Given the changes to Science/Exploration compared to what was mentioned in old dev interviews, I'm kind of expecting the unexpected at this point.

I'm right back on the hype train now - having a great time with 0.2, and it's just made me hungry for w/e is next... Does anyone know if Colonies is still the next planned roadmap milestone?

You gotta remember, the original announce trailer came out more than a year before the SX and PS5 were released so they announced support for what was available then. Fast forward 3.5 years, and we're deep into next gen lifecycle. In more recent announcements and interviews, IG has been really clear that previous-gen consoles are not going to happen. I mean, we may be approaching PS6 by the time console support ships. There are still going to be problems squeezing the game into current-gen CPU's, but you should not be concerned about it being hobbled by playability on doorstop-grade hardware

Fingers crossed for this one, for sure. Setting up those crazy elliptical polar relay satellites was actually really satisfying gameplay.