TLTay

Nate hasn't logged into the forum since yesterday...

The timing is too much to be coincidental. They knew the rest of the company's financial situation before KSP2 release. Only things that changed were sales numbers for KSP2, reviews, and goodwill impairment. This cannot be a good sign. Sorry about your hype train getting derailed before being out of visual range of the station. Not good.

I feel you. I've been excited since the announce video, and have been with KSP1 since the first downloads were available. KSP2 is not doing well. If it survives, it'll be in development for years, most likely. In the meantime, there's always mods for KSP1...

No. The ones that should be making meaningful contributions to the community is/are the studio/publisher. They should contribute a game worth 50 bucks. Fam, I do weekly. This has been like waiting 3 hours for your meal, with the manager coming out multiple times to tell you "it'll be out soon," just to get served an undercooked side dish, immediately charged full price, with promise that the rest of your order will be on your plate... sometime... maybe tonight?

Shocking it's not more negative. I've been scrubbing through the reviews, and it looks like most of the positive ones are about what they expect it to be in the future. Almost none of the positive reviews are about what they just bought and played. Most are just about signalling loyalty and hoping it will get better. You are doing a disservice to people by giving a game positive reviews out of hope or loyalty. Someone who might not know better might make a poor choice based on your cumulative reviews. DO review: The game you just downloaded and played. DO NOT review: Your hope for future developments, your support for the devs, your love of the franchise.

Op: check back in six months to a year. It'll take them at least that long to get what was currently delivered in a playable state. That, or it will get the axe.

I'm not talking about ads in the past week. Just the past day or so. Looks like they've all been pulled?

I'm hearing from reddit that the ads have been pulled from meta. Has anyone seen any ads within the last day or so? None are coming up on youtube either. Not a great sign. It has only been a week.

They WILL NOT signal it ahead of a decision. You are ALWAYS 100% behind a project until the call is made to the management to shutter it. Read nothing into it. I don't.

I agree completely. Very much depends on whether the devs can pull off a stable baseline quickly. Faith in them has been adversely impacted. The brand image has been tarnished, but could be repaired if another KSP1 is the result. They need to get it working rapidly to prove to everyone that there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and not just waste. If it looks good enough quickly enough, they might reconsider funding. As it stands, it looks like it has been thrown to the wolves. The devs themselves are likely being shielded from this kind of discussion as it has been known to impact morale and productivity negatively for many people. They start looking for jobs instead of working.

This is the sunk cost fallacy. Money already spent is water under the bridge. It does not factor into financial decisions. This goes for the cost of acquiring the IP as well. At this point it'll be up to the publisher to decide if it's a sound investment to continue pumping money into development, and by the looks of the EA release, we got that answer already. Only matter left to decide (it would have already been modelled by a competent analyist) is the threshold for pulling the plug. Depends on the sales expectations upon completion and their faith in devs making a completed and popular product. That faith may have been damaged, but if completed WELL, it could be a home run. It remains to be seen, but I feel the idea needs to be introduced since people have grown very attached. I can assure you that if it happens, the decision will not be made lightly or with ill intent, it's just about money.

As a finance person, pricing at $50 bucks after years of delays and being rushed out the door in this state indicates (to me) the following: They're done funding development, and the project needs to fund itself with sales revenue from here forward. Given the current state of things, they're likely to rapidly burn through the current sales revenue with little to no more influx until more stability or features are completed. No telling after (5?) years of development when that will be. I do not have access to their books, but looking at this purely from a financial perspective, if sales are as bad as I suspect, and with the history of development issues, cancellation is a strong consideration, IMO.

People saying theses dropoff rates are ok should compare player counts of KSP1 vs KSP2. The new hotness has less players after a week than old and busted has after 10 years. The state it was released in is famously inexcusable, and has already made it into the meta of diverse gaming communities. It has been popping up as a meme and joke in places completely unrelated to KSP.

I feel slightly less crusty now that I've seen a real person respond.

I bet if you land there the surface is flat, the erosion is fake, the textures are bad, and the scatter is scarce.

My theory is that it's people for whom gaming isn't much of a thing, but somehow got pulled in by KSP. As in, they don't play other games, or at least modern ones. It's easy to impress someone with nothing else in mind to compare it to. Must be the sound. Because it's not the graphics. Also, not many others are seeing it. For example, if I sit in a BMW, I don't grasp the added "value." Marketing and expectation setting could perhaps be a factor?

What, OP? Seriously? I cannot imagine someone who actually plays other modern games saying KSP2 looks even half-decent. It's so underwhelming the devs announced a they will be working on a terrain overhaul on the first day! The response from the community was THAT BAD. I thought they were joking us with potato-mode graphics and holding the scatter density back in the teaser pics leading up release, but then they went and dropped the turd just like that.

You have more optimism than I have. I think it's in a position where sales will need to cover costs or it's over. Maybe there's a chance. The thing I find odd is how the positive/negative review count is almost perfectly tracking 50/50 positive/negative, and has been since I started watching around 3k reviews. If they weren't game reviews, I'd swear someone was throwing the numbers to keep it at least 50% positive... I mean, I've checked in on the numbers and have repeatedly seen them within a double digit number of reviews of eachother. The odds are too low to be coincidence. I'd say it was fans doing it, but frankly there is coordination needed to keep pacing the positive reviews off of negative reviews. I'm not sure what has been going on there, but it seems fishy. Why not 47% positive? 56%? Why has it been right at the mark and often by fractions of a percent? I'll stop short of pointing fingers, but maybe somebody capable wants this thing to live. Numbers were roughly valid at time of posting.

You are the funding now.

Looks like I remembered the wrong end of March. Yes, it's the 31st, not the 1st. That gives them a month to assess whether sales will cover development costs. If there are 50 employees making on average 70k yearly, they'll need to sell 6k copies a month just to cover salary. It's possible, I guess. The trailers look neat. Not sure what the other expenses look like. Maybe they can keep it alive and turn it into a gem. In the mean time, goodwill has been meaningfully impacted.

Review of hours played by people who have reviewed the game as on now: 6840 total reviews. 66% have played for 1 hour or more. 41% played for 2 hours or more 29% played for 3 hours or more 20% played for 4 hours or more 9% played for 5 hours or more 5% played for 6 hours or more 5% for 7 hours+ 5% for 8 hours + 3% for 9 hours + That's a pretty steep dropoff for a release weekend. Very few people are making this the fun of their weekend after all the hype. 2/3 of people haven't even played 3 hours. Only 5% could be considered to be making KSP2 a primary entertainment choice this weekend. Looks like it's getting refunded or put back on the shelf for later by a great many people.

I just tried to watch that shadowzone video, and was greeted by a 2 minute commercial for KSP2 EA. It was awesome. Watch it if you can. They literally seem to have put more effort into the commercial than the game. Look at how much work went into it. The marketing team is well-funded and on point. Development... eh. Not so much.

It's not about what they can fix or not, this game hit the limit if the accounting/finance/management team's ability to tolerate expenses. Contrary to the flowery language, it wasn't put in early access so we can tell them what we think. It was rushed out the door at the last minute possible because management is done paying for development. If the game cannot cover its own development costs from this point forward, it is done. Gone. Cancelled. They're DONE paying development costs, and that's why out now.

We're probably a year out from stability or performance comparable to KSP1. Probably 3 years out from version 1.0. The interviews I saw from the youtubers of Nate and Nertea revealed just how little of the roadmap is in process. Although enthusiastic, the answers were barren of detail and betrayed just how little of the content has even been fully planned, let alone partially implemented. This was announced in August 2019. It wouldn't have been appropriate to even announce a game if it were in this state, much less set a release window. We are 3 years on from announce with a horribly buggy tech demo with no meat. I'm not sure what happened, but I expect cancellation. They may try to salvage parts of it by creating more KSP1 DLC out of it if they can port planets or functionality over. The fans bought already, the non-fans probably won't buy now. Can they keep the lights on? We will see.

The steam reviews keep bouncing from 49% to 50% positive. I've been watching since it was about 2k reviews. It seems like people are rushing in to try to offset negative reviews with positive ones. So far the content of negative reviews is about the product in its current state, and the content of positive reviews seems to be based on it being expected to get better over time and signaling support for the product. Only a small portion of the positive reviews seemed positive on the current product, with many people seemingly trying to convince themselves that their time and money are well spent. It seems that if the reviews were only counted based on what is paid for and played today, they would be overwhelmingly negative. Over the next week, we will be able to see what percent of reviewers actually bothered to play for more than a few hours. I expect many will not find it worthy of their time, despite signaling their allegiance with a positive review. There seem to be 2 categories of positive reviewers: "superfans" who are playing 10+ hours these last 2 days, and "investors" who've played low hours and have seemingly shelved the game despite leaving a positive review. The single most damning thing is looking at the concurrent player count in KSP1 right after launch go up. It's the highest it has been since the lockdowns. There can be little other explanation than the people who were hyped about KSP2 were disappointed and bailed back to KSP1 to get their fix. As of writing, there are 15k players playing KSP2 right now, down from 26k concurrent players. Viewers on twitch dropped from 28k at peak to 7k right now. Also of note is how rapidly the player count seems to be dropping compared to patterns for other recently released games. It will be interesting to see how many people play for how long after the signalling and cheerleading phase is over. I've said it before, and I'll say it again to unreceptive audience: if you're very attached to this game, you need to prepare yourself for the possible event it gets cancelled. T2 made their promise of release this fiscal year by a week. The promise was kept, now what happens next depends on the finance department's assessment of ROI. They'll be looking at metrics and sales, you can't signal them not to cancel. They only care about money. If they project continued losses going forward, that's it. Plug pulled. They will write it off. They've written off bigger.