Skorj

I would imagine ex-Annapurna has their hands full and "the KSP1 Mod Scene" is pretty far down their list to care about. Frankly, the corporate vulture will want a feast and ex-AP will be looking for deals that make quick money. For KSP that means licensing deals, and as ShadowZone mentioned if there was a Kerbals game for kids in the works, finishing that up might have prospects. The upside is: if they're hungry, licensing out the rights to the Kerbal IP to a game studio might be within reach of someone like Rocketwerkz.

Thanks to everyone who worked on getting the forums back! 60 days should be enough for ex-Annapurna to get their bearings and decide what to do with the forums. Hopefully they keep them. If nothing else, these forums are a great place to announce new KSP merch and licensing deals.

I think any team that consults with HarvesteR will get 2 sorted out. Looked like he nailed it for KitHack. 3 was a mystery to me why it's so bad. If we can abandon the "rooted tree" structure of crafts and just have parts stick together as needed, then sub-assemblies become easy and you just need a workspace where you can have multiple chunks of craft handy - like a probe bus and 3 probes - which you stick together for the final craft. Just need some place on the screen that's clearly the "real" craft and everywhere else is an area to work with sub-assemblies (or "modules" as a better name). I think it could be made very clear visually and still be far less clunky than KSP1's sub-assemblies. I would love to have an actual story or at least linked objectives (and also sandbox mode, of course). I agree anomalies are are a good way to do it, with far more rich mechanics about satellites to find them, building specific craft to go get them and so on. I'd love to see caves so you have to drive a rover in, or an underwater one on Laythe. Maybe a large alien base to discover and explore down into to get interstellar tech. Anything to make missions more than just "do I have enough delta-V"!

The Hype train is dual fuel Hopium and Copium, providing an inexhaustible supply of power. It just has to stop and take on water every so often to be steaming along again.

That gameranx article is just commenting on the videogameschonicle article. The videogameschonicle article is just commenting on a Bloomberg article, which is paywalled. The Bloomberg articles was by Jason Schreier, and is probably the only article out there on the subject that isn't written by AI. All that article states is that the ex-Annapurna company will distribute, not develop, the PD games. Which makes sense, since ex-Annapurna are not developers. All else is AI hallucination, for now. The future will tell if the corporate vulture's attempts to monetize their assets will lead to a new studio, but I think they're just going to do licensing. EDIT: Lisias, they also have minority ownership in Jagex, a rather more known studio. Whether anyone can make money off of Runescape is a different question: it's gone through several owners in the past few years.

I guess we'll see what the new owners do with the store page. The roadmap on the KSP2 store page violates Steam EA rules, but since Steam doesn't enforce those rules ... well, we'll see. I believe the majority of Steam EA games are abandoned before 1.0. Usually this is more forgivable, as it's often a 1-dev project where the dev lost interest or hit a technical wall. It's frustrating to see a major publisher do the same, but what can you do? Still, perhaps the new owners will make it eligible for deep discounts on Steam sales. I'm sure the work of the modding community has made it worth $5 by now, maybe even $10.

Sorry to say, Haveli does indeed seem to be a scrapyard for old tech companies. I see from their announcements that they even acquired the corpse of Veritas Software (I used to work there when tape backup was important). They do seem to try to eek out some value from their acquisitions, not just resell them, so there's that. As SZ noted, they're probably behind the licensing deal with Estes rockets. PD being acquired by a corporate vulture was what I predicted. I still have hope that an actual game studio will license the IP one day, as that's the easiest way for Haveli to make money. Side note: why does there have to be a real estate business named Annapurna Haveli, gobbling up the search results? The universe is laughing at me. EDIT: wait, I can see it now: a new collaboration between Kitten Space Agency and Stray: from the streets to the stars, Strays in Spaaaaaaceeee

KSP2 is worthless IP IMO. There's not even sunk cost fallacy to work with, since the current owners didn't spend any money on it. We'd be talking about KSP3 if non-trivial money were to be spent. The only studio they worked with who would have even the vaguest clue how to make a physics sim is Mobius Digital (Outer Wilds), and while I'd love to see their take on a Kerbal game, we'd definitely get something more than a sandbox from them, studios can't sit idle waiting for work. They're either a year into quietly working on their next game, or shut down. Still, an Outer WIlds-style take on KSP would be amazing.

Was going to say exactly this. What we expected was that KSP2 started as a baked-in mod for KSP1 with some fixes. That would have been the Star Theory days. We knew a lot of work got done after that, including a whole new system for planet textures, Blackrack's work, and a ton of new assets. Heck, they would have had to change a lot just to break things so badly. But it does seem safe to conclude they started with a copy of the KSP1 code base, before a couple hundred dev-years of new work was done. The percentages foonix found don't surprise me at all: a big chunk of KSP1 in a mostly-new codebase. I suspect the original code is effectively double or triple what the numbers suggest, given how simple refactoring can change thousands of lines of source code without changing the object code (actual behavior) at all, and that's expected when a new team is making sense of a legacy codebase and makes it conform to the current coding standards and naming conventions.

Not to dash anyone's hopes, but the new owners are a publisher not a studio. They fund game developers. they don't make games. They will not be working on KSP2 or any game. Our best hope remains that the Kerbal ISP gets sold off or licensed out. Maybe Rocketwerkz will license the Kerbals for KSA.

I've gone back to some games I had from 20 years ago and found that while the media worked fine, the CD key had faded as it was printed with a different sort of ink than the manual. Rather disappointing. GOG is the closest thing to forever we have, and that's the KSP install I've used for quite some time now.

This stuff gives me hope. If you can't skip time arbitrarily forward, you can't scale to huge numbers of ships in orbit. We've all been hurt before. No hype, but hope.

I would have gone with "Goblin Space Agency", leaning into the early "found in a junkyard" spirit of KSP parts.

Oh, I have. Even complex games are "mid" compared to large business projects. But I do wonder what they mean when they say they created their own engine. These days studios usually mean "a custom framework on top of Unreal", since re-inventing that particular wheel would be ... a bold plan. C# would be a great choice for a scalable framework built of top of letting Unreal do the crunchy bits, but they seem to be saying they started from scratch? I'm less hopeful for this project if that's the case. I've only ever seen studios crater after thinking they should crate a new engine (anyone remember Flagship?). Still, first time for everything. I'm cheering for them, either way.

Take2 almost surely has a support team that handles all of its abandoned games. That's pretty standard for large software companies. For compliance with EU law, they need to keep the games minimally functional - able to launch without crashing - for years after they stop selling them, so they need a team to chase crash bugs due to video driver changes and such. Those guys typically also handle simple changes in corporate branding in older games still being sold. I can't say what Take2 does specifically, but every large software company I worked for had a team like this somewhere.