Skorj

I think it's more Steam taking notice that many reviews talk about how often a game updates, and many forum posts ask whether a game is still being updated. This is a pattern across indie games in general, but especially EA games. Clearly this is information that customers care about, and that wasn't presented to them on the store page. Hopefully this will also increase the signal-to-noise ratio of reviews and forums by removing the need for so many reviews that just say "dead game" or forum posts that just ask "dead game?" Steam does take steps every year or two to keep up the usefulness of user reviews.

Funny you should say that. I just yesterday found a wallet in the couch the previous tenants left behind in my place as I was moving it out. The history of the KSP1 forums are of some value to nyone wanting to carry forward the KSP brand, assuming such a person exists. The KSP2 forums are just baggage that comes with that. You miss my point: currently adding stuff like volumetric clouds (which some would consider part of the bare minimum for a game where you can send probes into gas giants) isn't something within the realm of what most games would consider a mod. It's a whole new large part of the game that needed to be added, which is why people can get away with paid mods for it. The game would need to be designed for visual moddability in order for modders in the usual sense to add stuff like that. And it should be so designed. KSP is very much like a train sim game in this regard: there's so much room for extending the game by adding new parts and new planets, and the game needs built in support for modders adding new parts, planet data, and visuals for both in order to develop the sort of long-lasting fan community KSP has. KSP1 got away with a lot by being the first of its kind, but a modern game will need modern moddability. Adding a new part should be some XML text and some 3D asset files in one of the standard formats (or just textures for a re-skin). Am I the only one who sees the value here? Train Simulator Classic has like $20,000 worth of DLC, and Trainz a New Era has over 10,000 user-made items on the Steam Workshop IIRC. Making it easy to add new parts and new destinations can add so much life to a simulator-type game as long as the core gameplay is engaging, and the new items are visually appealing. Whether it's modders adding it, or DLC, or both, the key is making it easy to add content.

The long history of the forums is a real resource to people playing KSP1. I do hope they're kept alive in some fashion, even if only archived. I guess we'll see what the new owners think about the future of the Kerbal IP!

As far as the game engine: if the game is properly moddable, the engine doesn't matter to almost any mod. There's no reason adding parts or skins or changing the tech tree should require coding. And if it does, you shouldn't have to know the details of the game engine. At the point "game engine knowledge" really matters, you're beyond the point where the game is moddable and you're just writing game code directly. KSP has a lot of this of course, but it was mod-friendly rather than moddable. Or, put a different way, to anyone who says there can't be a huge mod community around an indie game with a custom game engine, I need reply only "Factorio". The kittens are still placeholders as far as we know, but even if it ends up being kittens due to inertia and lack of a better idea, IMO cartoon kittens (with serious expressions) and cartoon Kerbals appeal to the same audience. The actual critter doesn't matter IMO, just that it is emotionally expressive. You need your astronaut to look around in wonder when landing on a new planet, to move from fear to relief when your sad rocket finally makes it to orbit on the Nth try. Juno proved just how important that part is. I don't think it's an age thing: people don't seem to play AS kerbals, it's not an RPG, but rather as the director of the space agency sending them off to their doom. It's the difference between a physics sim game like KSP where the focus of the game is the rockets and the Kerbals are along for the ride, and a "space sim" game like Elite Dangerous, where you play the pilot, not the ship. Anyway, KSA would be the spiritual successor to KSP, not a sequel. That's fine IMO, though I'd be delighted if they get the license to change that.

To me, it's obvious this is what happened with KSP2. They had lots of people, they had lots of time, so a miss that big is clearly bad project management. People working on too many unrelated tasks and not getting the core must-have stuff done at high quality (there's also some sketchy engineering practices in there too). Now, this may have been the result of Take2 setting out silly milestone goals that forced this situation, or it may have been an unforced error, no way to tell from here. The big puzzle to me about KSP2 is how they were anywhere near meeting their milestones for T2 at the steps along the way. While all we have to go on for RW/KSA is what they say about themselves, at least what they're saying looks like good project management. I think they understand how to do it right, assuming they aren't just BSing us (and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt). So far they seem to have what it takes to deliver a worthy successor to KSP (and I'd love it if they ended up using the Kerbal IP for it). After all, all the project really needs are 3 requirements IMO: A solid moddable base engine for a rocket sim, one that isn't the crashtastic mess of KSP1. Updated graphics. I don't think they need "modern" graphics, in the sense of hundreds of people cranking out super-detailed art assets (we can live without Kerbal/Kitten shoelace physics), but a step up so that stuff like volumetric clouds and good exhaust plumes are natural to do in the engine. Some sort of actual progression system, rather than just a sandbox with random missions. Colonies building towards interstellar was just one way of many to do that. Only number 1 is actually hard IMO, the rest is just run-of-the-mill game design any competent game studio could deliver. And 1 isn't a problem to be solved by throwing a large team at it, but by a small team of the right people. There's no point in ramping up funding for the full project until 1 is proven. I'm excited for the future of some sort of KSP successor because RW seems to be doing just that. Of course, we'll see.

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.

I mean, that's not even a boycott, that's just "don't buy a product unless you know it's good". Gamers seem to struggle with this idea for some reason, which is why pre-orders exist. I haven't seen anything I liked out of T2 for many years. My initial hype for KSP2 came from not knowing that T2 had meddled with the dev process.

While I don't know about RTS per se, I do that that's a great approach: start with what will make the game new, and work on making a fun system first, then add the physics. We already have Juno, after all, but there's so much room for actual game ideas on top of the "rocket sandbox" foundation. My hype for KSP2 was all around the new stuff.

I still think the Kerbal IP as a whole has value, if only as a new game in the hands of a new studio and publisher. However, at this point why bother paying a lot of money for it? It's value may be positive, but rather low. I'd just make a spiritual successor to KSP instead, with new emotive characters. The failure of KSP2 means such a game likely wouldn't even be called a "KSP ripoff", but instead "KSP2 done right". Sure, it's an easier pitch as KSP3, but only a little easier. I'd certainly be up for trying any new rocket sim with a build-and-explore loop and a light-hearted tone.

I like that story. It's now my head canon.

One can play example-vs-counter-example all day, but the trend is clear: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy holds. Short term thinking and career-over-mission is the "lowest energy state" of any organization (commercial or otherwise), and the larger the org, the greater the energy gap. Entropy always wins in the end. Owner-run businesses (or other orgs) align career with mission, and so avoid that particular trap until sold or handed over. This is particularly stark in gaming: has any small studio survived for long making quality games after being AAAcquired? I'm sure I own a few shares of TTWO indirectly, and with my investor hat on: if the leaks are true, T2's meddling with ST/IG was a nightmare of stupidity and short-term greed. Not saying ST/IG is blameless here, they had lots of room to do better, but the restrictions they (T2) imposed sabotaged the project from the start. Even with that, T2 should have seen how badly the KSP2 project was going long before 2023 and changed course, but that might have involved T2 manages admitting they had made a mistake, so evidently not. Epic mismanagement. Selling PD is the right thing to do, as they clearly don't know how to manage small studios, but they're not even serious about that. With my gamer hat on: T2's behavior is exactly what one expects from AAA filth. I bought into the lie that PD was a hands-off department of T2. A small publisher for small games. That's on me for being so easily fooled, but it's hard to let go of once-loved franchises.