Skorj

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.

As someone who identifies as an LLC (Skorj has his own address and phone number, even), let me see if I can explain this better. There's no major difference between an LLC partnership and a closely-held corporation (where the shareholders know each other). The devil is in the details, but the risk is about the same. Everything you put into the business is at risk,and that's a lot, but you have some protection for other businesses and personal assets. There's a big difference is between that, where you both own and manage the company, and big (especially publicly held) corps where the owners and managers are different groups of people. (Founder led public corps tend to split the difference.) Bringing this long tangent back around to the topic: owner-run companies tend to have some vision beyond short-term profit maximization, some product they want to sell, some long-term plan, and always an eye for actually making money over the mere appearance of such. The KSP IP might be in good hands with such, and if it wasn't working out they'd be well motivated to either end it gracefully in a reputation-preserving way, or sell it at the best price they could reasonably get. A detailed post-mortem would be both a learning experience and a chance to show the sort of transparency gamers appreciate. But instead it's managed by people looking after their own careers first and foremost, with minimal concern for investors and none at all for reputation with gamers. From their point of view, the primary goal with KSP is to be able to remove any association with it from their resume, problem solved. Any future involvement would be a career risk, even to be part of selling it (unless for an outrageous amount). It's a sad situation, but it's an imperfect world.

Both games will be "supported" in the sense that if a 3rd party change (such as a video driver update) makes the game unable to launch, that will be fixed. PD still has a support team to keep its games technically playable for compliance with various consumer protection laws, remove launcher/branding, that sort of thing. Beyond that? Only if PD gets sold, which apparently T2 wants too much for.

Paul's post on the cancellation was well written IMO. Seriously, public post-mortems on failed projects used to be a thing at GDC, and it was wonderful. GDC changed direction mostly away from the technical a few years back, and it hadn't occurred to me that the increase in NDAs over everything were a big part of that. Used to be that there were no secrets once the code was no longer of competitive interest, and we all benefited from that.

Pretty much how I see the hype train at this point (hope this akamai link actually works):

We won't know the prospects for a KSP3 until we hear how the plan to sell PD went. If T2 somehow found a buyer, that might not be announced for months. But in the likely event of no announcement by the end of Q3, we can conclude the Kerbal IP is dead due to T2 putting too high a price on it. However, I have not just hope but expectation that we'll get a future rocket-sim game with colorful emotive characters, just not green space frogs. While KSP2 was in development, it would have been silly to make another game with the same tone. But now the field has cleared, and so there's room for a new "have fun learning astrophysics" game with mechanics that balance realism with an appealing learning curve (and some normal game progression, rather than just a sandbox with missions)..

The only real news from Belular's vid from a week ago is that he's not at all a KSP channel. In fact, he released his own studio's game The Pale Beyond on the same day that KSP2 came out. So the news about T2's mismanagement moved beyond KSP fandom into a somewhat mainstream gamer news channel. I thought that was nice to see.

Well, there's always one in any crowd, but at least around here posters tend to be a bit more mature than e.g. the Steam forums. IMO the important thing for communication around a new KSP-like would be to be clear about what the point of the new game would be, and focus on that narrowly rather than promising a list of features. Sharing the abstract like "we want this to be a game with a real progression system, not a rocket sandbox like KSP1" or "this one will be a story-driven game, and while we'll try to keep the physics sim accurate, it won't be the focus of the game so don't expect KSP1-like play" or whatever the vision of the game might be. Not to give away one of the superpower secrets of senior engineers, but it's best to promise future delivery of stuff you already have working, and keep silent about details till the testing is going well. But now I've revealed too much.

While gamers do have a bad habit of taking a wishlist as a commitment, IG went beyond that. Maybe this was your point, but they crossed the line IMO (Nate especially) with over-selling what they already had working. The store page on Steam, where the wording should matter, is rather bad about this. The roadmap shouldn't be on the store page at all (that arguably violates Steam rules), but they really messed up IMO by stating this as "stuff you're buying" and not "stuff we hope we can one day maybe do, but no promises". This just reads as a description of the product you're paying $50 for, to be delivered over time. I've bought quite a few EA games, and can only think of one other game that made this mistake, and ran into the same vitriol when he couldn't deliver. But that was a one-dev team with volunteers, and when he found a decent publisher, the publisher deleted all the roadmap stuff from the store page right away. Other big "hype wavestate collapse" games made the same mistake of over-selling stuff they hoped to have as stuff you would definitely be getting. There's still a lot of hate for Randy Pitchford and Sean Murray over games that might have been well received had communication been handled differently (and initial bugs been fixed quickly and apologetically). It's really a surprising mistake from veteran publishers, who really should know better. Edit to add: In particular I think HarvesteR knows better, and wouldn't make the same mistakes. I really liked his pitch of making a working colonies game with minimal rocket sim elements, then adding to the physics over time. That way you start with a new kind of game at release.

It's nice that someone did that last bugfix patch. I guess it was too much to hope for another. The sad thing is, with the game-breaking bugs fixed and some sort of colony system, KSP2 would finally offer something KSP1 doesn't (beyond graphics). But if I bought the IP, I don't think I'd bother, would be rather hard to get players' attention at this point to change reviews back to positive, even if someone did make the game something reasonable. I do still think the Kerbal IP still has value though, for a KSP3, just not in T2's hands. That bridge is thoroughly burnt at this point. And as we've been discussing in other threads, it doesn't have to be Kerbals to capture the spirit of the game that many find lacking in Juno. Heck, maybe Dean Hall and HarvesteR will collaborate at some point. KSP2, though, seems like there's nothing left but the funeral.

Kerbals have a very distinctive look, though. Plenty of room for cute, emotive characters with a different design.

The big problem with KSP1 (and therefore KSP2) is the physics is just done wrong from an efficiency perspective, in a couple of ways. HarvesteR sorted out joint flex in KitHack, so that's halfway there. The other problem - making everything not being controlled "on rails" - is something anyone with a RL physics background could help him with. For a new game that does these things right, there wouldn't be a problem with either 1000-part ships or 1000 satellites in orbit for some sort of colony / large economic system play. I can't imaging HarversteR would just make the mostly-sandbox KSP again. He's been there, done that, got the t-shirt. And I think Juno will eventually be a very solid sandbox-with-missions game for those who want that. But a rocket sim with an actual game behind it, with a real progression system and some sort of story, that would be amazing IMO. Or lean into multiplayer and combat, which isn't my bag but would certainly find an audience.

Updates might be automatic, but it's likely PD has a support team for older software. It's common in the industry (if not so much game dev) to have a small support team that supports all the out-of-date software versions that still have users, in case of critical crash bugs or security bugs. Support teams get no glory, but they do some amazing work with unfamiliar codebases. If we get another bugfix patch, we'll know the support team is working, and probably did the last patch as well.

Yeah, KSP is and should be a gentle introduction to orbital mechanics. Not taking itself too seriously, not an engineering sim, but not just a joke either. The humor in the first was more subtle, often found in part descriptions, not "in your face". Patched conics is IMO fundamental to the brand. You can have stable orbits around planets with moons without station keeping. Orbits can be "on rails." It's a simpler approach, that is still plenty complex for most players. And of course it was a good enough approximation for the Apollo missions. Giving up two unstable Lagrange point is a fine trade (especially as there's no station keeping, so you couldn't keep a satellite there for long anyhow). That being said, I think RSS / RO / Real Scale would be a great DLC, for players who have mastered the base game and want a harder challenge. Much like life support: KSP1 is too hard already for most players, but that added challenge is fine for an optional extra.

If PD is ever sold, maybe I could get excited for KSP3. Would depend on the buyer of course, another AAA studio would be pointless. I'm open to a lot of directions KSP3 could go, adjacent to KSP1 gameplay. It doesn't need to be KSP1 all over again, but it sure would be nice to start with that as a base! As has been discussed at length, all the tricky bits of the code are optional to the core experience: multiplayer, 3-body physics, and fancy terrain generation could all be sidelined if needed for a solid base game. Lots of ways to go from there once you had a rocket sim to build on, lots of ways to add an actual game to the sim.

The thing about taking over a clearly failed project: you're a hero if you fix it, and it's merely expected if you don't. Though if I bought PD I'd say "sorry all, the KSP2 code is unfixable, see you in a few years with KSP3." Everyone would be excited again with a few years' distance.