RocketRockington

KSP1 94% positive reviews on Steam. 5million+ copies sold. Despite being developed by amateurs. The fact that you personally disagree is more a you thing that an objective reality thing.

Lol this argument is so old and tired. All fans who dislike a product are entitled teens, and that's why developers should feel free to hype, lie and gaslight them. Get over yourself. The community works when the product is good, like it did during the KSP1 era. You deliver something good and then you get to say it's good. Anticonsumer crusaders like yourself who wants to justify any bad behaviour on the devs part by blaming the audience don't improve a single thing ever.

And yet those other companies, at least the ones that a succeeded, managed to do a lot better, doing both updates and bug fixes - I guess other companies can chew gum and walk at the same time. Sons of the Forest launched to EA at the same time, and has done 4 patches and 7 bug updates in the same period. Basically, I'm saying I don't take anything Nate has to say at face value, nor should anyone else after the years of overhyping and overselling. The game is released, and the proof is in the pudding now. When it comes to the KSP2 pudding, I'm pretty sure you have some idea what flavor I think it is, and it's not chocolate.

Lol yeah I saw that thread, you're getting shredded out there. But it's not your fault. The community is up in arms and for understandable reasons that have very little to do with you and a lot more to do with the history and the state of the project, how it was hyped for years and ultimately a huge let down for many people. Intercept really squandered years of positive community building by Squad and rebuilding it is going to be difficult. I'm sorry you didn't see KSP in better days. Talk to JustJim who used to do QA if you want to hear the stories.

Bold is mine. Tucking in obvious falsehood in with the all the unverifiable statements just makes us further doubt the rest of it. Your velocity is clearly not good. 3 months after launch and you've managed 2 patches that haven't addressed a huge swath of playability problems...after 3 years of delays what you claimed were to make sure everything was high quality. Look at actually successful EA titles and their cadence of updates and then tell us why 6-7 weeks between updates is a 'good' velocity.

Is one of the reasons because then we'd see the pace at which bugs are/aren't addressed? That's gonna be evident anyway. Good on you for coming back to deal with this. Direct engagement was part of what made KSP1 great, both as a game and as a community. Addressing/acknowledging the negatives and not just hyping positives too. The rest of the studio could learn a lot from you. Good on you. I hope you're not regretting accepting that job offer.

@Alexoff It's not worth it. I mostly stopped reading & engaging with this forum because of a couple of posters, [snip] because it's just walls and walls of text, along with not very subtle insults, coupled with an apparent wide latitude granted by the powers that be to disparage both specific individuals like yourself and the wider community because this person is on the pro-KSP2 side. Of course, it's the ksp2 forum, so that's not surprising, and you can't really expect true fairness, so the best strategy is to simply not engage, nothing is ever going to come of doing so.

Which you will never get. We've been asking the same questions, in response to the AMAs, etc, since launch. Unless there's a leak like the stuff that got reported when Star Theory got removed from the project/their devs poached, they will never air the dirty laundry. It's not in their interests to tell you why and how much time was wasted, they've given all the spin they can about 'massive technical challenges' and how 'monumental the game is'. Etc etc etc.

I can explain this. QA had nothing to do with it. It's due to all the delays. Corporate got fed up with giving Intercept more extensions and told Intercept they had to ship at a fixed date, no more excuses, because as we can see from Nate S's most recent post, him and his project managers are excellent at making excuses over and over. The same.kond of excuses we get - the project is going great but we just need a little extra time. Corporate must have gotten fee up with that. Allowing a project to delay so many times for 3 years was already kind of ridiculous. Intercept, however, didn't suddenly become better at scoping or project management because they finally stopped getting more rope, and KSP2 was released in the shape it was, despite QA and many developers likely knowing exactly what shape it is in. Many of the devs on KSP2 are likely great - but the legacy of years of failure and mismanagement from star theory have come to roost, and now unfortunately new hires like Darrin who are probably great people have to deal with it. Why Nate S still has a job though, I'll never know.

That's an absurdly HIGH ratio for games, in your favor, even though you're talking about it like it's bad. Right now KSP2 is averaging 300 active users - and if that's only part of your QA team, you must have at least 20 testers. Having 1 tester per 15 active users is a luxury most games don't have.

Too funny not to come back to share. Yesterday was the first day KSP2 failed to break 500 simultaneous users - topping out at 420. Probably symbolic of what the devs are spending their time doing now that they've resorted to their favorite trick 'Tell everyone we need to delay things more to improve the quality'. Worked out great for the last 3 years, didn't it? And people are still falling for it so why not? You can fool some of the people all of the time, after all. Today looks like it'll be the first day KSP2 failed to break 400 active players though - may not be anyone around when they actually get to the update. My guess is that if science mode isn't out in a few months, and doesn't give people a new experience that KSP1 didn't, demonstrating a more positive trajectory for this AAA priced tech demo - KSP2 will be fully written off, by both the community and T2. Peace out.

Lol you're one to talk about arrogance, I'll defer to your expertise on this. Btw after that shameful post from asdii and your behaviour, I'm done with these forums. The game speaks for itself at this point and watching KSP2 RUD only has so much entertainment value.

Love seeing the pro KSP2 crowd pounce when someone makes a mistake... even an 'unbiased' mod getting in on the beat down - funny how you guys don't do that when Intercept makes nothing but mistakes.

Not surprised at all the see KSP2 further slowing down updates. The past 2 months have been an all hands on deck situation for them. Unfortunately, due to their terrible project management, all hands on deck meant 'barely tolerable development rate'. They're going to revert to their standard slow as molasses speed now, the one that got the game so delayed and launched in such a bad state. But when a good chunk of your community is happy to keep waiting no matter how much you delay, why bother? I bet we'll see more merch coming out at a fast clip though.

I like how after 3 years of delays, spending another 2 years in a beta purgatory has now become the standard for things going well in some people's minds. KSP2 may not be good at many things, but it's been a fascinatingly effective at getting people to lower thier expectations.

They certainly wanted a lot of early sales, given they started with a quickly-shut down marketting barrage, including ads and events. Another reason it's clear that, despite the way some people want to frame this EA as part of some well thought out plan to release an MVP and get feedback on it, it was actually a botched release that was forced on them by poor project planning, a hard date the publisher was not willing to let them delay past, and expectations that the title would be far ahead of where it's currently at + a bunch of after-the-fact justifications.

We know that when Star Theory was dumped and they poached staff, they got most of the design team and artists and not the engineers. But they still paid those designers and artists even while they tried to hire engineers. Moreover, they were paying star theory for several years, regardless of whether development was 'restarted' or not. And even on top of that, one year of their current development - just april 2022 to april 2023, is more expensive than the net revenue they e gotten so far, by my estimates, and I've been a lead on several game projects, so I have a decent idea of what it costs. KSP2 is deeply in the red still. And I suspect that they're spending more month to month still than they're earning by a factor of 2.

You've gotten this wrong in a few different places, unfortunately. 1. Between Steam's cut, VAT, and transaction fees, the net revenue is about 55% of gross sales. And not every copy sells for the full $50 USA price tag. So net they've probably made 6-7 million. 2. Employees aren't just thier salary. There's benefits. There's office space. There's support staff, like marketters and janitors and lawyers. The projects yearly burn rate is north of $10 million because of these factors, with their 50ish developers. 3. Then there's marketting. KSP2 didn't do a ton, and pulled thier ads quickly. But it was still a cost. KSP is still very much in the red. They likely won't recoup prior costs until they've sold 2 million copies, due to the protracted dev cycle. For T2 it's a sunk cost - they had imagined they'd get KSP1 level of sales (5+ million units) at a higher price point for a 3 year dev cycle + ongoing support. Currently they're way below even first 3 months sales targets, most likely, and way over budget. The bigger concern is if ongoing sales are not paying for ongoing development. T2 is hoping that people will buy it once the bugs and content are sorted...but every year of EA development that's in the red is going to test thier patience. Hopefully the earnings call will give us more data.

Yeah totally fair to compare KSP2 to a game that takes 10 hours to complete, or 25 hours if you go full completionist. https://howlongtobeat.com/game/94769

2% of the peak player base right at launch. That's not the same thing as purchases. Based on # of reviews, the game has likely sold somewhere in the 300k range (big error bars here of course, factor of 2x either way). So peak daily players are more like 0.2% of purchases.

It's like everyone's forgotten hype is a thing. Where developers and the publisher push a false narrative about the quality of the product, and where some customers build up their expectations of said product, and then buy it sometimes regardless of negative reviews. And the write positive reviews not based on the current quality of the product, but in their hopes for the future state of it. Eg: the 'hype train' which is fueled by people's hopes, and can get manipulated.

She talks about having direct conversations with the fans...but does she have a forums account? Maybe she's more direct on the discord. I haven't seen a post of hers

Anyone should get the vacation time they need & earned. That said, very few game companies advertise when employees go on vacation( I can't think of an example but I'm sure there are some) Especially as he was only gone a week and is back to posting. I'm confused by their ongoing stupidity when it comes to communication. I think they're living in in a different world we're the game is good and their fanbase thinks well of them?

To me it just sounds like an inexperienced developer. You build your milestone plan in a series of layers that build up on one another, to make development as efficient as possible. That's development 101. "Behemoth of a game". It's an AA sized project. That at least so far they mostly are mimicing the previous project, except for the graphics facelift. My impression continues to be that their project management is abysmal and they keep talking up massive challenges as cover for how amateurishly they handled things.

We do keep that in mind. The point of this thread, partially, is that it's not a 'when the game is fully developed' but an 'if'. For whatever reason, T2 decided they needed to launch this game when they launched it, despite the state of it. For $50. Not a free closed beta that would have gotten them feedback without so much vitriol, which is their false justification. So I think if the game doesn't sell well or keep attention, there's a a good chance it won't ever be finished. Otherwise why launch it in the current state at all? And this thread tracks player counts and other metrics to see just how the game is being received, especially after patches.