RocketRockington

Didn't you say something like this before the first patch? Maybe I'm misremembering.We haven't seen new content in the first two months of release. I think their engineering team is still nearly entirely committed to big fixing, and there's very little additional content that can drop without engineering involvement. Based on @Gotmachine 's data mining, a lot of the content is already in the shipped code, it's just waiting for thr necessary systems to be there.. But of course, when a project massively screws up their project management and hires too many cartoonists and too few software engineers, it ends up being a bottleneck.

A lot of 'we can discuss it' or other generalizing to a broader group who made decisions, and quite a bit of deferring to Nate too. Shana seems to be more of a committee chairperson than a design director from the way a lot of this reads. I'm not saying there shouldn't be consensus of course...but it feels like a lack of taking direct responsibility for the design of the project, if that even is her role.

You're joking I know, but when people stop caring enough to come and even complain about KSP2 - and it's not because the game is now perfect and wonderful - that's also not a great sign. KSP1 went out with a bang, a genuine finish to years of updates, updates that finally brought the needed tools to the game, and fireworks. KSP2 seems more likely to go out with a whimper, at this point.

So each patch seems to have bumped numbers for a week before returning to pre-patch player counts and then continuing to decline. One hilarious thing - though the thread title is now very wrong, there is a funny 10% value we're about to hit. If the whole Intercept team is logged into the game through steam, we're about to get to the point where they make up 10% of the peak user base.

In some rough approximations for some early guesstimates, I'm sure they did. But not for actual mission planning. Apollo wouldn't have had a correct free return trajectory just by using patched conics and hill spheres, for instance.

At this point, assuming they've worked on multiplayer consistently to integrate it into the engine, it's a huge sunk costnand part of the reason for the massive delays. Also I don't think the ksp2 design team has a good sense of what the community wants or cares that much (eg Wobble rockets) - they're chasing 'new users' and assume the old users will fall into line and buy it because there isn't much choice if you want something new in Kerbal... fortunately KSP1 mods keep getting updated.

It's also unrealistic because there's no such thing as a discrete SOI where you pop between one frame of reference and another for keplerian orbital conics.

There's a big price differential. Likely somewhat more people per sale review KSP2 vs KSP1, but not enough to make up for how big the difference in price is. On the other hand, 10x more money has been spent on KSP2, given both the # of people working on both and the relative salaries involved. And KSP1 has certainly made a lot more.money than KSP2 as well.

As far as sales go, the only way to get a vague estimate is by looking at new reviews. I've posted elsewhere but there is some data backing up that the ratio of reviews to sales averages 41, but varies between 20 to 100 depending on the title. Since yesterday KSP2 seems to have gotten about 30 new reviews, so 1200 steam sales if the average holds true. In the previous days is was only getting 10ish. My guess is KSP2 gets more reviews per sale than average because it's controversial. Mostly what matters to T2 are sales projections though. They still likely believe that after enough dev effort is put in, KSP2 will hit the sort of sales figures KSP1 did - but at the moment sales are pretty poor for the title, as you'd expect from the low review scores.

Peak during the last patch was 3k. Might have to see what the weekend holds, to see if the patch makes the game more.meaningfully playable to significantly change user counts, but after 7 weeks after launch without any new content, there may not be a big bump until new content is added.

[snip] Anyway, the solution of just making all the parts bigger isn't a good one. I don't buy a Legos to I have 3 pre built pieces to stick together in a pre-defined fashion. More parts offer the possibility of more creativity, less parts means less creativity, its as simple as that. And I didn't want to have to read between the lines of every dev answer that pointed toward better physics with bigger craft as if I was listening to a politician speak and give "diplomatic" answers. Regardless, 80% of the people answering the poll expected higher part counts with reasonable performance - whether it was because of developer-created hype or personal expectations.

Did you miss this post? Or all the videos where they show off extremely high part count ships? Or is this going to be a pointless semantics argument where you try to argue those weren't 'promises'. Which I'll acknowledge - they never specifically promise anything, they just hyped things without biding themselves to anything legally.

There was quite a bit of creatively worded marketing...

It becomes plural when it's not 1 month. Including saying .5 months. Though you can also say half a month.

I completely disagree - KSP very much does lend itself to mimicing real life - the reason it feels good to go to the Mun is because you get this sensation of accomplishment that wouldn't be the case if it had no connection to the complexities of real-life space exploration. Kerbal is the closest we have to real world space exploration most players will ever experience unless you play Orbiter. Virtually every other title that does some sort of space gameplay - whether it uses humans or something else as the characters - does something less realistic. How CLOSE to real life is up to the developers. The developers decided to make fuels more realistic in KSP2 - switching from 'liquid fuel' to actual named chemical fuels. I don't see you arguing against that. Modders have certainly made the game closer to real life, in a variety of ways, and people happily play those mods though obviously they're not for everyone. Further, many people in this thread who want LS are not arguing to do LS because of realism reasons, but for gameplay reasons - to make missions more challenging or interesting. So overall your point of 'It's Kerbals so the game should be unrealistic' doesn't make sense to me.

Moreover Kerbals are fictional so coming up with rules that say XYZ must apply because they're Kerbals and not humans is silly. Life support is not off the table just because they're Kerbals - it's off the table because that's what the developers want to do.

That's not how it works. Companies keep working on games based on expectations that additional development costs will result in revenue from future sales, not based on past revenue. Basically the whole point is to get more money than was spent developing it.

Its logical to assume that players who stop playing, or who never started playing, are not happy with the state of the game as it is right now. The hard data from player #s and reviews backs that up. And that's what I'm saying. What's presumptuous is to assume they all have the same rationale as you do for why they aren't playing, there are multiple reasons why that may brbthr case, you're waiting for fixes, others are waiting for new features, others are waiting for optimization, and some are fed up with the hype and the endless waiting for the next thing that's supposed to solve these issues and have writtrn off KSP2 completely. I'm sure there are other reasons. Well a lot of people didn't have your issues and they show up as players on steam early on - ones that have faded away over time. Again, extrapolating from your personal anecdotal experience and assuming that's the one reason steam players have stopped showing up on steam telemetry is silly. It would make sense if some change in a recent patch broke the launcher, but actually after the patch player counts went up briefly before falling off. There are also very few mods out for KSP2, I doubt that's the primary reason player xounts have dropped off - and it wouldn't affect the rate of new reviews.

That's why I mentioned the rate of reviews, from which you can estimate sales rate. https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-that-game-sold-on-steam-using This article points out that average # of sales per review is 41, and most games fall between 25 and 100 sales per review. I'd guess that due to KSP2s controversial nature, the rate of sales per review is below the average, but even using that average, KSP2s sales rate is now low enough than any reasonable eatimate of thr burn rate of a 50 developer team exceeds it.

My guess is that when colonies comes out, you'll be disappointed. Every indication I've seen is that the colony system they're aiming for is one that requires little hands on management...and also therefore has little gameplay besides tacking new facilities on. They're indicating that colonies can't 'fail' because there's nothing to cause them to decline. All you can fail at is not having enough resources on hand to expand them. Maybe this should be in a separate topic, but I'm willing to bet that the colony 'gameplay' is going to be extremely flimsy, and not the sort of colony sim some people hope for. My expectation is it'll be more like setting up fire-and-forget mining or science bases like you would in a game of Galciv 3 (albeit with a 3d editor) than a place you constantly interact with like Surviving Mars. On the one hand, this does mean that it won't take focus from the rocket game at all. On the other, it's unlikely to have complex and interesting challenges, especially with automated delivery routes.

About a week later and KSP2 player counts have fallen by another 33%. Rate of reviews (which is indicative of new purchases) are relatively stable over the last week though, so rate of purchase is.likely stable - but also well below sustaining burn rate for thr project. Hopefully Take2 does take the long view, because the player community has really spoken about the state of the current game.

3 months is 13 weeks. That's 4 patches if they were every 3 weeks.. which, since it seems unlikely there will be a patch tomorrow as nothing has been said, is also not something that should be assumed. Also the size of each feature is not the same. People assuming that if Science takes 3 months, multiplayer will take 3 months are not being rational. We don't know how much of each is already done and the one thing we can be very sure of is that Intercept games doesn't know how to schedule or forecast well at all, considering all the massive delays and the lackluster launch

They weren't fired, they stayed with star theory which shut down after they couldn't find another project. Can't fire someone you never actually hired. Maybe they didn't get an offer to come over, or maybe they refused because they knew what working with Intercepts poached management team was like. Aso I'd say the problem with intercept is primarily really bad project management, as demonstrated by their constantly missed schedule and need to launch an alpha game to EA, more so than just technical challenges. Building KSP2 was always going to be more demanding of engineering than art. Thats obvious from day 1. Especially if you want to add multiplayer. The fact that they kept their art team and didn't keep or quickly get a new engineering team is more an example of poor planning, poor understand of the scope of the tasks ahead, poor ability to hire, and/or poor prioritization.

I don't think there will be as much of a difference between current KSP2 and future KSP2 modded as there is between past KSP1 and current modded KSP1. The KSP1 modding community probably put in 2 to 3 orders of magnitude of time building mods than went into the base game. That's unlikely to happen with KSP 2 for several reasons. 1. The base game should have 10 times more labor invested in it than KSP1, and it's unlikely to attract a modding community 10 times as large 2. KSP2 has non of the indie zeitgeist or espirit d'corps that KSP1 had. The current modding community released a letter politely saying they're in a wait and see mode, and future modders are less likely to want to get involved with a very commercial Take2 franchise vs an indie darling 3. KSP2 isn't unique on the marketplace like KSP1 was. KSP1 itself is a competitor for modding attention. Also, personally, if I was a modder, I'd be a little annoyed with the sentiment I've often seen that there's an expectation of mods. Being heavily modded isn't a right that games get just for being moddable, they earn it by building a good community and being popular. This may be another post that gets removed, but comparing past KSP1 and sentiment about it does directly affect expectations people should have of future mod development for KSP2.

Edited because I was just saying what @VlonaldKermandid. Agree with their statement.