PDCWolf

The answer is Yes. At any point in development you're just allowed to say "yep, that's it, this is 1.0." For proof, look at StarForge (the game, not the celeb prebuilt pc brand) and other games by the same developer. The only process by which Steam would care is a proper delisting. If you cancel development AND THEN delist an EA game from Steam, they will offer automatic refunds.

AKSHUALLY, as the highest quality hopium inhalers were saying, the only fact was that it was "an office in Seattle", and then the CEO said "the studio is not closed". This would be, I believe, the first, official confirmation that what we all were sure happened did in fact happen.

Lmao, I really want to believe there's 2 to 3 meanings to what he said. The first thing people are gonna see when they check the game out is the overwhelmingly negative reviews, and god forbid Matt is the first personality they find, telling people to refund the game.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/kerbal-space-program-2-producer-confirms-mass-layoffs-contradicting-ceos-remarks Seems someone officially broke the silence.

KSP2's EULA have this nasty bit, which has never been put into practice AFAIK: As you can see, monetary benefit from these works is not regulated by the EULA, and neither is production of those when you haven't acquired the right to play the game. After the refund, Matt would've already ceded his rights to those works for T2/PD to use as they see fit, yet since monetization was never regulated, they can't do nothing about it. On the other hand, youtube being youtube, if T2 hits the claim button, they'll oblige, and I doubt Matt would go legal against them. As a personal remark: Companies that think they own gameplay videos or livestreams are cancer. EULAs regulating what I do with a product I purchased beyond copying it to re-sell should be illegal, and in most civilized countries they tend to be.

Don't worry, I kinda agree with the idea so I'll gladly say the controversial take myself, and then you can compare to your take: If you don't know how to play the game, you have no hope of making it fun for the people who do. Now, being bad is different and kinda excusable. Most devs @ KSPTV were horrid at playing the game, but this is not a game where you need to be skilled at to have fun. On the other hand they refused to use mods and I think IIRC they even prohibited using mods on official dev streams so that included mechjeb... up until about Skunky joined as CM.

Because the game got sold outside the US/EU. $50 for me at release was between 30% and 50% of my paycheck. Of course I was lucky enough to live in a place where they regionalized prices, but still, even $8 was a good chunk of money I could've gotten some other really good games for.

Bad lesson. Don't get involved in Early Access when it involves big publishers. A real studio needing early access would be overjoyed and communicative regarding feedback and progress respectively, devs in those projects hang around the community having useful discussions and develop their product knowing how much the customer is worth. On the contrary, these clowns just wanted to farm exposure on every update with a marketing campaign to try and get more sales, whilst they had a rigid vision with zero room for wiggle, and clearly had no regards with misleading about their progress or their future. On the other hand, your own responsibility lies on being critical and analytic. DO NOT huff the hopium, do not exhale copium. Positivity does literally nothing for a project other than keeping you tied to it when the red flags start to show up. Early Access is a business, and contrary to what people too deep to accept they got scammed say (or that undervalue their time and money), you do buy games based on what they can be and not what they are, so be careful with your money, and know when to step out. Also it should be pretty clear that no Early Access game (and even most full release ones) aren't worth anywhere near $50. ---- As for the OP, I'd really note down: Most people aren't happy with just the same game with a coat of paint. Lift up what's good, re-do it professionally, but also add up new things. Unity is insufficient, this is why people don't want it. You'd need to rebuild enough systems around it (multithreading, physics joints, rigidbody physics). I don't know about Unreal but those are things to consider. Do not ignore veterans. Most of the community has been playing for a decade. If you release your product and there's nothing new for them to do, yeah, you just alienated a good chunk of the playerbase. Don't dumb down stuff. Part of the charm was the learning curve. Try-Fail-Improve doesn't work if you remove the first 2. Deeper features > more features. Learn how to make a UI. An indie dev making a bad UI is one thing, professionals being unable to make something usable is laughable. For the love of god just stop with the tech trees. Again, an indie not getting it right is one thing, professionals having no idea how to balance one is another. Precursor spacefaring race "lore" is not innovative, or even fun. It's the most overused, predictable cliche in almost every space game. Colonies do not need physics. Destruction is one thing but why both SQUAD and IG decided that ground buildings need physics simulated is beyond me. Think long and hard on why players would want to go interstellar after the first time they do so. Interstellar flight is so far the ultimate challenge for space exploration, so what are players supposed to do after that? Life Support is obligatory, as is any other form of danger for real spaceflight. Between 11 and 5, those systems need to be interconnected to allow not just engineering challenges, but multiple solutions. If every system just resolves to "add part to not die" then it's not fun. I could probably think of more but I need to go to work.

Lmao @ some people acting like the game was free. $50 is $50 and most aren't seeing those back. Thankfully I didn't pay anywhere near that so I not only feel vindicated but can look back and laugh. Other people really don't have that luck.

Source? PD is already mostly occupied on their most recent launch and their upcoming project.

Writing as I watch so this is more a disorganized stream of consciousness: He should not have said the "you won't feel validated if you think the devs suck" and only 10 minutes later state how they were forced to hire juniors with no experience that didn't even play the first game. It's also very funny to see how it indeed was prohibited to ask the people that knew, much less consult with someone like HarvesteR. This also explains why they hit pretty much the exact same walls. It's HILARIOUS to me they might've pitched a re-engineering of the original game code with none or little knowledge of it and much less asking the people that worked on it about it. Talk about overpromising and underdelivering, something Uber was known for from previous titles. It was also really easy to guess that T2 really did see Kerbal as a golden egg goose, good to have confirmation. I still believe it was... until they absolutely ruined it by believing overpromising amateurs on their bid and then placing the dumbest restrictions upon them. Add Nate being a serial overpromiser, and them banning scott manley! It's like they took every step and precaution to set themselves up for failure. It's no wonder some of us saw them as completely arrogant when they refused or were prohibited to consult or ask anyone with a smidge of knowledge of the franchise, and then proceeded to make the same or worse mistakes. Continuing with hilarity. "This focus of visuals resulted in more fundamental design and gameplay decisions to take the back seat" AHAHAHA, as if the game looked any good. Yes, it has some modern fx and shaders, but to be a mess just to look like that? Incredible. "Nate believed the difficulty introduced by wobble would be necessary to have a fun game." Absolute clown. At least ShadowZone understands wobblyness in real rockets, even if he uses that to make a dumb case about "teaching engineering". No, enabling parts to clip into each other or otherwise exploding out of the blue does not teach engineering, it teaches cheesing. Couple that with the statement saying he was actively steering stuff away from realism specifically to dumb it down... yeah... no wonder. At this point (16 minutes) we arrive to the public reveal, yet there's no mention of any feature being complete even by the original Uber Entertainment, so either they did believe they could finish before the release, or they were already in the cycle of misleading that they had a full game when in reality they, at this point, had a bad frankenstein of KSP1. This is also known to be the point where the revolving door starts at, even after the transition from ST to IG. A revolving door filled with amateurs and juniors, hired under secrecy and now, we know also hired for minimum price. At last we also have confirmation that they were working with the original codebase ST was using, so pretty much another "I told you" to the clowns stating they magically started a new game from scratch after the merge. To further pile up on this, it seems I also was right on pointing out the "multiplayer build" we got screenshots from was indeed the original one, and not some magical new build they started after the merge. By minute 28 we get a second confirmation of this... They really didn't, at any point have a single one of the features developed. It's also a good warning story that, with multiplayer engineers being fired so early on... the long term product was dead long before these current days. My key takeaways, in comparison/opposition to SZ: Read the forums. It was impossible to miss what the community wanted... yet somehow T2 and then IG/PD/Nate did horribly. Early Access is for customer integration and feedback. If you don't care about feedback, then don't do Early Access. It seems we'll never get that font changed now... Dumb down accessibility, not the game itself. Games are hard because systems are most times loosely explained, or in the case of KSP1 have literally no explanation. Fix onboarding and you don't need to make everything inconsequentially easy to the point your game is a mediocre mess that elicits no emotional response. You can't make a product this complex with amateurs. You can't work on someone else's code without the ability to consult them... specially if it's the mess we know from KSP1. Stop using Unity. Unless you come out with something revolutionary, the public perception is always negative when you announce your project is in Unity, specially from a fanbase that's been dealing with its limitations and misuse for 10 years. Stop listening to Nate. KSP2 is dead.

Whilst I admire HarvesteR for what he did. He grew a little side project he was forced to do overtime at work if he wanted to progress on, to a massive behemoth that the literal biggest publisher in gaming wanted to purchase. On the other hand, it's also possible to recognize he wasn't the greatest at a lot of stuff. I still do firmly believe that if we give him an intercept-sized team, he'll have a much better vision than Paul Furio on the engineering side and Tom Vinita on the feature lead side. He knew the mess he made, and he definitely is the most informed person to not repeat it. In fact, not only has he not repeated the same mess, but also evolved its systems on a much better product which is Kithack. It'll forever be the shame of ST/Intercept that with probably nearly 10 times the budget and alleged professionals, they couldn't even make the first milestone without their "sequel" breaking down and getting their studio closed. On the other hand, KSP2 is unfixable, and even if you "fixed" it, it'll still be trapped in Unity, with the subpar joint physics that plagued 1. KSP2 has no fix other than being deleted.

From our position. For IG/PD/T2 it was, I'm pretty sure they thought, a golden egg goose with a very quick turn around and minimum budget for the numbers T2 oversees.

Sadly. Tom Vinita had similar roles on 4 other sub-mediocre games... Not sure I trust Rocketwerkz's version if they just shotgun hire everyone like this. I don't think whatever they'll say we'll ever get enough level of detail to justify the 2020-2023 mess, and their subpar performance after releasing the game regarding speed and quality.

And at the end of the day... 1% or 10% is still insufficient for what this game was supposed to sell by using a budget at least 10 times bigger, and streamlining dumbing it down for a wider audience, so either number is still a good enough argument to understand T2's decision of cancellation and to consider it a commercial failure that they might never touch again even if the economy granted them the possibility of infinite virtual money.