How Squad could have prevented the entire PS4 fallout

[Zucal]

I think the world ended today.

Time to start looting and rampaging, then!

[Yakuzi]

So much this. There was no preventing the "fallout", no matter how well and clearly communicated the message was. People were going to say the sky was falling one way or another, the old PC vs console thing would rear its head, and people would complain about the details of how the port was being made. Some members of the community get up in arms about *any* announcement, no matter how good the news is or how well it's communicated.

Yes, there will always be people that will be outraged about any change. However, that doesn't mean the recent "incident" could have been largely prevented if the following chain of events would have been different:

1. KSP players are anxiously awaiting an update for KSP 1.0.x to solve some critical issues in the current/released version

2. Devnotes are coming up, after 2 weeks of slow news people are eagerly awaiting anything new

3. KasperVld starts hyping dev notes, which will be late but with in.cre.di.ble news

4. As one can expect by now, the KSP player base (composed largely non-console players, please correct me if I'm wrong) gets extremely hyped up

5. Devnotes are posted... not much dev or notes, only a marketing announcement

6. Squad doesn't supply any additional information. Players are confused particularly since it now seems development===PS4, whereas many issues (including several critical ones) still exist in the current=released version.

7. Mayhem ensues

8. Max and Kasper try to control the damage to no avail, finally Harv posts an article a day later on KSP development and several details and potential implications of the PS4 port.

Had the proper devnotes been posted before (i.e. Harv's article), with the appropriate details on a PS4 port, or if the PS4 announcement had been posted in the announcement section (seems kinda logical) without any falsely advertised dev note hype, I'm sure the community's reaction would have been a lot more nuanced (apart from the eternal whiners mentioned by RIC above).

The point is, promotional stuff or anything not directly related to development of KSP the game does not belong in the dev section. Max himself said that he's not a dev so give him his own section (Merchandise Mondays^tm?) where he can hype up all the "amazing stuff he's working on" without the false dev advertisements leading on the community.

TL;DR PR is important for any company. Squad please look into improving your PR and communication... promotional stuff/marketing is not PR.

EDIT1: I also fully agree with the OP

EDIT2: Additionally, a 1.0.3 quickfix for the memory leak would've been nice

Edited June 19, 2015 by Yakuzi

[Robotengineer]

TL;DR PR is important for any company. Squad please look into improving your PR and communication... promotional stuff/marketing is not PR.

Great point, some of us think that because Squad is a marketing company, they should have good/decent PR, so we get our expectations to high when they have poor PR in reality.

[TheMoonRover]

Fallout? That's news to me. What happened this time?

There's a link in the original announcement (on the forums at least) to an article which clearly explains that the PS4 version would not hinder development for the Windows/Mac/Linux versions, in fact quite the opposite where Unity 5 is concerned. So is the "fallout" all because of people not reading the article and assuming otherwise?