An Open Letter to Flying Tiger Entertainment

[KasperVld]

The glass is twice the size it needs to be at the moment. The question about whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on the future state of the liquid inside it...

You're proposing the glass has already increased in size while the liquid is still missing. At the moment though, I think the glass is still the original size and the liquid isn't here yet either. It is merely known that the size of the glass will increase in the future.

[federicoaa]

I'm not sure if I'd buy a copy for ps4, but sure I gladly beta-test it

[Hotaru]

If you do meet any half-full glasses, just make sure the bottom half is full before you get too close.

I think what you're calling pessimism, I'm calling pragmatism. "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst" and all that. I don't just vaguely expect good things to happen on their own, I hope they happen but I expect bad things so I can be prepared for them and deal with them. I'm happy when things turn out OK, and never too badly let down when they don't. It's a nice way to be.

In this case, I severely hope Squad has some concrete reason beyond blind optimism for giving the porting job to Flying Tiger!

[goldenpsp]

Ah Open letters, the playground of the audacious know it alls. How I love them.

Now with that out of the way, anyone who has been around awhile. Anyone who has read the history of how KSP came to be, would know that this game is a true labor of love. I truly believe that everyone involved in KSP is fully committed to the success of this game. Yes they have to pay the bills too. And no they haven't been perfect. But for now I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they don't want to see their own game go down in flames, and will do what it takes to keep that from happening.

[cantab]

A simple question about Flying Tiger. They don't exactly have a strong record working with consoles, but do they have a strong record with Unity? Do many of their mobile games run on Unity 5? If yes that's encouraging. If no it's a little worrying.

[Robotengineer]

How many times has Squad actually taken Kommunity advice on development and business strategy? AFAIK, never.

I think I've reached 'frankly, I don't give a damn.' status on Squad side development. Squad doesn't listen, or doesn't appear to listen, so why waste words?

[Kuu Lightwing]

How many times has Squad actually taken Kommunity advice on development and business strategy? AFAIK, never.

Implying that "Kommunity" (am I the only one who sees how stupid that word is?) knows better about development and business than a marketing company.

Edited August 29, 2015 by Kuu Lightwing

[Gaarst]

Implying that "Kommunity" (am I the only one who sees how stupid that word is?) knows better about development and business than a marketing company.

"Kommunity" knows better about what KSP is missing and what should be changed than Squad. Maybe not businessy things (even though, I'm sure there are some forum users that actually work in business) and maybe not development of the game itself (understand coding) (even though, blablabla, work in programmation), but for what the game should be like, we are the best to discuss what needs to be done

Edited August 29, 2015 by Gaarst
Added things

[Robotengineer]

Implying that "Kommunity" (am I only one who sees how stupid that word is) knows better about development and business than a marketing company.

Some people in the Community (I agree Kommunity sounds kind of stupid, ) may know better. It just seems like there were some decisions made that looked completely ridiculous from outside Squad, but they may have made perfect sense from within Squad. Marketing isn't my profession, so maybe it's my perspective that skews things.

[Izny]

Anyone who has read the history of how KSP came to be, would know that this game is a true labor of love. I truly believe that everyone involved in KSP is fully committed to the success of this game. Yes they have to pay the bills too. And no they haven't been perfect. But for now I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they don't want to see their own game go down in flames, and will do what it takes to keep that from happening.

So much this. I don't post much or often. And I don't like to post nothing besides a quote, but this one deserves some extra attention imo.

[wossname]

Why was this "Flying Tiger" company selected? It seems to be a very random choice to me.

[The_Rocketeer]

I don't see how porting to console can affect KSP for me. I'd never play it anywhere but on my desktop anyway. I surely can't be alone here.

As for what the community wants, that's not necessarily a wise way to develop a game. Feedback has it's place, but the community wouldn't exist at all if Squad hadn't already produced a solid product, and allowing the clamour of demands to heavily alter that product doesn't necessarily result in a better product. I mean, we'd all personally love a year without taxes, but we wouldn't love the resulting collapse of society.

[luizopiloto]

You're proposing the glass has already increased in size while the liquid is still missing. At the moment though, I think the glass is still the original size and the liquid isn't here yet either. It is merely known that the size of the glass will increase in the future.

There is no liquid... *hycup* I drank it all... *hycup*

[Kuu Lightwing]

Some people in the Community (I agree Kommunity sounds kind of stupid, ) may know better. It just seems like there were some decisions made that looked completely ridiculous from outside Squad, but they may have made perfect sense from within Squad. Marketing isn't my profession, so maybe it's my perspective that skews things.

Some people may think they know better. But still we don't know what's the actual reasoning is behind the decisions they make. For some reason Squad thinks the game should be released on consoles. They also say that PC version will not be harmed by that decision. I chose to trust them and don't worry much. I don't play consoles and don't really care about KSP on consoles, though.

Actually, what bothers me with all those advises is that the decision is already made, the contract with Flying Tiger is probably signed, and the development is started. What would you suggest? Break the contract, stop selling Death Sticks and rethink your life? I doubt that's how things work...

- - - Updated - - -

As for what the community wants, that's not necessarily a wise way to develop a game. Feedback has it's place, but the community wouldn't exist at all if Squad hadn't already produced a solid product, and allowing the clamour of demands to heavily alter that product doesn't necessarily result in a better product. I mean, we'd all personally love a year without taxes, but we wouldn't love the resulting collapse of society.

I heavily agree with that. Listening to feedback is important, but they always should have their own plan and guts to dismiss even a popular suggestion if they think that the game would be better without that.

[goldenpsp]

Why was this "Flying Tiger" company selected? It seems to be a very random choice to me.

Hmm. They very likely looked into a number of companies. Received quotes and checked into their portfolios and experiences and the picked a company that they felt could best do the job within the budget they had.

[Albert VDS]

How many times has Squad actually taken Kommunity advice on development and business strategy? AFAIK, never.

I think I've reached 'frankly, I don't give a damn.' status on Squad side development. Squad doesn't listen, or doesn't appear to listen, so why waste words?

There have been numerous patches and additions to KSP all coming from the community; suggested hot fixes after releases, mods incorporated into the game and a ton of suggestion from these forums.

Saying that Squad doesn't listen is quite unfair. Just because yours or others advice hasn't been publicly considered doesn't mean Squad ignores advice.

These comments and situations are reasons why a company like ID software doesn't have a forum, because some fans think they are they great messiah and bring perfection to the game.

Like Kuu Lightwing said; Squad is a marketing company who created material for companies like Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Samsung and Nissan.

How silly is it to think that some random guy on a forum has better knowledge to run a company.

[Robotengineer]

There have been numerous patches and additions to KSP all coming from the community; suggested hot fixes after releases, mods incorporated into the game and a ton of suggestion from these forums.

Saying that Squad doesn't listen is quite unfair. Just because yours or others advice hasn't been publicly considered doesn't mean Squad ignores advice.

These comments and situations are reasons why a company like ID software doesn't have a forum, because some fans think they are they great messiah and bring perfection to the game.

Like Kuu Lightwing said; Squad is a marketing company who created material for companies like Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Samsung and Nissan.

How silly is it to think that some random guy on a forum has better knowledge to run a company.

Note, Squad created marketing material for companies, AFAIK they hadn't created their own content before KSP. The marketing aspect of KSP has been great, the way the development has been handled is what I take issue with.

I might as well state what it is I take issue with the most, so here it is: The whole 1.0, no final beta kerfuffle. Sure, KSP may have sold more copies after 1.0, but was it release worthy? IMO, and in the opinions of many others, no. Four patches later the game still isn't in a finished state.

How silly it is to dismiss the counsel of people who have the best interests of your project in mind.

[marce]

There have been numerous patches and additions to KSP all coming from the community; suggested hot fixes after releases, mods incorporated into the game and a ton of suggestion from these forums.

Saying that Squad doesn't listen is quite unfair. Just because yours or others advice hasn't been publicly considered doesn't mean Squad ignores advice.

These comments and situations are reasons why a company like ID software doesn't have a forum, because some fans think they are they great messiah and bring perfection to the game.

Like Kuu Lightwing said; Squad is a marketing company who created material for companies like Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Samsung and Nissan.

How silly is it to think that some random guy on a forum has better knowledge to run a company.

Not to be unfair, but being a good marketing company does not at all indicate being any good at software development.

While games may be more on the creative side of the business (it's called "studio" for a reason) SE is still an engineering task requiring people with the right mindset and as much experience as possible to be done well.

They stacked up on some guys, but seem to be still far away (budget and staff wise) from being an efficently running professional software house.

I don't say the community is always right, but I know a few guys I strongly feel actually do know better than SQUAD in various aspects. Just to be clear: based on my limited experiences I do not see myself in this group!

Anyway, always keep in mind that SQUAD seemed to have the best intentions (before 0.9 at least) but, as they said themselves many times (“we do things differentlyâ€Â), don’t fully know what they are doing.

Based on this assumptions they did surprisingly well!

In my own, personal, inexperienced, irrelevant and biased opinion most decisions (not all!) since 0.25 - including the various ports announced - are short sighted and won't do the brand any good.

But I'm not in charge, so I'll lean back, get some popcorn and enjoy the show

@SQUAD: please do us all a favor and prove me wrong!

[DuoDex]

Well.

I suppose people said the same thing when Felipe started work on Kerbal Space Program. Personally, I have my doubts, but I've withheld them because I didn't think posting them would make one iota of difference. Saying "here's why you'll fail - but please don't" - I definitely to want to do my best now.

This thread, for what it is, is quite unnecessary. I expected better of the community than complaining about ports that a) have not been shown and have been highly praised by Squad staff.

Edited August 29, 2015 by DuoDex

[Robotengineer]

Well.

I suppose people said the same thing when Felipe started work on Kerbal Space Program. Personally, I have my doubts, but I've withheld them because I didn't think posting them would make one iota of difference. Saying "here's why you'll fail - but please don't" - I definitely to want to do my best now.

This thread, for what it is, is quite disgusting. I expected better of the community than whining about ports that a) have not been shown and have been highly praised by Squad staff.

And c) don't affect the PC version, at least not directly.

[Endersmens]

Well.

I suppose people said the same thing when Felipe started work on Kerbal Space Program. Personally, I have my doubts, but I've withheld them because I didn't think posting them would make one iota of difference. Saying "here's why you'll fail - but please don't" - I definitely to want to do my best now.

This thread, for what it is, is quite disgusting. I expected better of the community than whining about ports that a) have not been shown and have been highly praised by Squad staff.

I really don't consider the opening post whining. It was more concern than anything. Being skeptical and concerned is mostly a good thing.

As for what it's turned into, I can't say.

[Albert VDS]

I really don't consider the opening post whining. It was more concern than anything. Being skeptical and concerned is mostly a good thing.

Besides that it's full of assumptions, it's quite a condescending post. The worst part might even be "whether you're violating my first suggestion".

Calling a recipient incapable of doing their work properly(without proof), suggesting that they will release a half-baked port(without proof) and then end with a snarky remark and planely state they will fail, yes that's something everyone should respond to well right?

[basic.syntax]

A simple question about Flying Tiger. They don't exactly have a strong record working with consoles, but do they have a strong record with Unity? Do many of their mobile games run on Unity 5? If yes that's encouraging. If no it's a little worrying.

I think your question is answered in this article from HarvesteR about the collaboration.

...our moving to U5, which I think is fair to say is something everyone has been asking for quite a while, has been largely sped up by our collab with FlyingTiger...

... PS4 has its own set of tech requirements, and our 'eclectic' UI implementation was evidently not quite up to par with those reqs. For the past weeks then, we've been working on a total revision of the game's UI. Currently Jim (RomFarer), Mike (Mu) and DJ from FlyingTiger are assigned to that enormous undertaking.

On my end, I'm tasked with the shaders and physics side of the U5 upgrade. Shader-wise, we had a few broken ones here and there because of upgrade issues, which were for the most part easy to fix (DJ helped me out there a lot too, he had been plugging away at it while we were still in exp for the 1.0 release).

[Ryds]

Anyone that is a regular poster on this forum is obviously a pc ksp player, like myself. I've no intention at all of buying another copy so I can play it on ps4, absolutely none. It is a perfect game for pc so I don't understand why anyone here is so bothered about the console version. It will be the same game, who cares about a different version if you own it already?

- - - Updated - - -

...so, good luck to Flying Tiger and Squad. I genuinely hope you make the console version as good as the PC. But with that my interest ends. Really not sure why people are wasting time and hundreds of words speculating on something that they do not have a working knowledge of. Very poor thread.

[asheft]

Um... a couple of comments here. The primary arguments for why the ports will be successful seem to be: 1. Squad knows what's happening and we don't. 2. Squad has their standards of quality and won't let Flying Tiger release unless they have a release that is up to their standards (side note: I agree that it's kind of silly to blindly trust a pretty much unknown company to port a game to three platforms which they haven't worked with ever/in a long time, plus based on what I've read here even their games for the platforms that they are familiar with aren't exactly ones to brag about). 3. Squad thinks they're doing a good job. 4. The marketing people at Squad know much more than a huge community of people who want to see success of the game, and who also have many many different perspectives and ideas that might not occur to the relatively small Squad. 5. "Trust us. We know what we're doing" (this should really be #1, it's been their go-to argument for the last two or three announcements/releases).

Looking back on 0.90 and 1.0 with the advantage of hindsight, what do we see? First 0.90. We see a huge amount of skepticism from the community who cite many many reasons why it is going to beta too early and will be a buggy mess upon release. Squad reassures the community that they will make the final release (when it is released, after several beta releases) up to their standards, the people at Squad think that it will be a success, and we should trust them. 0.90 is released, there's some bugs, but whatever, beta is for bug-fixing so hopefully there will be a couple of beta releases to- oh, wait, they just announced 1.0. Within the span of about 4 months the entire beta plan went out the window, for the vague reason of "it's ready". The community is extremely skeptical, and again, they cite many many reasons why it's a bad idea. Squad basically shoots down everything with "We think it's ready, we think that it is progressing well, it'll be up to our standards, trust us. Oh and we'll also fix a ton of bugs even though we're also introducing massive new systems and features with not one beta to test them all out, but yeah, they'll all work fine and it will be mostly bug free." It's been a while since that announcement so my memory might be a little off, but my recollection is that they really didn't listen to what was being said (a lot of it was good advice!). 1.0 comes... and as far as I can tell the general consensus is that it was a good release, several bugs were fixed, and the new features are nice, but there were a lot of somewhat obvious bugs that could have been very easily caught and fixed by a 0.99 release (and instead were via 4 post release patches) and don't belong in a finished game. So, as far as the community can tell, this is the quality standard of Squad. This could clearly be very wrong, but that's the baseline that we all have to work with. And in the end, I think that the community was at least somewhat right, and at minimum a lot more right than Squad thought.

So yeah, I think that the community has a right to be skeptical, and I think that Squad should provide some kind of concrete evidence of the potential for a successful release rather than the vague "trust us" that they have been using for the last 6+ months. And I think that at least the consideration of some of the ideas on this forum would be beneficial. Personally, I care none about the console releases, but like others I would hate to see Squad's name soured by sub-standard releases for the consoles, and furthermore, I'm a little irritated to see the same arguments being used again and again.