Lost Sale Here!

[Zoidos]

On 4/28/2016 at 7:43 AM, ghost_sox said:

Hello,

I created this forum account to voice my thoughts to SQUAD about Kerbal Space Program's price.

I watched videos of this game.   I have played the demo.   I saw the price was $23.00 on Steam.   I said "OK,  I'm going to get this on my pay day."      After  pay day,  I come back and it's $40.00???!!!!   REALLY???    I was all kinds of ready to shell out the $23.00!   I would even pay $29.00....     So,  let me get this straight....  you nearly DOUBLE the price after the update 1.1  (the price was always in the $20.00 to $25.00 range, I had been watching).   I wouldn't get DOUBLE the game would I?   I doubt it.    So you want double the money and without doubling the game content.  Not from me,  not today.    

You have lost this sale,  and my son's sale,   as well as my flight sim addicted father's sale.    This game is not worth $40.00 as it sits now and Squad knows it!

A very disappointed lost customer.   Put the price back to ~25 and I'll buy but until then,  see ya....

I bought this game for 37 EUR when it was still in Alpha. Never regretted buying it, still one of my favorites after 1 1/2 years. There are a lot of games that leech on their prequels, suck really really bad and cost a lot more (looking at you, Anno 2205 and Simcity 2013). 

3 days later I bought a copy for a friend for 17 USD in Steam Christmas Sale. And another copy for another friend later on for 23 USD. Just wait for some sale, you'll get it for less.

BTW, if you look at the prices for computer games, 40 bucks is not that terribly much with games in the 80+ USD pricerange. Not to mention subscriptions and DLC packs (2 things SQUAD will never make you pay for).

[Zoidos]

2 hours ago, Accelerando said:

I mean, I'm not saying I want to forego rocket construction (although having more stock vehicles that actually do something would be nice). Procedurally generated vehicles, if anything, would be my jam - procedurally generated NPC actors that you can interact with/work with.

But the point I was getting at is that people are billing KSP as this enormously complex game so full of content that it is entirely due to Squad that they are pouring hundreds of hours of time into the game. What I am saying is that SQUAD has significantly less to do with this than is being assumed.

What SQUAD does is provide you with is maybe 100 rocket parts and a small assortment of planets with extremely bland surfaces, such that you can barely tell any landing site from any other, and none of them are particularly interesting to look at. They set the orbital trajectories of the planets, and the heights of their atmospheres, if any. And they provide a movement engine for your rockets to go places in. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing in itself. But it's not a very large amount of content, it's definitely not a management sim game, and I definitely would sympathize with people not wanting to pay $40 for it. The vast majority of the content that makes the game interesting is the ships and vehicles players build by themselves. And if you want to do anything particularly interesting with them aside from "go places" or "dock", you have to download mods created by other players.

And yes, I agree that a large part of "the point" of games like these is for players to build their own spacecraft/vehicles/whatever! I love that aspect! But SQUAD provides absolutely nothing to do with your creations aside from going places or docking. And while learning how to do this is difficult/complicated, that isn't due to SQUAD's careful game design, it's due to physics!

That's what I wanted to get at, in essence. So again, I'd definitely sympathize with someone not wanting to pay a 2x jacked up price for a very small update to a game that is largely featureless if you consider SQUAD's contribution, and thus the portion of the gameplay that you are paying money for. People are talking about the game as though the hundreds of hours of enjoyment they got out of it were entirely due to SQUAD, but I don't think that this is true. It's like saying that you would be okay with paying someone else $500 for a ball peen hammer because of all the things that you can build with it using your own time and your own effort.

----

----

So with that said, yes, I would personally like there to be some kind of management aspect. The most defining aspect of management/strategy sim games, IMO, is that you have a lot of units (spacecraft modules, people, etc) that can interact with each other to produce novel situations that you must deal with. KSP right now has none of that. Your Kerbals don't serve any purpose other than to be cute impediments to your spacecraft's stabilization system. Your mining bases don't serve any purpose other than to refuel your ships to keep going somewhere else.

What I'd like is at least something akin to the Kolonization mod, where you have to manage resources across multiple long-term bases. But in the long run I'd like to actually have to... manage a space program.

1. Give Kerbals some degree of AI so they can do things without your direct command. Let Kerbals control and auto-manage spacecraft systems, and let them have basic personalities so they can be happy or satisfied or angry and they can help you out or revolt against their dire condition and mess things up.
2. Make it so that you actually have to take care of the health of your crew, and plan strategies for exploring and inhabiting the solar system that involve more than one spacecraft at a time without requiring you to constantly, exhuastingly switch around between ships and fiddle intricately with the flight controls of every single unit for minutes or hours at a time. Don't force me to build gigantic space stations piece by piece all by myself! There is nothing interesting to me about launching a payload to Kerbin orbit or rebuilding a booster for the fifteen thousandth time. Let me focus on building and launching the actual modules that do interesting things.
3. Make science actually interesting. There's nothing fun to me about clicking on some boxes to make a money counter called "science" tick up. Implement some actual science in the game if you're going to have it at all - collecting and recording observational data, and using it to make decisions that actually matter to your space program. Let my scientists refine their analyses and models of planetary/asteroid surfaces based on spectrometric data and sample collection missions. Let me share my results easily with other players so we can cross-reference and compare techniques. To make this interesting, I think to some extent the planets and asteroids will need to be seed-generated so that no two players can use the exact same results, but they will use the same techniques.
4. Make management actually interesting, too. Counting money isn't strategy in itself. There needs to be deadlines (or at least people to keep from dying), there needs to be catches, there needs to be NPC characters or factions who can actually get angry with you if you mess things up, and impose or threaten restrictions on you in a way that's meaningful to the other aspects of gameplay and the requirements of your hardware and your Kerbals.
5. And in the long run, let your Kerbals and space habitats develop their own dynamic community/economy and squabble amongst themselves. You don't need to simulate down to nose hairs - you can have Kerbals with a handful of stats and personality traits, and that's sufficient to allow for a wide range of interesting interactions. Likewise with habitats and economic interaction.

Flying rockets is nice, but I don't just want to fly rockets to places where there's nothing else to do.

This isn't to say that the way KSP is right now is necessarily bad or unfun. But once you've exhausted the challenge supplied by Kepler and Newton, there is not much else to it unless you want to do self-imposed challenges. I've squeezed out about all the fun I can from that. I don't think people ought to have to pay $40 for that experience when the game has already sold so well.

I'm sorry, but then you have the wrong game. KSP is a game where you build rockets and fly them to other planets. What SQUAD contributes to it is the platform, a physics sandbox where you can create your own rockets and rovers and space stations and planetary bases. The things you have listed are simply out of scope for this game concept. Also, I don't think it's fair to deny that the game has not improved much in the past years. A lot of people have put an insane amount of effort, time and creativity into this game and this clearly shows. 

Also, you mentioned that you have exhausted the possibilities that keep this game interesting for you - how many hours have you spent with it until you realized that? 

It's a simple calculation: How much have I paid for how many hours of enjoyment? KSP will score easily waaaay waaaaaaay higher than most titles from mainstream publishers. 

 

PS: I hope this does not come over too harsh, I don't mean to offend you or disrespect your opinion (just in case this got lost in translation).

[fourfa]

I understand all the opinions here; I don't think anyone is being ridiculous.  Just wanted to say that this is hands down the best $40 I ever spent.

[SpaceplaneAddict]

I did kinda sorta pay around $53-$55CAD fr the ame, considering it well worth it if you like spaceflight.

[SpaceplaneAddict]

On 2016-04-28 at 7:01 AM, ghost_sox said:

(snipperooo)

Sad to see that. I do understand your point of view, and yeah, i have also had those bugs. Sorry to see you found the negative part of this community, we're usually better than this, right guys?!

Anyway, have fun with KSP, whatever you will do in it.
*Determination.

[AbacusWizard]

On 4/30/2016 at 11:49 PM, Accelerando said:

I find that this is true of most indie "sandbox" games advertised for their openness to creativity: the catch being that YOU (and/or the modding community) have to create most of the actually functioning content yourself.

Well, yes. I spend most of my KSP time designing rockets and then flying the rockets I designed. I spend most of my Dwarf Fortress time digging out a stronghold of my own design. I spend most of my Factorio time building a factory and using it to produce resources with which I build more factory.

However, I usually call these activities "playing the game."

[DoctorDavinci]

59 minutes ago, AbacusWizard said:

Well, yes. I spend most of my KSP time designing rockets and then flying the rockets I designed. I spend most of my Dwarf Fortress time digging out a stronghold of my own design. I spend most of my Factorio time building a factory and using it to produce resources with which I build more factory.

However, I usually call these activities "playing the game."

I read this and the tea I was drinking sprayed out my nose lol ... fantastic

[ExtremeSquared]

On 4/29/2016 at 0:04 AM, ghost_sox said:

...CRASH TO DESKTOP within THE FIRST HOUR and you call that WORTH  $40.00???   Yer nuts   The game is no where near worth full price and...

We should be honest with ourselves here. The beta testing nature of this game is something that should be better advertised to new buyers. We were ready to deal with it. Not everyone is.

[Hodari]

11 minutes ago, ExtremeSquared said:

We should be honest with ourselves here. The beta testing nature of this game is something that should be better advertised to new buyers. We were ready to deal with it. Not everyone is.

Is it really any different from any other game out there these days?  Used to be, you'd buy a game and that was it.  Either the game worked and you enjoyed it when it was first released...or not.  Today, people expect games to include constant updates, new content, bug fixes, and rebalancing for the lifetime of the game.  The downside to that is that sometimes when they try to fix one thing, the developers will break something else instead.  But that is hardly unique to KSP.

[ExtremeSquared]

Yes. It's well below average in polish and stability. It's so above average in fun and innovation that it's easy to lose sight of this fact.
Edit: Then again, I don't play that many video games any more, so it's possible that stability standards have gone downhill over the past few years.

Edited May 1, 2016 by ExtremeSquared

[steve_v]

11 minutes ago, Hodari said:

Is it really any different from any other game out there these days?  Used to be, you'd buy a game and that was it.  Either the game worked and you enjoyed it when it was first released...or not.  Today, people expect games to include constant updates, new content, bug fixes, and rebalancing for the lifetime of the game.  The downside to that is that sometimes when they try to fix one thing, the developers will break something else instead.  But that is hardly unique to KSP.

Speaking only for myself, I have never had any expectation of "constant updates, new content, or rebalancing". Fixes for old bugs or newly introduced bugs are a different story.
I fondly recall the days when you bought a game, installed and played it - with no game breaking bugs and no hot-fixes (it's hard to release patches on floppy disks) If it didn't work on release day you threw it in the trash and moved on.

Today, developers expect customers  to put up with constant updates, new bugs, bungled bug fixes, buggy third-party game engines and rebalancing for the lifetime of the game.

13 minutes ago, ExtremeSquared said:

Yes. It's well below average in polish and stability. It's so above average in fun and innovation that it's easy to lose sight of this fact.

Indeed, I'd never knock KSP for a lack of innovation or "fun". Most of the time the fun outweighs the bugs and performance problems... But it's not early access any more, and it's a stand-alone "complete" game, not a Unity tech-demo. These constant game-engine issues need to stop now.

----

I can't really agree on the "KSP is too expensive" drift of this thread, but I will say that IMO the move from 0.90 to 1.0 most certainly didn't justify doubling the price. All 1.0 really did was implement a few things mods did better already and introduce more bugs.
So far, aside from partially addressing some long-bemoaned performance issues, the main takeaway from 1.1.x appears to be even more new bugs.

[Pecan]

17 hours ago, Accelerando said:

...

So with that said, yes, I would personally like there to be some kind of management aspect.

...

 

Thank you, that all makes sense now (I summarise your points as "Squad have made a simulator with parts, physics and planets but the only interest/challenge is in using those parts to master the physics, not in any management or 'tycoon' style gaming content."  Kick me if I've still misundertood).  Squad have always said they wanted to make a 'tycoon style' game and, yes, I've always thought the very weak point of KSP is the career-mode that's meant to provide that management aspect.
Personally, I'm content with sandbox but I think your observations are well grounded.

PS: To the OP - hardly anyone's commented on the comment about 64-bit crashing all the time.  That only happened with the pre-1.1 versions, where 64-bit wasn't even officially supported, because of Unity 4, didn't it?  I've certainly had no problems with it since 1.1 (but haven't tried 1.1.x).

[suicidejunkie]

For me, KSP is the second best value for money spent on a game.  (Including the cost of buying gift copies for others)

It is only second, because it hasn't had a full decade to amortize the cost over like Space Empires IV did, and I don't have quite as much free time.

 

 

[sal_vager]

This thread, probably more than any other recently, shows how good a community we have here.

Pinned for TOTM May.

[NeoMorph]

On 30/04/2016 at 7:49 AM, Accelerando said:

Just because you got your money's worth doesn't mean it's absolutely necessary that other people accept a nearly doubly jacked-up price tag on a still-unfinished product (no matter what they crank the version number up to), especially when the primary reason that you get so much playtime out of the game is because you and your fellow players put massive amounts of work and time into creating and testing almost everything you can interact with aside from the buildings and rather featureless planets.

Let me ask you about Lego sets. That is basically a simplified brick system. How much does one kit cost... AND YOU HAVE TO PUT IT TOGETHER YOURSELF...

Yup, Lego is very basic and all that is is plastic part which you have to assemble (just like KSP)... yet it costs loads more compared to KSP. If you want to add more to your first Lego model you have to buy more kits... and more... and more. With KSP you just download mods from the community. You don't just get part packs from the community, you get utilities too. AND you can make your own, if you so choose. I guess you could 3D print lego blocks but they would be poor copies at best. So which is the best value for money here? KSP or Lego?

KSP is fun, cheap to expand on, and educational. Yes, Squad haven't finished it yet but that is because they are constantly improving on it. It's like complaining that World of Warcraft or Eve Online isn't exactly the same as it was on day one. Or maybe why was ANY game given a sequel. Squad wants to give us the best possible game. Most games are going for $40-$60 now (including Lego games). Previous price for KSP was the early access price and if you missed that then it was really your own fault for not buying it then. I've kicked myself for missing sales before now but I didn't blame the ones selling the item. It's my fault for not buying it at the lower price.

I personally like the game. If you find it too expensive you could just stay with the demo until you can afford it. There is still a demo, isn't there?

 

Edit: P.s... I love Lego too heh.

Edited May 1, 2016 by NeoMorph

[Andem]

Just going to say, in my family,we have agreed to limit our total internet spending to $150 a month. If we want something that goes over that price, we save the money until the next month rolls around. I would wait three years to get Kerbal Space Program, and is by far one of the best games out there, competing with Portal, Subnautica, and the original Legend of Zelda.

[Hobbes Novakoff]

On April 30, 2016 at 1:00 PM, Accelerando said:

But the point I was getting at is that people are billing KSP as this enormously complex game so full of content that it is entirely due to Squad that they are pouring hundreds of hours of time into the game.

I dunno. Thanks to SQUAD's physics engine, wide selection of parts, and (to a lesser extent) excellent modding support, in the 3 years I've owned KSP, I've:

• Flown air races (Stock)
• Done plane stunts, while humming the theme from Top Gun (Stock)
• Launched Mercury missions (Stock)
• Reenacted Apollo 11 (Stock)
• Explored planets (Stock)
• Launched scanning satellites (Stock)
• Driven a boat (Stock)
• Driven a submarine (Stock)
• Built a space station (Stock)
• Blown up a space station (Stock)
• Destroyed an interplanetary battleship (Modded)
• Filmed a scene for a documentary (seriously)
• Made a cinematic (Modded)
• Had massive 5v5 jet battles (Modded)
• Flown through a canyon at Mach 3 (Stock)
• Blown up during atmospheric entry (Stock)
• Blown up during atmospheric exit (Stock)
• Attacked an enemy airbase (Mod)
• Commanded a fighter squadron (Mod)
• Picked up the wreckage of a friend's plane (Mod)
• Built a base on the Mun (Stock)
• Built a base on Minimus (Stock)
• Crashed a rover during an ill-advised rocket jump (Stock)
• Flown around with a jetpack (Stock)
• Climbed a building (Stock)
• Jumped off a building (Stock)
• Landed a plane on Kerbin (Stock)
• Landed a plane on Minimus (Stock)
• Built an interplanetary vessel, in space (Stock)
• Flown a plane from Minimus back to Kerbin (Stock)
• Mined for ore (Stock)
• Nuked the KSC (Stock)
• Done more stuff that I can't remember (Mostly stock)

Let's compare that with, say, Call Of Duty:

• Shot people
• Shot zombies
• Shot cars
• Blown up people
• Blown up cars
• Blown up zombies
• That's basically it

Which game has more content?

 

[Camacha]

On 29/04/2016 at 9:04 AM, ghost_sox said:

Ok,  Purchased yesterday.....   Glad I only paid $23.99 and here's why....

Within the first hour of downloading the game from Steam with the Humble Bundle Steam key...  I was putting a fin on the base of my third rocket in career mode,  after clicking the fin into place..  POOF!   My desktop appears.   The game just vanished...    CRASH TO DESKTOP within THE FIRST HOUR and you call that WORTH  $40.00???   Yer nuts   The game is no where near worth full price and all you  fan boys need to get into reality

Wif

Calling people fanboys like that seems unfair. I bought this game in a much rougher state than you did. The demo seemed fun, but I was not entirely convinced. I had to endure a lot of imperfections and major flaws that have since been polished to a mirror finish. Yet I played, and played and then played some more. You know what I did next? I bought a copy for a friend, who did the exact same thing. Then we both played.

If you expect a game to be flawless, you would better sell your computer. Even AAA titles that will cost you 60 dollars will need extensive patching to be somewhat playable, without even coming near the replay value of KSP. If you expect a game to be fun, however, well now - you have hit the mother lode. Jackpot. A black hole for free time. Whatever description you fancy.

If I am totally honest, KSP has grown into a mature game. Pretending it is still some shaky prototype is unrealistic at best.

Edited May 3, 2016 by Camacha

[hieywiey]

General Rule of Thumb:

1. Get KSP

 

K. Kerman asks:         

Well, There's this thing called The Steam Summer Sale , and it's happening soon

 

Okay, What's so special about it?

This:

 

 

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Today's Lesson:

Get KSP now or suffer The Wrath of Jebediah™.

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The Wrath of Jebediah™ is exclusively available from Jeb's Junkyard. Jebediah B. Kerman, a.k.a. Jebediah "Booster" Kerman, is NOT responsible for any damages related to The Wrath of Jebediah™ or The Kraken™. The Kraken™ is a registered trademark of MOAR BOOSTERS Inc. MOAR BOOSTERS Inc. is owned by J. Kerman.  BadS = true

 

Edited May 11, 2016 by hieywiey