25,000 copies sold (Steam)

[78stonewobble]

4 minutes ago, Ferio said:

It's been 5 years in development. I think it's very reasonable  to expect a better experience. Not like KSP1 but at least much better than the current state.

We don't know that it's been in 5 years of uninterrupted of problem free development. 

I don't think it's reasonable to expect "early access" to mean everything from:

A: Buggy (many bugs and possibly severe bugs), low performance (from some situations to all the time), lack of features and no guarantees. 

To:

B: Limited amount of bugs of limited severity, good performance (in all situations), plenty of features, guarantees of such things and nearly ready for full release.

And of course to have such a wide definition and thus expectations being dependent on time in development, number of employees, budget, what company owns what company and what not. 

Such a wide and ambiguous definition will only lead to consumer confusion and buyers regret.

Whereas defining "early access" as A, will lead to realistic expectations that adequately describe eg. KSP1's own early access, KSP2's early access and anything better is simply a bonus.  
 

[Niroc]

Just something to note. Earlier in the thread someone was asking if there was something between triple A and indie and I think the term you're looking for is double A which probably fits KSP2 best, it's not a indie title due to it having a publisher backing it and a fairly sizable team but it's not anywhere near triple A levels (which to my limited knowledge have hundreds if not thousands of people from possibly more then one studio working on a game) 

[rebel-1]

The development has already paid off on early access sales. You can close the project and count the money. Fans brought a mountain of money for the demo version of the game. Further refinement of the game does not make sense anymore. A waste of money.

[kerbiloid]

KSP-1 with mods or KSP-2 with bugs

Every top-end hardware owner decides on theirs own.

[Mantarochen]

12 minutes ago, rebel-1 said:

The development has already paid off on early access sales. You can close the project and count the money. Fans brought a mountain of money for the demo version of the game. Further refinement of the game does not make sense anymore. A waste of money.

I highly doubt that. With only around 40.000 sales, let's round to 50.000, without even taking the refunds into account, they made $2.5M before steam took a cut, before the marketing is paid, before they flew out people to ESA etc etc. 

 

At this stage they are nowhere near ROI. Someone on reddit calculated that this launch just covered about half a year in terms of development costs, just based on the average salaries and the team size.  

 

I might be wrong, and I hope so, because I don't want to see the game fail, even if I am highly critical to what they launched and the price. My best guess is that take 2 is gonna cut the losses in a few month if the sales don't recupe. But for that to happen they need to fix the game. And fast.

Edited February 28, 2023 by Mantarochen

[MarcAbaddon]

20 minutes ago, Niroc said:

Just something to note. Earlier in the thread someone was asking if there was something between triple A and indie and I think the term you're looking for is double A which probably fits KSP2 best, it's not a indie title due to it having a publisher backing it and a fairly sizable team but it's not anywhere near triple A levels (which to my limited knowledge have hundreds if not thousands of people from possibly more then one studio working on a game) 

You are probably thinking of my post, but I wasn't asking, but instead stating that there are things between indie and triple A. 

And I agree with your description, I was very surprised to read some people here consider KSP 2 to be an indie game. That's why I pointed out there are games in-between.

[LoSBoL]

1 minute ago, Mantarochen said:

I highly doubt that. With only around 40.000 sales, let's round to 50.000, without even taking the refunds into account, they made $2.5M before steam took a cut, before the marketing is paid, before they flew out people to ESA etc etc. 

 

At this stage they are nowhere near ROI. Someone on reddit calculated that this launch just covered about half a year in terms of development costs, just based on the average salaries and the team size.  

Check your staging, I mean numbers, estimated sales for KSP2 on steamspy alone exceeds 400.000 copies. 

[Niroc]

Yeah, Indie titles are called indie because they do not have a publisher behind them. (Thus the term independent) I think people sometimes generalize the term with any studio that isn't cranking out block buster titles like Call of Duty or Halo or any other big triple A title you want to throw around.   

Edit: Something else to add is that these terms are all very relative and nebulous at best. A big name publisher can crank out small titles that would be on the scale of an indie and some indie games get picked up by publishers and become major titles.  

Edited February 28, 2023 by Niroc

[MarcAbaddon]

1 minute ago, Mantarochen said:

I highly doubt that. With only around 40.000 sales, let's round to 50.000, without even taking the refunds into account, they made $2.5M before steam took a cut, before the marketing is paid, before they flew out people to ESA etc etc. 

 

At this stage they are nowhere near ROI. Someone on reddit calculated that this launch just covered about half a year in terms of development costs, just based on the average salaries and the team size.  

I think there's a huge uncertainty in terms of sales, since it was sold in 3 different platforms (I'd bet on Steam being the most common one though), and we don't even have solid numbers for Steam. There were also refunds, so who knows where they ended with - I could see sales being as high as very low 6 digit numbers myself, basically scratching 100k. 

But I agree that they definitely didn't get ROI on it yet.  

[Mantarochen]

2 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

Check your staging, I mean numbers, estimated sales for KSP2 on steamspy alone exceeds 400.000 copies. 

With an all time peak of 11.812 players on steam, I can pretty much say without a doubt that this is bullsh*t.  At least in terms of steam sales, the 400.000 figure is pure fantasy.

Edited February 28, 2023 by Mantarochen

[LoSBoL]

Just now, Mantarochen said:

With an all time peak of 11.812 players on steam, I can pretty much say without a doubt that this is repurposed bovine waste. 

I'd rather go by steams analytics then by someone's gut feeling. 

[Mantarochen]

2 minutes ago, MarcAbaddon said:

I think there's a huge uncertainty in terms of sales, since it was sold in 3 different platforms (I'd bet on Steam being the most common one though), and we don't even have solid numbers for Steam. There were also refunds, so who knows where they ended with - I could see sales being as high as very low 6 digit numbers myself, basically scratching 100k. 

But I agree that they definitely didn't get ROI on it yet.  

How do you get to these numbers? I mean like for real, no offense but the devs didn't publish anything (you can figure out yourself why) and every steam tracker on this planet, tells me that there were a max of 11.812 players in the game at the same time. 

With 2.179 playing right now. 

Do you think there would be only 2.000 players in the game right now when the sales scrape at the 6 figures mark?

 

[78stonewobble]

4 minutes ago, Mantarochen said:

With an all time peak of 11.812 players on steam, I can pretty much say without a doubt that this is bullsh*t.  At least in terms of steam sales, the 400.000 figure is pure fantasy.

It's early access, meaning bugs, low performance and a lack of features, all of which means people might get the game and play around with it a bit and then wait and come back to it after some updating has been done. Or at least that makes sense to me. 

I suspect people did the same thing with KSP1 during it's 4 years of early access: "What's in the newest update? Cool, but it's not quite there yet, I'll be back when X is fixed and/or Y is added."

[Mantarochen]

2 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

I'd rather go by steams analytics then by someone's gut feeling. 

https://steamcharts.com/app/954850

?

The game literally sits below Dota 2 in topsellers over the last 14 days, behind Fallout 76 , Company of heroes 3 and god knows what. 

https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/US

The 40.000 - 50.000 sales estimate won't be this far off. Or do you think 400.000 people buy the game to then not start it?

 

[Niroc]

Well remember that there's more then just Steam, they released it on Epic Games Store and their own site if I recall. 

[MarcAbaddon]

2 minutes ago, Mantarochen said:

How do you get to these numbers? I mean like for real, no offense but the devs didn't publish anything (you can figure out yourself why) and every steam tracker on this planet, tells me that there were a max of 11.812 players in the game at the same time. 

With 2.179 playing right now. 

Do you think there would be only 2.000 players in the game right now when the sales scrape at the 6 figures mark?

 

As I mentioned it's more towards my upper range. But we have 10k reviews on Steam, a 1:10 review rate is already very high.

Also, the peak was 25k according to SteamDB, not 12k. A 25000 concurrent player peak with 100k sales means that 1 in 4 buyers was buying at the same time, which is also high, but maybe possible on a release day. 

[Mantarochen]

Just now, Niroc said:

Well remember that there's more then just Steam, they released it on Epic Games Store and their own site if I recall. 

Yes. There are other possibilities to get the game. 

Since Epic games doesn't publish anything in terms of numbers and the DEVs won't for their own site, Steam is the next best data source. 

Besides steam being by far the most popular with the most people on the platform. 

 

KSP2 was in the Top 10 most wishlisted games on steam. It peaked below 30.000 players. So there is no way in hell the game has above 100.000 copies sold on Steam. 

Even if you'd account for half the people buying, but not even starting the game. 

[LoSBoL]

9 minutes ago, Mantarochen said:

https://steamcharts.com/app/954850

?

The game literally sits below Dota 2 in topsellers over the last 14 days, behind Fallout 76 , Company of heroes 3 and god knows what. 

https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/US

The 40.000 - 50.000 sales estimate won't be this far off. Or do you think 400.000 p

9 minutes ago, Mantarochen said:

 

 

 

https://steamdb.info/app/954850/charts/

Link from OP, scroll down to 'owner estimations' 

Edited February 28, 2023 by LoSBoL

[Mantarochen]

6 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

https://steamdb.info/app/954850/charts/

Link from OP, scroll down to 'estimated owners' 

The metric they use to calculate ownership by just multiplying Steam reviews x20 - x50 might work with some COD or City Builder game where people leave reviews because they always do. 

KSP2 has an absurd amount of reviews by people who vented because the release was a disaster and people who review the game with "don't listen to the haters" as review. 

Everyone and their mum left a review on the KSP2 store page. Completly inflating the numbers this site uses to calculate the "estimated owners" statistic.

 

 

This graphic tells an entirely different story. 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Mantarochen

[MarcAbaddon]

Those estimates are often not working well just after release, depending on the methods used. The site you link even has a disclaimer to that effect.

[LoSBoL]

3 minutes ago, Mantarochen said:

KSP2 has an absurd amount of reviews by people who vented because the release was a disaster and people who review the game with "don't listen to the haters" as review. 

GameSpy poles Api's

4 minutes ago, Mantarochen said:

This graphic tells an entirely different story. 

Yes, your story, but that's just a story, not analytics

[Mantarochen]

5 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

GameSpy poles Api's

Yes, your story, but that's just a story, not analytics

Ehm what? I mean copium is hell of a drug but what else are these numbers other than statistics?

That is literally the entire point of that picture. You can find the same numbers on the official Steam charts page, just not displayed as fancy. 

 

To confirm your point about the sales numbers the site is okay, even if the site says that the values are probably not correct, because the game just launched, as @MarcAbaddon said, but if I use the same site to display current player numbers, the site isn't a real statistics site? 

Aha, okay. 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Mantarochen

[Sequence]

I've been running KSP2 directly from the executable to bypass the launcher, so steam won't show my activity anymore. I bet I'm not the only one doing this.

[Gargamel]

A number of posts have been removed.   There is no reason to bicker or get personal on these forums.    Please keep it civil.   

[LoSBoL]

36 minutes ago, Mantarochen said:

Ehm what? I mean copium is hell of a drug but what else are these numbers other than statistics?

 

Last post on the subject

Those numbers are indeed, statistics, not copium or personal guestimates. And like I said before, Steamspy does API polling;

"Estimates are made based on the API polling user profiles from Steam to determine what software titles (primarily video games) they own and using statistics to estimate overall sales. Software developers have reported that Galyonkin's algorithms can provide sales numbers that are accurate to within 10%, though Galyonkin cautions against using his estimates in financial projections and other business-critical decisions."

Good thing we aren't the ones needing to do financial projections or business-critical decisions.