Where are the devs?

[coyotesfrontier]

Normally on a game launch you expect the developers to be active on social media during the time after the game's release, constantly responding to users, helping out, talking about features, etc.

For KSP2 there was a large amount of posts by developers right before release, but now .....nothing. 

Where is everybody?

[LoSBoL]

There is a Dutch saying that applies here, sit still when being shaved. 

On a sidenote I hope they are working their bottoms off creating a 1st day patch, which is late already. 

Edited February 27, 2023 by LoSBoL

[J.Random]

22 minutes ago, coyotesfrontier said:

Where is everybody?

Working on an update, hopefully. Definitely not swimming in a Scrooge-McDuckian money vault. I think.

Edited February 27, 2023 by J.Random

[dr.phees]

Probably getting a leg chewed off by Take 2 as well. They will have quite some meetings going through possible futures. I guess at best we will see some restaffing, at worst there will be some small quick updates and then KSP will be put on a very small burner or sold off or simply dropped.

[tstein]

38 minutes ago, coyotesfrontier said:

Normally on a game launch you expect the developers to be active on social media during the time after the game's release, constantly responding to users, helping out, talking about features, etc.

For KSP2 there was a large amount of posts by developers right before release, but now .....nothing. 

Where is everybody?

I hope they  not only do nto get into social media but do nto touch their cell phones for  several weeks until they  fix this.

[Periple]

In this kind of situation the absolute last thing you want is your devs to be on the socials. It's soul-crushingly demoralizing. It'll easily kill productivity for weeks. That's why studios have community managers, they're paid to be in the front line taking all the rage.

You want the devs to get off the socials, focus on the positive, and then get cracking on the highest-priority issues. When things start turning around, then you get back on the socials. 

Also: socials matter FAR less than fans believe, and short-term social storms matter even less. The place I work in has had its share of bad publicity and its effect on sales has been undetectable. For a current high-profile example, look at Hogwarts Legacy -- totally destroyed on social media and a lot of reviews, but breaking sales records left and right.

Ultimately the game will stand or fall on its own merits, and for something like KSP2, that will only be determined much later than the first week of EA. If KSP2 loses the YouTubers and won't see them coming back, that would be worrying. 

[RayneCloud]

9 minutes ago, Periple said:

In this kind of situation the absolute last thing you want is your devs to be on the socials. It's soul-crushingly demoralizing. It'll easily kill productivity for weeks. That's why studios have community managers, they're paid to be in the front line taking all the rage.

You want the devs to get off the socials, focus on the positive, and then get cracking on the highest-priority issues. When things start turning around, then you get back on the socials. 

Also: socials matter FAR less than fans believe, and short-term social storms matter even less. The place I work in has had its share of bad publicity and its effect on sales has been undetectable. For a current high-profile example, look at Hogwarts Legacy -- totally destroyed on social media and a lot of reviews, but breaking sales records left and right.

Ultimately the game will stand or fall on its own merits, and for something like KSP2, that will only be determined much later than the first week of EA. If KSP2 loses the YouTubers and won't see them coming back, that would be worrying. 

All of this. Community Managers are the face, the liason, and the punching bag. It's our job to take the hits, to relay what isn't just noise and what's valid to the team so they can dig in and get to work. It's our job to protect their morale, and to be the messenger to the community. I don't want them on socials. I want them taking a break over the weekend, and then getting to work today. I also don't want them crunching and pulling 12+ hour days, but ya know, that stuff happens in our industry.

Edited February 27, 2023 by RayneCloud

[Monger]

It's been weekend, and hopefully they are busy browsing through the feedback now. 

[mgzsman06]

I'm certain the devs are hard at work and as they said 'within a few weeks' we'll hopefully see a patch to a vast majority of the game breaking issues. Perhaps they'll enable aero effects, reentry and autostrut too 

[Tazooka]

3 minutes ago, mgzsman06 said:

I'm certain the devs are hard at work and as they said 'within a few weeks' we'll hopefully see a patch to a vast majority of the game breaking issues. Perhaps they'll enable aero effects, reentry and autostrut too 

We can hope!

I'd rather the bugs get fixed before aero effects, reentry and autostrut though. It's game breaking sometimes

[mgzsman06]

Just now, Tazooka said:

We can hope!

I'd rather the bugs get fixed before aero effects, reentry and autostrut though. It's game breaking sometimes

Very, very very true. I'm just hoping that they chose that wording to allow them a few weeks to do as much as possible without being too stressed. It would be nice to fix the bugs and people would be less annoyed, but releasing those not long afterwards would be a good idea since its supposedly already been worked on before we got it and would be neat to see finally lol 

[Tazooka]

3 minutes ago, mgzsman06 said:

Very, very very true. I'm just hoping that they chose that wording to allow them a few weeks to do as much as possible without being too stressed. It would be nice to fix the bugs and people would be less annoyed, but releasing those not long afterwards would be a good idea since its supposedly already been worked on before we got it and would be neat to see finally lol 

Game devs these days either do small updates/patches regular and often

Or, what appears to be our case,  larger and incrementally

I guess it depends on the studio and publisher

[kerbiloid]

Sitting in the corporative dungeon, working and awaiting for the day-after-tomorrow piece of bread.
Still not worked off enough for the hatch to be opened for some light and air.
This cruel world of profit and capital...

***

Could be drinking after the day-before-yesterday event, but unlikely everyone. So, probably the first.

[The Aziz]

Launching anything on Friday is.. questionable, to say the least, because as game dev you're facing a flood of feedback after the weekend. Unless you stayed at work.

 But I have seen community managers popping up here and there few times already, so they're with us.

[Ferio]

2 hours ago, coyotesfrontier said:

Normally on a game launch you expect the developers to be active on social media during the time after the game's release, constantly responding to users, helping out, talking about features, etc.

For KSP2 there was a large amount of posts by developers right before release, but now .....nothing. 

Where is everybody?

Clear red flag as it already was before.

5 years in development, delay after delay, rarely any updates and an EA that is purely for funding. I wouldn't be surprised if the plug is pulled out sooner or later.

[RayneCloud]

4 minutes ago, Ferio said:

Clear red flag as it already was before.

5 years in development, delay after delay, rarely any updates and an EA that is purely for funding. I wouldn't be surprised if the plug is pulled out sooner or later.

I don't even have the energy to explain to you why this is just wrong and incredibly unhelpful. They wont pull the plug on this. 

[Ferio]

Just now, RayneCloud said:

I don't even have the energy to explain to you why this is just wrong and incredibly unhelpful. They wont pull the plug on this. 

Well, I hope you are right. Love KSP1.

[RayneCloud]

Just now, Ferio said:

Well, I hope you are right. Love KSP1.

So do I. 

[Periple]

52 minutes ago, Ferio said:

5 years in development, delay after delay, rarely any updates and an EA that is purely for funding. I wouldn't be surprised if the plug is pulled out sooner or later.

Since @RayneCloud doesn't have the energy (and I don't blame her, these narratives are sticky -- narratives that are simple, compelling, and wrong often are), I'll try to explain why it's very wrong.

"5 years in development" – that sounds pretty normal for a game this size and this complex. The thing with KSP (1 and 2) is that they do a lot of stuff that most games just don't do. If you're making, say, a driving game, a first-person shooter, or an open-world aRPG, you're dealing with a known quantity. The engines are made to support just that kind of game. There's still a ton of stuff to do but it's all known problems with known solutions.

KSP2 needs stuff like precise time-warpable orbital mechanics, multiplayer that takes into account that players may be in different timelines, and even very basic assumptions don't hold. For example, consider the angst about the clouds. It is true that game engines make it pretty easy to design beautiful clouds. The thing is that they're predicated on the assumption that the clouds live in a skybox somewhere at optical infinity. That's not the case for KSP when you can fly right through them and away into the cosmos, until you reach another planet with different clouds. Because you can't "just add clouds" like the game engine expects, you have to come up with a custom solution. That takes time and is hard to estimate and may go wrong in unexpected ways. Ditto for precise and stable orbital mechanics. Ditto ditto for timewarp. More so for multiplayer that accounts for players being in different timelines. On top of that, you need to make a driving game (wheels, driving physics), a construction game (duh!), and so on and so forth. 

"Delay after delay" -- Par for course IMO. The first big delay was an effective reboot of the entire project. You can't just continue production as if nothing happened when you start a new studio, even if you hire some of the old developers. It's also likely that the material constraints for the development were changed so drastically that the only thing that carried over was (some of) the design work. Then there was the covid delay. And finally the push into 2023 rather than 2022. All that is completely normal. Not ideal, mind, but normal -- lots of games do a lot worse.

"Rarely any updates" -- KSP2 has gotten more developer updates earlier on than most games, by far. Although TBF this is most likely because it was announced prematurely; under normal conditions they would've gone radio silent until they were ready to announce a release date.

"An EA that is purely for funding" -- extremely unlikely. KSP is a "long tail" franchise. If TT wants ROI, they need to keep the franchise a going concern for years. If they felt that it was more profitable to add another delay than to go with EA now, that's what they would have done. A company like TT does EA for two reasons: to get a reading on how much interest there is in a franchise ("for X amount of kerbucks in a marketing campaign, how many EA sales do we get?") and secondly to turn the EA process itself into a marketing effort by getting it into a positive feeback loop, building a community, and eventually creating positive word-of-mouth, especially among influencers. A rocky start to the EA means nothing, it's a year-long campaign at least. 

"Wouldn't be surprised if the plug is pulled" -- TT treats KSP as a franchise, not even as an individual game. KSP2 is the keystone of that franchise. If they start to seriously worry that the game is going to tank/not get finished/the studio needs help getting it done, then they will put the studio on a tighter leash, appoint a bunch of tough producers known for Getting Stuff Done, and maybe do some ruthless featurectomies. They will only pull the plug if they determine that there isn't enough interest in the franchise. The current state of the EA barely even factors into that decision.

From TT's point of view, the more social media uproar there is over KSP2 at this point, the better -- it signals interest in the franchise. At this stage in the game, there really isn't any bad publicity: it doesn't matter what they say as long as they get the name of the game right. Besides which, redemption arcs are super compelling.

They will only pull the plug on KSP2 if people lose interest. As long as people signal interest, they will keep it going. 

(Oh, and, the state of the game? I would put it at about six months from production-ready with the current feature set. About a year or two from the full feature set, depending on what the state of readiness of those systems is -- I've no doubt they've been working on them, they're just disabled in the EA build.)

Edited February 27, 2023 by Periple

[RayneCloud]

Thanks @Periplethis is all been quite a ride and I just ran out of energy to keep  trying to explain things from a dev perspective. Intercept is not above or immune to criticism over this, and peoples feelings are valid and they're allowed to refund, not buy it, give feedback, compain, etc. I just hate the personal attacks on the character of the dev team, when actual dev ops usually has very little say in things. 

[tstein]

24 minutes ago, RayneCloud said:

Thanks @Periplethis is all been quite a ride and I just ran out of energy to keep  trying to explain things from a dev perspective. Intercept is not above or immune to criticism over this, and peoples feelings are valid and they're allowed to refund, not buy it, give feedback, compain, etc. I just hate the personal attacks on the character of the dev team, when actual dev ops usually has very little say in things. 

When the general public complains about devs they are thinking mostly  in the top of the pyramid where the devs stay on bottom. Peopel know that most of the fault is in managers and directors usually and not in the coder (although some blame is always there as well).

[J.Random]

35 minutes ago, Periple said:

walloftext

Yeah, no. Considering what modders were able to do to original KSP, considering budgets and the team size and experience of the original KSP, the arguments of "you don't understand game development", "they had to build a studio", "never been done before" and so on just won't fly in this community. Or at least I hope that the community preserved enough collective critical thinking to destine these arguments for RUD.

[MarcAbaddon]

I think you underestimate of the plug being pulled on this at some point - Take Two won't keep going as long as some people talk about KSP, they are going to keep going as long as they think they can make money with it. Pretty sure they are taking a long hard look at the EA sales and refund numbers at the moment. As for putting them on a tighter leash, they already did so once. I think at some point they are going to decide they got burnt enough.

Take Two has in the past let famous franchises lie on the side for a long time, either because interest waned or because they were focusing something else. And they did cancel a game valued at 53$ millions at the end of 2021. 

[tstein]

Just now, MarcAbaddon said:

I think you underestimate of the plug being pulled on this at some point - Take Two won't keep going as long as some people talk about KSP, they are going to keep going as long as they think they can make money with it. Pretty sure they are taking a long hard look at the EA sales and refund numbers at the moment. As for putting them on a tighter leash, they already did so once. I think at some point they are going to decide they got burnt enough.

Take Two has in the past let famous franchises lie on the side for a long time, either because interest waned or because they were focusing something else. And they did cancel a game valued at 53$ millions at the end of 2021. 

Publisher actions are not limited to an on off switch. Much before this there is:  demand of a plan and  lots of milestone meetings,  then if that does not work,  the call to the studio and demand  changes and management with someone they bring from somewhere else. Only then  an investor (a publisher is an investor)   thinks on switching the lights off.

[J.Random]

4 minutes ago, tstein said:

demand of a plan and  lots of milestone meetings,  then if that does not work,  the call to the studio and demand  changes and management with someone they bring from somewhere else

Already happened, didn't it?