Some statistics from Steam DB and discussion about the future of the game

[Turtlegirl1209]

Heres some worrying stats from Steam  DB:

	negative reviews	positive reviews	Positive %	24 H peak
KSP 1	5,855	106,848	94.8 %	7,284 players
KSP 2	4,662	4,596	49.6 %	6,642 players

 

These statistics are as of 10H00 UTC 28/02/2023

I find it very concerning that less than half a week after launch, KSP 2 has almost as many negative reveiws as KSP 1, which has been out on Steam for 8 years. I would estimate that the quantity of negative reviews for KSP 2 will surpass the quantity of negative reviews  for KSP 1 within a few days of now. Also, not to mention the fact that The actual percentage of positive reviews is less than 50 % for KSP 2, meanwhile it's 95% for KSP 1 (its definitley worth accounting for the fact that KSP 1 is a mature game, but still these numbers should be closer to one another in an optimal launch scenario, even for an EA).  

And of course, the first game really shouldnt be more popular in player count than a newly released sequel. I find it very concerning that more people are playing KSP 1 than KSP 2. In the reviews and on these forums, its easy to find counts of people saying who they tried KSP 2, were dissapointed, then just went back to KSP 1 and played that instead.

These stats do kinda paint a worrying picture for me. What do you think, did i miss something? It seems like this game is getting a lot of negative publicity, and people who know a lot about programming seem to be worried about the code base for the game. Could this launch be a detriment for the long term health of the game? I really want this game to be in a better state. Can KSP 2 have a bright future ahead of it? 

 

[MarcAbaddon]

It's hard to tell. It depends on how fast the Devs start tackling the problems and whether they listen to feedback. It's also possible that the game will be a mess but has enough redeeming features hidden in the mess, that modders will fix most of it. It being Unity based means it is pretty amenable to wild changes.

[RayneCloud]

So, usually, the first 7 days of a launch are chaotic and most major influx of users happens with in the first 30 to 90 days or so. We'll have to wait and see what the response is and what the first few patches look like and the cadence of patch release. That and communication from the dev team needs to ramp up in an EA environment which means the community team needs to be engaging with the community while not bothering the devs and taking away from dev time more than is absolutely needed to get critical information out to us.  From Steam DB, we can see that there was a "releasetest" branch and 5 development branches that were all updated yesterday.  This tells me that yes, they are hard at work.

Also, it is incredibly unfair to compare a game that actually launched (0.7.3) 11 years and 8 months ago and had 10 years of development with two DLC's and 1,000's of mods behind it to support and make it more enticing of an experience,  to something that's less than a week old from launch and less than 5 years or so in active production, for me, personally.. Even with a large budget and dev team, this was a total architectural rebuild and that took time. The pandemic also didn't help, and I imagine that the ESA event was the first real public play test the game had. I really wish they'd have put this out at steam next fest as a demo to get feedback.

Edited February 28, 2023 by RayneCloud

[tstein]

1 minute ago, RayneCloud said:

 

Also, it is incredibly unfair to compare a game that actually launched (0.7.3) 11 years and 8 months ago and had 10 years of development with two DLC's and 1,000's of mods behind it to support and make it more enticing of an experience,  to something that's less than a week old from launch and less than 5 years or so in active production is a bit unfair to me personally. Even with a large budget and dev team, this was a total architectural rebuild and that took time. The pandemic also didn't help, and I imagine that the ESA event was the first real public play test the game had. I really wish they'd have put this out at steam next fest as a demo to get feedback.

No it is not unfair to compare those because one was a garage product on part time and other had a studio. No one expects quality of the former, but from the later it is standard to demand a minimum.  In ALL other field of software industry that excuse would not stick and it should not stick here as well.

[RayneCloud]

5 minutes ago, tstein said:

No it is not unfair to compare those because one was a garage product on part time and other had a studio. No one expects quality of the former, but from the later it is standard to demand a minimum.  In ALL other field of software industry that excuse would not stick and it should not stick here as well.

No, that is not true. Felipe was working at Squad which was a marketing studio with money and resources to let him work on it alone, and when he started this project he WAS alone, but support for it ramped up quickly. I know, I was there.  Once it was clear that KSP 1 was becoming successful, Squad put more money, more devs and more resources in to the project and more people were hired on. Lest you forget, C7, Mu, Nova, CptSkunky and me, Marco, and many more. Including people like rover dude, etc. Simply go watch the KSP 1 credits and see how many people are credited on KSP 1. 

[MarcAbaddon]

Honestly, I think few people are putting the games side by side and just comparing the feature list. I am not miffed about any of the missing features or parts myself.

What concerns me are the bugs and flaws in core mechanism (just to name some: unstable orbits, staging, fuel drain and finnicky maneuver node) and little progress in terms of physics. That the physics bugs from KSP 1 are still in the game was extremely disappointing to me. Orbital mechanics and local physics are the core of KSP, and it was really here I was hoping for a better foundation than we have in KSP 2. 

Orbital parameters like AP and PE can't  be allowed to randomly fluctuate. And that they do make me worry about how they set up fundamental parts of the game. You'd expect movement along an orbit to be programmed in a way that's it stable (e.g. by only directly adjusting the phase and have the actual physical world space coordinates as a function of the phase).

[RayneCloud]

Valid concerns Marc.  I agree, there's a lot of issues there that are holdovers from KSP1. It is, disappointing, that they're still here.

[kerbiloid]

When most of these problems were happily fixed or bypassed by the KSP-1 late releases and mods, whose source code was available from the very KSP-2 development beginning.

But why look into the cookbook recipes when the cook knows better.

[Kubas_inko]

Considering how "much" was added since 2019

I think the game has a long future in front of it. Depends how successful though.

Edited February 28, 2023 by Kubas_inko

[Monger]

Simulation games often sell adequateyly for a very long time. Unlike Call of Duty, which makes most of its sales within the first month, you can have steady sales for years in this genre. 

Feedback rate is usually a lot higher if something goes sideways. So this also means, that very few players actually jumped the EA train. One of the main goals of KSP2 is to reach a far bigger audience, so that hasn't happened yet.c

Of course if Private Divisions won't deliver, then this will go down in flames. But I wouldn't underestimate the boost that can happen if many players turn around and joyfully declare: wohoo! I can actually launch the game! 

Especially journalists love these rebound stories. 

[Kerbart]

59 minutes ago, Monger said:

Feedback rate is usually a lot higher if something goes sideways. So this also means, that very few players actually jumped the EA train. One of the main goals of KSP2 is to reach a far bigger audience, so that hasn't happened yet.

I don't think it was actively marketed outside the KSP1 crowd — and given the state it's in, it would be unwise to do so.

59 minutes ago, Monger said:

Of course if Private Divisions won't deliver, then this will go down in flames. But I wouldn't underestimate the boost that can happen if many players turn around and joyfully declare: wohoo! I can actually launch the game!

As much as the sorry state the game is in right now, things can turn around quickly if they can address the burning issues in the next month or so. Performance isn't as bad as was claimed — maybe not 30 FPS but things still look smooth and it's definitely playable — and once the game breaking bugs (parts spontaneously flying off, mutilated saves) are addressed people will start enjoying the game, Next would be much needed QOL improvements - AP/PE display in maneuvers, accurate DV calculations, etc, followed by a round of fixing annoying but not breaking bugs (the horizontal launch thing, typing an "M" in the VAB triggering the map, etc). By the time it's May the game should be in a much, much better state.

If not it's going to be rough.

[tstein]

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

I don't think it was actively marketed outside the KSP1 crowd — and given the state it's in, it would be unwise to do so.

As much as the sorry state the game is in right now, things can turn around quickly if they can address the burning issues in the next month or so. Performance isn't as bad as was claimed — maybe not 30 FPS but things still look smooth and it's definitely playable — and once the game breaking bugs (parts spontaneously flying off, mutilated saves) are addressed people will start enjoying the game, Next would be much needed QOL improvements - AP/PE display in maneuvers, accurate DV calculations, etc, followed by a round of fixing annoying but not breaking bugs (the horizontal launch thing, typing an "M" in the VAB triggering the map, etc). By the time it's May the game should be in a much, much better state.

If not it's going to be rough.

Performance is horrible on the most common cards in the possible consumer base. They do need to improve the performance enough to not be a slide show for those cards (cosndiering it is NOT a game with super amazing graphics). IF they do that and fix the most absurd crashes, problems with loading  saves etc, then yes the game can flourish. But hey need to reach a level where  msot people do nto feel they are fighting the game,

[Periple]

Just now, tstein said:

Performance is horrible on the most common cards in the possible consumer base. They do need to improve the performance enough to not be a slide show for those cards (cosndiering it is NOT a game with super amazing graphics). IF they do that and fix the most absurd crashes, problems with loading  saves etc, then yes the game can flourish. But hey need to reach a level where  msot people do nto feel they are fighting the game,

From what I've seen getting massive speed gains should be pretty easy. There are some stupid vertex counts on some of the assets and the fuel flow system is a huge bottleneck. Fixing both of them should be easy-peasy and it'll deliver big returns.

There could be tougher constraints further down the line of course but only time will tell.

[tstein]

Just now, Periple said:

From what I've seen getting massive speed gains should be pretty easy. There are some stupid vertex counts on some of the assets and the fuel flow system is a huge bottleneck. Fixing both of them should be easy-peasy and it'll deliver big returns.

There could be tougher constraints further down the line of course but only time will tell.

A single capsule nothing else on the launch pad gets 3-5 fps in a 1050Ti (the most common  card, completely dominant in the notebooks,  around and that can run  most steam games very well). so it is not fuel flow sicne there is not even fuel on that scenario. There is something really   weird regarding planets.

[MarcAbaddon]

I think it was tracked down to one fairly complex and large shader used for planets. Since it seems to do a lot at the same time, it might not be easy to optimize. Let's face it - either it is fairly complex or they would probably have done it earlier. 

[Kerbart]

11 minutes ago, tstein said:

Performance is horrible on the most common cards in the possible consumer base. They do need to improve the performance enough to not be a slide show

We might be talking about two different things here. Define slideshow? I have a 7 year old desktop and with its original card I got indeed what can be called truly slide show performance. But after upgrading to a modest gpu (1660 Ti) I'm getting 18-30 FPS (launch/space) which appears pretty smooth to me. It might not be the 120 FPS that hardcore PUBG players want, but that's not needed to enjoy KSP either.

[tstein]

6 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

We might be talking about two different things here. Define slideshow? I have a 7 year old desktop and with its original card I got indeed what can be called truly slide show performance. But after upgrading to a modest gpu (1660 Ti) I'm getting 18-30 FPS (launch/space) which appears pretty smooth to me. It might not be the 120 FPS that hardcore PUBG players want, but that's not needed to enjoy KSP either.

GTX 1050 4 GB (just one gen before ) doing literally 3 FPS with a single part in launchpad. IF it were 12 fps I would  be happy.T he thing is..  this  card uses so much les spowert hat it is the dominant  GPU in notebooks.

12 minutes ago, MarcAbaddon said:

I think it was tracked down to one fairly complex and large shader used for planets. Since it seems to do a lot at the same time, it might not be easy to optimize. Let's face it - either it is fairly complex or they would probably have done it earlier. 

Or just  make a LOW  setting with a SIMPLE shader.

Edited February 28, 2023 by tstein

[HowDoKerbal]

said it before and I’ll say it again - Steam reviews are a garbage metric to try and glean any sort of useful information from. 

You can’t compare the 2 titles. One has been fully released for years with a robust modding community and one just released in early access as basically an alpha.

4 hours ago, Turtlegirl1209 said:

And of course, the first game really shouldnt be more popular in player count than a newly released sequel. I find it very concerning that more people are playing KSP 1 than KSP 2. In the reviews and on these forums, its easy to find counts of people saying who they tried KSP 2, were dissapointed, then just went back to KSP 1 and played that instead.

Again, going back to what I just wrote above: KSP2 is early access and essentially a very basic sandbox. No progression, no career modes, no mods..just some basic parts for you to mess around with. Most people at this stage won’t get much play time out of it, especially if they’re having severe performance issues due to a simple lack of optimization or playing on potato hardware. They’ll check it out for a few hours and then go back to KSP1, which does have progression and mods, until the next KSP2 patch at which point the cycle will repeat until KSP2 has enough content that people switch to it full time over KSP1.

Once a couple patches release that address the most pressing problems, the negative reviews will slow and general sentiment will improve. KSP2 will do just fine in the long term.

[Monger]

37 minutes ago, Periple said:

From what I've seen getting massive speed gains should be pretty easy. There are some stupid vertex counts on some of the assets and the fuel flow system is a huge bottleneck. Fixing both of them should be easy-peasy and it'll deliver big returns.

There could be tougher constraints further down the line of course but only time will tell.

VRAM seems also to be an issue. There are rumours about memory leaks and/or wrong memory allocation. With a little luck these are quick fixes once you pinpointed them. 

[tstein]

5 minutes ago, Monger said:

VRAM seems also to be an issue. There are rumours about memory leaks and/or wrong memory allocation. With a little luck these are quick fixes once you pinpointed them. 

That  reminded me  when I managed a team in health tech ,  we issued computers for the developers that matched the most common   computers the Doctors had, no not high end stuff, because I wanted the devs to FEEL when the things was  slipping into  dangerous performance zone. It was impressively effective as the developers never let performance  slip away.

[regex]

5 hours ago, Turtlegirl1209 said:

I find it very concerning that more people are playing KSP 1 than KSP 2. In the reviews and on these forums, its easy to find counts of people saying who they tried KSP 2, were dissapointed, then just went back to KSP 1 and played that instead.

Anecdotally, I have exactly one reason to go back to KSP1 and that would be playing RO. Nothing about the base game is good. I played a science mode game a few months ago and it was pretty lackluster all around so there's no reason for me to be playing it instead of KSP2. That being said, I got my initial high from playing KSP2 and I'm going to see what the first couple of patches do because right now the big draw is flying over Kerbin. Game needs work, it's that simple. I think a lot of people who are excited about KSP2 are waiting to see what the first few patches will bring.

[Serenity]

It's unfair to diminish the value of KSP1, especially after all the ''KSP2 will be better'' ''KSP2 will fix the broken aspects of KSP1''

I wish i could be more constructive and ellaborate but i can't, what i am reading the past few days in these forums have left me dazzled.

40 minutes ago, regex said:

Nothing about the base game is good.

I uh, really? 

[regex]

4 minutes ago, Serenity said:

I uh, really? 

I mean, compared to everything else in my library, yeah, it's pretty lacking, one of the few titles that screams out for (nay, requires) mods. Science and career mode are tacked on afterthoughts, everything looks muddy and low-def, gameplay is an extremely boring "right-click receive reward" meta...

Really hoping KSP2 doesn't fall into the same gameplay trap but at least they've solved the graphics issue. Game is stunning.

[Bej Kerman]

11 minutes ago, Serenity said:

55 minutes ago, regex said:

Nothing about the base game is good.

I uh, really? 

Well, I don't often find people who don't concede that the game in its unmodded state is not a very good way to play it.

4 minutes ago, regex said:

I mean, compared to everything else in my library, yeah, it's pretty lacking, one of the few titles that screams out for (nay, requires) mods. Science and career mode are tacked on afterthoughts, everything looks muddy and low-def, gameplay is an extremely boring "right-click receive reward" meta...

Really hoping KSP2 doesn't fall into the same gameplay trap but at least they've solved the graphics issue. Game is stunning.

For a good portion of KSP 1's history, you needed mods to get dV readouts, which is absolutely required for spaceflight. So yeah, completely agree. KSP 2 has dV right out the box and that, to me, makes it more promising than KSP was.

[Profugo Barbatus]

I'm not really sure why these stats are surprising or concerning - KSP1 has had forever to be super popular, and KSP2 has launched roughshod at best, and feature lacking. This is expected in an EA title, but such an anticipated title is going to get way more attention than might otherwise be warranted for an EA release. So a lot of people bought it expecting way more, letting hype and anticipation overcome the warnings about the games state. So a lot of people have likely done what many of us have done, which is 'enjoy' the bugs, review as to how they felt about the current state of the game, and then put it down to wait until whenever it looks better before seriously diving in. 

I can't speak for everyone else, but I was running a heavily modded KSP1 leading into the release, and I'm still playing that save now, just because its got the content I want. When KSP2 starts to have more of the content I want, I will probably pivot over for the last time. Until then, I'm booting it up here and there to get kraken'd and participate in the journey, just like I did back in KSP1, playing on and off since before the Mun was released (I actually played the VERY first version way back when, for like 30 minutes which hardly counts) right up until Career Mode came out, then I started playing seriously. I would hardly argue that Pre-Mun KSP1 wasn't very fun, just that there wasn't much to actually strive for - a very important difference. KSP2 is in much the same state, There is fun to be had when you do things - there's just not much to do, and doing any of them doesn't really matter.

Despite all that, the fact the game already has 10% of the reviews of KSP1 in less than a week is actually a really good indicator - not only are there a lot of buyers, but a lot of them are invested enough to feel that they need to get their opinions out already. Its got a rough rep out the gate, but I've seen worse launches do better.