A week in... 10% still playing

[uglyduckling81]

On 3/4/2023 at 12:37 AM, twich22 said:

The good news is now that all the people who don't really care about the game or are not hardcore about it and dont want to be involved in its development or werent involved in the development of KSP 1 are out of the picture, the voices of those who actually care about the development of the game and know what they are talking about will not be drowned out by the useless masses. So im totally okay with it for now since the game is in such a bad state anyways and really needs appropriate prioritization of resources to get it to a playable state in a relatively short period of time. 

I actually care about the development of KSP2. I was part of the KSP1 early access since 2013 or 2014 or something.

I don't own KSP2 yet and obviously don't play it as a result, because of the game's horrendous state.

Does that invalidate my opinion, criticisms, and suggestions for the game?

Just because 90% of people have stopped playing the game doesn't mean they don't care or their opinion matters less. It just shows how terrible the game actually is.

[Superfluous J]

On 3/29/2023 at 12:48 PM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I think we gamers are very forgiving of small studios doing quirky things.  OTOH - when you have a big publisher behind you and promise great things... we expect a certain level of polish.

I agree with most of this, but I'd change that for me, it entirely has to do with the price and not who's releasing it.

I would happily buy a $20 KSP2 game released by a AAA developer as Early Access in its current state.

I would not have bought a $50 KSP2 game released by HarvesteR or anybody else, no matter how "indie" or "mainstream" they are.

For me, this is 100% to do with the implied contract between game seller and game buyer. In EA, we get a significantly cheaper game in exchange for that game being garbage compared to full releases, with the knowledge that that might be all we ever get, that we should submit bug reports, and that future versions of the game are free for us.

Getting a an eventually finished $60 game in the current state for $50 isn't worth it for me. That's where it starts and ends in my book.

Edited March 31, 2023 by Superfluous J

[RocketRockington]

1 hour ago, uglyduckling81 said:

Just because 90% of people have stopped playing the game doesn't mean they don't care or their opinion matters less. It just shows how terrible the game actually is.

97% at this point.  And also how little there is to do in the game. 

Hopefully T2 sticks to funding this game through yet more tribulations, but I do wonder at how many times the KSP2 project management will be able to screw up and keep getting another chance to keep stumbling forward.

[Alexoff]

Saturday evening, barely a thousand players on Steam online. Is there a T2 shareholder report coming soon?

[Ferio]

On 4/1/2023 at 1:00 PM, Alexoff said:

Saturday evening, barely a thousand players on Steam online. Is there a T2 shareholder report coming soon?

[snip]  If they drop the price to 20 euro, the current players who bought wouldn't be too happy.  Price already dropped to 30 euro through key sites, I guess it will drop more.

I bought and refunded, there's no way I would pay 50 euro (or 25 euro) for early access in the current state. Would pay 15 euro tops.

I think the entire strategy of high price went completely wrong, hence the many refunds in the end. 50 euro is just too much. I think if they went for a price of 15 to 20 euro's people wouldn't probably refund and just wait it out.

Edited April 3, 2023 by Starhawk
Redacted by moderator

[Alexoff]

9 hours ago, Ferio said:

[snip]  If they drop the price to 20 euro, the current players who bought wouldn't be too happy.  Price already dropped to 30 euro through key sites, I guess it will drop more.

I bought and refunded, there's no way I would pay 50 euro (or 25 euro) for early access in the current state. Would pay 15 euro tops.

I think the entire strategy of high price went completely wrong, hence the many refunds in the end. 50 euro is just too much. I think if they went for a price of 15 to 20 euro's people wouldn't probably refund and just wait it out.

I don't understand at all what the strategy was with KSP2. It seems that the developers hoped that the end of the world would happen before the release of the game and that they could not strain too much with the game, receiving a salary every month. But as often happens - the end of the world did not happen and the developers had to do something quickly and come up with something quickly, it didn’t work out very well.

And now there are 600 people playing in ksp2, and 3000 people in ksp1...

[Ferio]

4 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

I don't understand at all what the strategy was with KSP2. It seems that the developers hoped that the end of the world would happen before the release of the game and that they could not strain too much with the game, receiving a salary every month. But as often happens - the end of the world did not happen and the developers had to do something quickly and come up with something quickly, it didn’t work out very well.

And now there are 600 people playing in ksp2, and 3000 people in ksp1...

Way more for KSP1 I think. It was free a couple of weeks ago at Epicgames.

[Alexoff]

1 hour ago, Ferio said:

Way more for KSP1 I think. It was free a couple of weeks ago at Epicgames.

It is impossible to calculate, I usually launch KSP1 from a shortcut, and not through Steam, so as not to waste time. But many also launch KSP2 like this, not through the launcher. Steam shows at least some specific numbers, but they are not in favor of KSP2.

[Death Engineering]

I just can't play something so utterly and disappointingly filled with bugs.

As a career, I support and troubleshoot buggy software. The last thing I want is something way worse as "recreation". Call me when this thing, oh I don't know, works?

Orbits drift or disappear, parts fall off spontaneously, whole designs sink into the VAB floor like it was made of quicksand, EVAs that knock the lander back into space, EVA's that fall through the terrain, I mean it is truly endless.

I give KSP2 a few low chance of ever making to as feature-complete as KSP1 got.

Edited April 4, 2023 by Death Engineering

[Ferio]

20 hours ago, Death Engineering said:

I give KSP2 a few low chance of ever making to as feature-complete as KSP1 got.

Modders can do as much but I really hope KSP2 will get better, might be years away though. 

Edited April 5, 2023 by Ferio

[RocketRockington]

On 3/28/2023 at 8:40 PM, RocketRockington said:

KSP2 failed to reach a peak of 1000 players for the first time today (peak was 918 -  3.5% of its peak player count) - and bottomed out below 400.

About a week later and KSP2 player counts have fallen by another 33%.  Rate of reviews (which is indicative of new purchases) are relatively stable over the last week though, so rate of purchase is.likely stable - but also well below sustaining burn rate for thr project.

Hopefully Take2 does take the long view, because the player community has really spoken about the state of the current game.  

[The Aziz]

How many are playing doesn't matter, what's important to the publisher is the amount of finalized purchases.

So, honestly, whatever. It's will spike back when the update drops anyway.

[AtomicTech]

How many people are playing it today?

(Just out of curiosity)

[Tazooka]

19 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

How many people are playing it today?

(Just out of curiosity)

418 currently

646 is the peak in the last 24h

1,081 in the past week

[TLTay]

Not surprising. If I wanted to punish myself I'd just work overtime instead of banging my head against bugs to play a featureless 50 dollar demo.

[RocketRockington]

3 hours ago, The Aziz said:

How many are playing doesn't matter, what's important to the publisher is the amount of finalized purchases.

So, honestly, whatever. It's will spike back when the update drops anyway.

That's why I mentioned the rate of reviews, from which you can estimate sales rate.

https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-that-game-sold-on-steam-using

This article points out that average # of sales per review is 41, and most games fall between 25 and 100 sales per review.  I'd guess that due to KSP2s controversial nature, the rate of sales per review is below the average, but even using that average, KSP2s sales rate is now low enough than any reasonable eatimate of thr burn rate of a 50 developer team exceeds it.

[Alexoff]

1 hour ago, RocketRockington said:

This article points out that average # of sales per review is 41, and most games fall between 25 and 100 sales per review.  I'd guess that due to KSP2s controversial nature, the rate of sales per review is below the average, but even using that average, KSP2s sales rate is now low enough than any reasonable eatimate of thr burn rate of a 50 developer team exceeds it.

It is difficult to say about KSP2, because if the game is good, then there is no time to write a review, you have to play. And if the game caused a lot of disappointment, then the review will appear sooner. A lot of players were waiting for KSP2, the interest was great.

[Terwin]

On 3/29/2023 at 7:27 AM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Even if they are mostly going off of telemetry - data needs inputs.  Engagement (willingness to test) is dropping like a stone 

 

On 3/30/2023 at 7:00 PM, uglyduckling81 said:

Just because 90% of people have stopped playing the game doesn't mean they don't care or their opinion matters less. It just shows how terrible the game actually is.

Going by Steam telemetry sure, but if you ever used mods in KSP1 you know that you do not play with mods in the steam directory, so anyone playing with mods or otherwise not using the steam launcher will not be in those statistics as an active user.  (and at this point of the dev path, there is a lot of need for mods)

On 4/3/2023 at 2:45 PM, Alexoff said:

It is impossible to calculate, I usually launch KSP1 from a shortcut, and not through Steam, so as not to waste time. But many also launch KSP2 like this, not through the launcher. Steam shows at least some specific numbers, but they are not in favor of KSP2.

I got errors launching through steam, so my 'play-time' is all of 2 minutes back on release day.

I 'landed' on the Eve seas before the patch and did a mun-minmus tour after the patch.

(my 'landing' was about as stable as the game-ball at a NBA game, but the vessel was still intact...)

Edited April 5, 2023 by Terwin

[Palshife]

9 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

About a week later and KSP2 player counts have fallen by another 33%.  Rate of reviews (which is indicative of new purchases) are relatively stable over the last week though, so rate of purchase is.likely stable - but also well below sustaining burn rate for thr project.

Hopefully Take2 does take the long view, because the player community has really spoken about the state of the current game.  

That's presumptuous. The player community is hardly unanimous about the state of the current game. Plenty of us like and enjoy KSP2 (even in its current state). Naturally it's logical to assume that many of us have decreased our playtime as we await more fixes, not because we reject the game in some sort of unified "message."

[RocketRockington]

32 minutes ago, Palshife said:

That's presumptuous. The player community is hardly unanimous about the state of the current game. Plenty of us like and enjoy KSP2 (even in its current state). Naturally it's logical to assume that many of us have decreased our playtime as we await more fixes, not because we reject the game in some sort of unified "message."

Its logical to assume that players who stop playing, or who never started playing, are not happy with the state of the  game as it is right now.  The hard data from player #s and reviews backs that up.  And that's what I'm saying.

What's  presumptuous is to assume they all have the same rationale as you do for why they aren't playing, there are multiple reasons why that may brbthr case, you're waiting for fixes, others are waiting for new features, others are waiting for optimization, and some are fed up with the hype and the endless waiting for the next thing that's supposed to solve these issues and have writtrn off KSP2 completely.  I'm sure there are other reasons.

 

4 hours ago, Terwin said:

 

Going by Steam telemetry sure, but if you ever used mods in KSP1 you know that you do not play with mods in the steam directory, so anyone playing with mods or otherwise not using the steam launcher will not be in those statistics as an active user.  (and at this point of the dev path, there is a lot of need for mods)

I got errors launching through steam, so my 'play-time' is all of 2 minutes back on release day.

Well a lot of people didn't have your issues and they show up as players on steam early on - ones that have faded away over time.

Again, extrapolating from your personal anecdotal experience and assuming that's the one reason steam players have stopped showing up on steam telemetry is silly.  It would make sense if some change in a recent patch broke the launcher, but actually after the patch player counts went up briefly before falling off.  There are also very few mods out for KSP2, I doubt that's the primary reason player xounts have dropped off - and it wouldn't affect the rate of new reviews.

[Palshife]

2 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

What's  presumptuous is to assume they all have the same rationale as you do for why they aren't playing

I'm assuming they "all" have the same rationale? Just so we're clear, when I said hardly unanimous what I meant was not unanimous. Not unified. Meaning I firmly believe everyone has their own rationale (which means not necessarily my rationale). I was suggesting another situation to explain a drop in play time which you hadn't considered. So it should be clear that I'm not speaking for anyone else. I'd appreciate it if you didn't cherry pick my words to make it sound like I was.

[didkodidko]

To be frank, I'm not playing KSP 2 since I have full glory modded KSP1 RSS/RO and it's better in every way than time spent in KSP2. I'll be back when science and optimization is a thing. When is 2nd patch scheduled for release?

Edited April 6, 2023 by didkodidko
typo

[Tazooka]

13 minutes ago, didkodidko said:

When is 2nf patch scheduled for release?

In the next 2 weeks apparently, according to Nate

On 3/31/2023 at 7:55 PM, Nate Simpson said:

On to business. We have knocked out a few more bugs for Patch Two, including that pesky issue where vehicles with more than 8 parts in a radial symmetry set were loading into the floor. We’ve just about wrapped up the cherry picking process and can say with confidence that it’ll be out sometime in the next two weeks. We’ll post an exact date for Patch Two as soon as we know it.

As we continue stabilizing and improving performance, we’re also making progress on re-entry heating, new parts, and Science Mode.

But judging how we haven't had any update or news about it. I'm guessing next week, which will be 5 weeks since the last patch, over a month

So much for "weeks not months"

Edited April 6, 2023 by Tazooka
Format

[The Aziz]

They're not gonna release on next Sunday and everything prior to that is less than a month.

In any case, setting up estimates in software development. Who knows what they're doing out there, maybe there are some obstacles they're determined to get through for that patch.

[cocoscacao]

47 minutes ago, Tazooka said:

So much for "weeks not months"

Technically, that would be still correct. Several weeks, rather than several months. I don't know if 1,25 months counts as a plural