Kerbal Space Program 2 (not dying and getting a new owner) Hype Train.

[Mr. Kerbin]

Hype?

Edited November 7, 2024 by Mr. Kerbin
New page!

[Dakitess]

No. Not even.

Better go with passionnate guys an a new franchise, be it a copy of KSP, than another cash-oriented development by a new pro team, of the official franchise. "KSP2" acronym by itself is way too damaged, it's FUBAR, let it go. How sad is that ? I swear, as one of the most passionate player of KSP, I am not even a little excited by this news, which is so sad.

There is a minor chance, though, that the new IP owner is... KSA team haha.

Edited November 8, 2024 by Dakitess

[Kaa253]

Steam gave my KSP2 install a little 83 MB update today. It said something about shader engine.

[AlamoVampire]

I just tripped over an interesting video about KSP2 by ObsidianAnt. Potentially saved in some form? Interesting watch, I leave you to draw your own conclusions. I for one am still not going to buy KSP2 until a future is secured positively. But I am watching.

203001082025

Replaced the video with obsidians reuploaded video with some minor corrections (per him)

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Edited January 9 by AlamoVampire

[Jacke]

4 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

I just tripped over an interesting video about KSP2 by ObsidianAnt. Potentially saved in some form? Interesting watch, I leave you to draw your own conclusions. I for one am still not going to buy KSP2 until a future is secured positively. But I am watching.

203001082025

I respect ObsidianAnt.  I suggest reading many of the comments on that video, as they have a better view of things.

This is former staff of a game publisher.  Also, according to many knowledgeable people, KSP 2 was so badly founded, it isn't worth working on.  It would be cheaper and easier to start from scratch.

Better yet, sell the Kerbal IP back to HarvesteR.  KSA is going to be the true successor to KSP.

[AlamoVampire]

1 minute ago, Jacke said:

Better yet, sell the Kerbal IP back to HarvesteR.  KSA is going to be the true successor to KSP.

Harvester noped out years ago. If he wanted anything to do with the future of ksp after that i doubt hed had left/sold. As to ksa, im not holding my breath. 012701092025

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, AlamoVampire said:

Harvester noped out years ago. If he wanted anything to do with the future of ksp after that i doubt hed had left/sold. As to ksa, im not holding my breath. 012701092025

HarvesteR was in a bad situation with no way out. He didn't own KSP because he made an agreement with his company (Squad) early on that the program was Squad's property, in exchange for them letting him stop doing whatever he used to be doing and instead work on it. That sounds like a crazy agreement considering it's about the only way the game would have ever existed I'm glad it went down that way.

Then when things stopped going his (and our) way, he left instead of getting walked all over. Thankfully KSP1 survived this and IMO is better for it. KSP2, not so much

None of that is official record and I have no insider information. I just connected dots based on what I've read over the past decade plus.

[AlamoVampire]

@Superfluous J i had forgotten why he had left and came in as I said somewhere around here a few days after 0.21 had arrived on steam so was unaware of the deal you reference. I knew he was part of squad and honestly thought squad was his company. As far as KSP2 i was hurt by the fact they wanted system specs that were way over the top for even a top flight AAA game. Was a move that felt like they wanted to drive away players. It kept me from buying for sure. 121701092024

[Lisias]

Well... Apparently, it's not game over yet.

Haveli will honor Private Division’s pre-existing contracts, including Tales of the Shire: A “The Lord of the Rings” Game, Game Freak’s unannounced title, codenamed Project Bloom, and Kerbal Space Program.

https://gameranx.com/updates/id/523449/article/private-divisions-buyer-has-launched-a-new-game-publishing-company-with-annapurnas-former-staff/

[Scarecrow71]

13 hours ago, Lisias said:

Well... Apparently, it's not game over yet.

Haveli will honor Private Division’s pre-existing contracts, including Tales of the Shire: A “The Lord of the Rings” Game, Game Freak’s unannounced title, codenamed Project Bloom, and Kerbal Space Program.

https://gameranx.com/updates/id/523449/article/private-divisions-buyer-has-launched-a-new-game-publishing-company-with-annapurnas-former-staff/

Dude.  Not gonna happen.  Honoring the contracts could very well simply mean that they are going to continue allowing downloads of KSP for people who bought it (which is happening).

This is nothing more than spreading misinformation.  Why can't we si.ply just wait until we get an actual communication before inhaling large amounts of hopium/copium?

[RandomKid]

Hype train has run out of steam, it will not get any more.

[Skorj]

1 hour ago, RandomKid said:

Hype train has run out of steam, it will not get any more.

The Hype train is dual fuel Hopium and Copium, providing an inexhaustible supply of power.  It just has to stop and take on water every so often to be steaming along again.

[Bej Kerman]

The best thing to come from all this is probably SZ's critique of journalism. So many quotes from articles that are quoting articles that are quoting Bloomberg, with SEO and opinionated padding added along every step of the chain, leading to disgusting, gross slop like what Lisias uses as a "source" here.

With that said, the firm that bought KSP 2 will probably not require KSP 2 still be in development to continue selling it to unsuspecting people, those who don't check reviews, and people who go out of their way to play mediocre, bad, and infamous games. They've also got other projects as well that warrant more attention, so it's not like KSP 2 would be much more than passive income to them.

[Lisias]

Interesting enough, almost no one besides me and Skorj cared to  doa deep dive into the buyers past, not even SZ .

Great journalism, only compared to the greatness of their criticizers.

WORST.... The counter argument is still more speculation, but without any grounds.

Oh, dear... KSP2 failed for a reason, after all.

[Chilkoot]

Some new tidbits scattered through this vid:

[Link to video with some profanity in it removed -- those interested can look for "Kerbal Space Program 2 Has Been Cut Loose" on Youtube.] 

Edited January 12 by Vanamonde

[AlamoVampire]

It looks like harvester is looking into opening talks with the team mentioned in the above video. What if anything comes of it time will tell.

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[Chilkoot]

35 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

What if anything comes of it time will tell.

I wonder what is even salvageable in the existing KSP2 asset base.  Most of the code would have to be scrapped for it to rise from the ashes as a standalone product.

Maybe he's interested in acquiring the IP and any art/sound assets for his current project, insofar as they may be usable in BRUTAL.

[AlamoVampire]

Dunno. All i know is if ksp2 survives or gets redone its decidedly taking by far the most kerbal path getting there! 151401112025

[Lisias]

48 minutes ago, Chilkoot said:

I wonder what is even salvageable in the existing KSP2 asset base.  Most of the code would have to be scrapped for it to rise from the ashes as a standalone product.

Everything but the code. 

The Conceptual Art is good, the tutorials are decent, the Sound is marvelous.

Not everything was done wrong on this game.

 

1 hour ago, AlamoVampire said:

It looks like harvester is looking into opening talks with the team mentioned in the above video. What if anything comes of it time will tell.

This would be interesting...

[Dakitess]

Ha, I would totally let down the "conceptual art" as well, I deeply HATE how KSP2 looks(ed). It's very very dated, technically speaking, but had some "unfortunate" engine limitation. But what is not a engine limitation, is the overall look of this game. The color palet is atrocious, the lightning is wildly broken and unaesthetic, the parts shaders are really weird and their modelisation is almost at the level of KSP1. The ground features is totally lacking, the clouds are... "They are", at least haha.

Yeah nah, KSP1 was already outdated by the time it appeared, which was normal considering the context of the game and its nature, then it kept being outdated, which is normal since, well, old and "very indie" game foundation, and mods helped to keep it alive. KSP2 only added some polygons (not much) and clouds, basically, reaching 70% of what could be done on a 12yo indie game with community mods (...), at the cost of even less framerate, no AA and horrible art choices.

Ha, KSP2...

[AtomicTech]

Even if this is repetitive, watch the @ShadowZone to cut through all of the noise/bad reporting. 

Personally, I think there's no hype. We just have new owners that're gonna keep trying to sell KSP 1/KSP 2.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

Even if this is repetitive, watch the @ShadowZone to cut through all of the noise/bad reporting. 

<....>

Personally, I think there's no hype. We just have new owners that're gonna keep trying to sell KSP 1/KSP 2.

His criticizing about the half baked news articles is valid, but he didn't took a deep dive on the buyer's past acquisitions neither.

Between many acquisitions, the ones that matters for our subject are:

* 2022, a minority stake at Behaviour Interactive, Canadian Game Studio with a vast portfolio on Consoles (GBA PS2, PSP, and obiously PC, Xbox and PS5).

* 2023, a minority stake at Candivore, Israeli mobile game studio.

* 2024, they bought Jagex (runscape).

* 2024, they bough the whole Private Division, and yanked all the staff of Annapurna Interactive to run it.

Additionally, Haveli itself was funded in 2020 IIRC by Apollo Global Inc, these ones a huge asset management firm (650B USD in assets under their management). They tried to buy Paramount recently, buy the way...

Initially they funded Haveli on ~500M USD, but only Jagex costed them 1.1B USD so we can be reasonably sure they are way bigger nowadays.

These investments strongly suggest some strategy to gain a foot on the market. They fully own a seasoned Game Studio, and have minority stakes on other two - they are not buying corpses for dissection.

And now they bough their own Game Publisher, closing the gaps. Not only that, they hired a whole staff of highly seasoned and reputable professionals from a publisher with a very impressive portfolio, so these guys have a hell of a network available right now.

You don't hire seasoned and reputable professionals to sell scrapping neither squeeze the last dime of dying companies.

That said, this doesn't tells anything about KSP2. They may, indeed, choose to ditch the thing to anyone willing to buy it and focus on the remaining P.D. portfolio - but since this is not how they are operating for the last few years, there's a chance they may consider further developing it.

Not enough to rest assured, but still enough to not throw the towel yet.

 

[Tony Tony Chopper]

So, I doubt this is a automatic working feature of Steam and I want to read some Opinions. The depots heavily changed by removing various dev-branches from Steam: https://steamdb.info/app/954850/history/ . Also a private depot got added to it too. Will something happening over the next few days?

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, Tony Tony Chopper said:

So, I doubt this is a automatic working feature of Steam and I want to read some Opinions. The depots heavily changed by removing various dev-branches from Steam: https://steamdb.info/app/954850/history/ . Also a private depot got added to it too. Will something happening over the next few days?

Seems devs somewhere got  tired of people playing with deposit changes to accuse work being or not being done... and cried to steam to hide their incompetence even further, and it also seems steam caved in recently. Shame, and in the case of publishers/devs, for shame.

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Seems devs somewhere got  tired of people playing with deposit changes to accuse work being or not being done... and cried to steam to hide their incompetence even further, and it also seems steam caved in recently. Shame, and in the case of publishers/devs, for shame.

Besides siding you on this specific case, the sad true is that exposing the developers to end users almost every time ends up in tears.

From that lectures about Project Management I had when younger (or less older), every single time some kind of communication were mentioned, the instructor emphasized: "shield your developers from the end users, or you will lose control of the project, or you will lose your developers, or both").

It's not the developer's task to handle end users' expectation (and requirements), and I think we can get some text book examples from this very Forum. Unavoidably they will be prone to listen to the more vocal (in voice tone, or pocket deepness) ones in detriment of the project's real goals, and sometimes even of the detriment of the product itself.

Of course there're exceptions to this rule - but the only sucessful ones I'm aware are small scale projects (one to five devs, essentially where XP works) where all of them are well oiled working together and have good social skills. Any less skilled one must be shielded even on these exceptions, by the way.