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

[para 9]

18 hours ago, Grenartia said:

Because I expect continuing support for my purchase from whoever owns the IP. That's not an unreasonable expectation to have. 

Yes, it is unreasonable. You're not owed indefinite support.

Breaking Ground released in 2019. The most recent version of Windows in 2019 was Windows 10. Windows 10 support ends later this year. 

Riddle me this, joker: why doesn't Microsoft still support Windows 95? Aren't the people who purchased it owed support for life?

"When does the obligation end, then?"

The so-called obligation, to host a free forum, never existed in the first place. You're displaying a seriously unwarranted and false sense of entitlement. 

Don't be mad at me, or the new owners. You should direct your anger at Nate for (almost) single-handedly destroying the franchise, IMO. 

Edited January 29 by para 9

[Skorj]

The long history of the forums is a real resource to people playing KSP1.  I do hope they're kept alive in some fashion, even if only archived.  I guess we'll see what the new owners think about the future of the Kerbal IP!

 

[para 9]

I agree, and I hope they continue to support KSP1 also. 

[Grenartia]

17 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

"Oh yes if you give us money you can have the privilege of getting this ball of 200 angry users that requires you pay more money monthly for their website to be angry in, which also requires every couple months you pay thousands of dollars in forum software licenses." Or to make it clearer, in my opinion a constant, monthly, maintenance mess and resource drain of a forum is not a "nice tidbit included in the package". It's an expenditure Haveli decided they'll keep paying out of their pocket for... for whatever value they see in it, PR or otherwise, they could've absolutely received it, looked at it and said "nah, we ain't paying for that" the moment control was passed over.

You mistakenly presume I was implying the forum is a positive asset for the buyers. "we have a forum" wasn't a selling point. It was a matter of "We're looking to sell everything associated with Private Division, including the entire KSP IP, and that includes the KSP forum". From Haveli's perspective we're the couch the tenants left behind when they left the apartment. 

 

 

15 hours ago, Skorj said:

After all, all the project really needs are 3 requirements IMO:

1. A solid moddable base engine for a rocket sim, one that isn't the crashtastic mess of KSP1. 
2. Updated graphics.  I don't think they need "modern" graphics, in the sense of hundreds of people cranking out super-detailed art assets (we can live without Kerbal/Kitten shoelace physics), but a step up so that stuff like volumetric clouds and good exhaust plumes are natural to do in the engine.
3. Some sort of actual progression system, rather than just a sandbox with random missions.  Colonies building towards interstellar was just one way of many to do that.

1. Agreed.
2. Disagreed. I couldn't care less about clouds, volumetric or not, or pretty exhaust plumes. Colorable parts? Sure. A consistent part-art style (think what the base game or restock offer compared to the *original* parts were, even before 0.90), definitely. But leave anything beyond the bare minimum to modders. 
3. I feel like that "actual progression, not just sandbox with random missions" statement's too vague and subjective. I, for one, don't want to be railroaded into a particular form of progression. Mile wide and an inch deep, indeed. 

1 hour ago, para 9 said:

Yes, it is unreasonable. You're not owed indefinite support.

Breaking Ground released in 2019. The most recent version of Windows in 2019 was Windows 10. Windows 10 support ends later this year. 

And I remember being told that Windows 10 would be the last operating system they'd release, everything going forwards would just be updates. I'm running hardware that was a year old when 10 came out, and doesn't support 11. 
 

1 hour ago, para 9 said:

Riddle me this, joker: why doesn't Microsoft still support Windows 95? Aren't the people who purchased it owed support for life?

Do not cite the deep magic to me, witch. I was there when it was written.
 

1 hour ago, para 9 said:

"When does the obligation end, then?"

The so-called obligation, to host a free forum, never existed in the first place. You're displaying a seriously unwarranted and false sense of entitlement. 

I was referring to the obligation for support, not the obligation "to host a free forum". You've got a major attitude problem and assumption issues, m80. 
 

1 hour ago, para 9 said:

Don't be mad at me, or the new owners. You should direct your anger at Nate for (almost) single-handedly destroying the franchise, IMO. 

Don't be mad at Nate, be mad at T2 for imposing dumb repurposed bovine waste on the entire IG team. The buck stops at the desk of T2's CEO, not Nate's. 

[Skorj]

5 hours ago, Grenartia said:

You mistakenly presume I was implying the forum is a positive asset for the buyers. "we have a forum" wasn't a selling point. It was a matter of "We're looking to sell everything associated with Private Division, including the entire KSP IP, and that includes the KSP forum". From Haveli's perspective we're the couch the tenants left behind when they left the apartment. 

Funny you should say that.  I just yesterday found a wallet in the couch the previous tenants left behind in my place as I was moving it out.  The history of the KSP1 forums are of some value to nyone wanting to carry forward the KSP brand, assuming such a person exists.  The KSP2 forums are just baggage that comes with that.

5 hours ago, Grenartia said:

2. Disagreed. I couldn't care less about clouds, volumetric or not, or pretty exhaust plumes. Colorable parts? Sure. A consistent part-art style (think what the base game or restock offer compared to the *original* parts were, even before 0.90), definitely. But leave anything beyond the bare minimum to modders. 

You miss my point: currently adding stuff like volumetric clouds (which some would consider part of the bare minimum for a game where you can send probes into gas giants) isn't something within the realm of what most games would consider a mod.  It's a whole new large part of the game that needed to be added, which is why people can get away with paid mods for it.  The game would need to be designed for visual moddability in order for modders in the usual sense to add stuff like that.  And it should be so designed.

KSP is very much like a train sim game in this regard: there's so much room for extending the game by adding new parts and new planets, and the game needs built in support for modders adding new parts, planet data, and visuals for both   in order to develop the sort of long-lasting fan community KSP has.  KSP1 got away with a lot by being the first of its kind, but a modern game will need modern moddability.  Adding a new part should be some XML text and some 3D asset files in one of the standard formats (or just textures for a re-skin).

Am I the only one who sees the value here?  Train Simulator Classic has like $20,000 worth of DLC, and Trainz a New Era has over 10,000 user-made items on the Steam Workshop IIRC.  Making it easy to add new parts and new destinations can add so much life to a simulator-type game as long as the core gameplay is engaging, and the new items are visually appealing.  Whether it's modders adding it, or DLC, or both, the key is making it easy to add content.

[AtomicTech]

On 1/15/2025 at 12:55 AM, Lisias said:

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.

 

I've already thrown the towel in; I'll pick it back up when there's news though

[Grenartia]

On 1/29/2025 at 10:43 PM, Skorj said:

You miss my point: currently adding stuff like volumetric clouds (which some would consider part of the bare minimum for a game where you can send probes into gas giants) isn't something within the realm of what most games would consider a mod.  It's a whole new large part of the game that needed to be added,

Its clouds. Its just friggin clouds. Its just fancy visuals that add no gameplay features and negatively impacts performance.

Edited Tuesday at 09:16 AM by Grenartia

[Bej Kerman]

3 hours ago, Grenartia said:

Its clouds. Its just friggin clouds. Its just fancy visuals that add no gameplay features and negatively impacts performance.

Oh how I have the perfect game for you.

Incidentally, its 1993 sequel also had clouds.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Oh how I have the perfect game for you.

No joke, I still play this thing on my retro-computers now and then.

 

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Incidentally, its 1993 sequel also had clouds.

It's incredible how the guy managed to add volumetric clouds on an Amiga 500 machine without screwing the frame rate... If we at least could do the same nowadays...

 

6 hours ago, Grenartia said:

Its clouds. Its just friggin clouds. Its just fancy visuals that add no gameplay features and negatively impacts performance.

Jokes aside, I really found these clouds pretty beautiful. It only happens that I can't run it on my puny hardware - but I don't mind the game having them because I don't mind people having computers better than mine. As long as I can deactivate the thing in order to make it to run on the hardware I have now, I'm fine.

 

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

...

That said, Elite Frontier is a hell of a good game, this thing is legendary and Frontier Development managed to fund Elite Dangerous exactly due the game being legendary, with dated graphics and all.

You see, the key selling point is: good game, not nice volumetric clouds. If you don't have a good game yet, wasting resources on adding volumetric clouds is just... waste. They had way more important things to do (as freaking colliders for the whole KSC, damnit, they left the main landmark of the whole game lagging behind to add volumetric clouds?).

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

I don't mind people having computers better than mine.

The leading factor is -how many- people have a computer better or worse than yours... However nowadays you'll quickly realize there's more than one company pushing devs with money under the table to 'popularize' the obligatory inclusion of certain technologies... Still, the "average" pc nowadays is:

• 6 core minimum, 3.7 Ghz AMD or Intel (r5 3600 or i5 12400 more or less being the most popular)
• Nvidia RTX3060, RTX4060 or at a hasn't upgraded yet tier, a GTX1650 as the lowest. (~8Gb as the target VRAM, RT obligatory more recently, sadly.)
• 16GB ram with 32GB right about to become the most mainstream.
• 1080p single monitor with 1440p as secondary option.
• Somehow most people do have more than 1TB total space (though steam exposes most people have <250gb free from that).
• Less than 2% steam users have access to a VR headset (and that number actually went down!)

From that base line, it's a bit more fair to judge if one is right in asking for more/less graphics. KSP2 had a grossly outdated look, bar the opinion one might have on the artstyle, the graphics were just not up to par. Of course, some of those would be sacrificed for the performance of the simulation, but both games had the same issue with graphics being an afterthought. Raymarched volumetric clouds, weather effects, godrays and such are more than well-warranted for the most popular, entry level 'gamer' spec... Nowadays most gamers can run a level of raytracing even (sadly, again, hate how it's being massively rushed into the industry despite still looking like garbage)

[Lisias]

24 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Still, the "average" pc nowadays is:

Anyway aiming for the average is automatically alienating half of the potential user base.

Anyone minimally intelligent should be targeting their audience using the Bell Curve.

You should aim, at very least, the central 80% of the curve, from the bottom 10% to the maximum 10%. Anything below, or anything above, is wasting resources because such resource should be had allocated on something that would maximize the chances of selling a copy to that 80%.

Had anyone, at least once, wondered why the average age of the games played by 47% of Steam users is 7 years old? For 37% of them, it's even older.

https://www.cbr.com/players-spend-15-percent-steam-time-games-from-2024/

 

Edited Tuesday at 05:38 PM by Lisias
brute force post merge

[PDCWolf]

Just now, Lisias said:

Anyway aiming for the average is automatically alienating half of the potential user base.

Anyone minimally intelligent should be targeting their audience using the Bell Curve.

You should aim, at very least, the central 80% of the curve, from the bottom 10% to the maximum 10%. Anything below, or anything above, is wasting resources because such resource should be had allocated on something that would maximize the changes of selling a copy to that 80%.

If you want % ranges:

• ~64% of gamers have -at least- a 3060 or similar and better (8GB or more VRAM).
• ~80% of gamers have 16GB or more ram.
• ~86% of gamers play at 1080p or above
• ~78% of gamers have a CPU with 6 or more cores
• ~75% of gamers have a CPU at or above 3Ghz (laptops -really- mess with this metric)
• ~92% of gamers have at least 500GB storage space with ~80% having at least 150GB free.

Still, you can't apply the bell curve linearly to the target of your game, because (discounting previous interest) people with higher range PCs are less likely to try bad looking games their hardware can easily run, and the same is true for the opposite group, with people with weak hardware being much less likely to muck around with settings and INIs to try and get games to work on their systems. This is why you aim at a specific range of PCs with most blockbusters aiming specifically at the "average pc".

Now the almost obligatory DLSS/FSR and soon to be obligatory (still, sadly) Raytracing... you'll see the bare minimum pumped to RTX2000 and RX6000 series... and just you wait for the upcoming 5 years of games when everything is an underperforming, disgustingly dithered, badly lighted UE5 mess.

 

[Grenartia]

6 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Oh how I have the perfect game for you.

Incidentally, its 1993 sequel also had clouds.

Yeah, this is the kind of response I expected, but, like, there is a bare minimum of graphical fidelity that facilitates good gameplay. I.E., you can tell the difference between Kerbin and the Mun. Clouds are extraneous. Sure, they look pretty, but making them a priority for development over actual gameplay features (I do consider paintable parts a feature, because there's at least some utility to being able to colorcode things) is a bad investment of dev time and money. How many people say "damn, we didn't get colonies in KSP2, but at least we've got clouds!"?

 

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

Jokes aside, I really found these clouds pretty beautiful. It only happens that I can't run it on my puny hardware - but I don't mind the game having them because I don't mind people having computers better than mine. As long as I can deactivate the thing in order to make it to run on the hardware I have now, I'm fine.

I'm in pretty much the same boat. Its a nice option to have at the end of the day, but as long as its purely optional, and implementing it doesn't distract from delivering on far more important features, I have no complaints. 
 

 

2 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

The leading factor is -how many- people have a computer better or worse than yours... However nowadays you'll quickly realize there's more than one company pushing devs with money under the table to 'popularize' the obligatory inclusion of certain technologies... Still, the "average" pc nowadays is:

• 6 core minimum, 3.7 Ghz AMD or Intel (r5 3600 or i5 12400 more or less being the most popular)
• Nvidia RTX3060, RTX4060 or at a hasn't upgraded yet tier, a GTX1650 as the lowest. (~8Gb as the target VRAM, RT obligatory more recently, sadly.)
• 16GB ram with 32GB right about to become the most mainstream.
• 1080p single monitor with 1440p as secondary option.
• Somehow most people do have more than 1TB total space (though steam exposes most people have <250gb free from that).
• Less than 2% steam users have access to a VR headset (and that number actually went down!)

From that base line, it's a bit more fair to judge if one is right in asking for more/less graphics. KSP2 had a grossly outdated look, bar the opinion one might have on the artstyle, the graphics were just not up to par. Of course, some of those would be sacrificed for the performance of the simulation, but both games had the same issue with graphics being an afterthought. Raymarched volumetric clouds, weather effects, godrays and such are more than well-warranted for the most popular, entry level 'gamer' spec... Nowadays most gamers can run a level of raytracing even (sadly, again, hate how it's being massively rushed into the industry despite still looking like garbage)

I'm running:
 

• 4 core i5 4460 (3.2GHz)
• GTX 1050 Ti (4GB VRAM), originally used stock Intel graphics
• 16GB of RAM (computer came installed with 12 for some reason, and that reason is its a Dell)
• One 1080p monitor
• One 2TB SSD (originally had one 1TB HDD, still kept as a backup drive)
• No VR
   

Yes, I'm aware most of my hardware is basically a decade old. But that's why I don't have time for nonsense about "pwetty cwouds". inb4 "upgrade": I've been unemployed for 5 years, and will likely remain unemployed for the foreseeable future, so unless someone's gonna start an upgrade donation drive for me (which I'm not asking for, to be clear), an upgrade isn't really in the cards. 

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Still, you can't apply the bell curve linearly to the target of your game

Agreed. But it's good enough for a discussion on a Forum. And even by using dumb approximations, it gives us pretty interesting numbers, like that matemagical of mine when I ended up calculating that could be possible for KSP2 had reached about 95K sells instead of the 80Ks if they had allowed the game to run fine on a GPU with 4GB of VRAM.

 

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

because (discounting previous interest) people with higher range PCs are less likely to try bad looking games their hardware can easily run, and the same is true for the opposite group, with people with weak hardware being much less likely to muck around with settings and INIs to try and get games to work on their systems.

Being the precise reason the game must support both of them seamlessly instead of using the money to add every single possible eyecandy possible to please only the top tier and rellying only on modders to support the others. 

 

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Now the almost obligatory DLSS/FSR and soon to be obligatory (still, sadly) Raytracing... you'll see the bare minimum pumped to RTX2000 and RX6000 series... and just you wait for the upcoming 5 years of games when everything is an underperforming, disgustingly dithered, badly lighted UE5 mess.

It's years that people (like me) are warning, and this just don't sink on some heads - the World is developing on a very, very harsh economical crisis. Anyone relying on top hardware are going to be out of business, including hardware sellers.

The Game Industry already fired an awful amount of people, so the workforce is terribly handicapped and unable to deliver enough to satisfy such high demands.

Let's talk about something else: is anyone following the Windows 11 adoption rate? Had anyone noted that, by the first time in History, the adoption rate is shrinking, with users rolling back to Windows 10 in greater numbers than updating to 11? Had anyone noted that this happened exactly as Microsoft tightens the grip over demanding new hardware?

Had anyone tried to plot that curve over the hardware distribution normal from Steam?

Interesting conclusions are waiting you.

 

2 hours ago, Grenartia said:

 

• 4 core i5 4460 (3.2GHz)
• GTX 1050 Ti (4GB VRAM), originally used stock Intel graphics
• 16GB of RAM (computer came installed with 12 for some reason, and that reason is its a Dell)
• One 1080p monitor
• One 2TB SSD (originally had one 1TB HDD, still kept as a backup drive)
• No VR

 

I have some monstrosities available to me, one of them futurelly having 24 cores and 192GB of RAM. But, guess what, I can't afford having it running the whole weekend for playing, the electrical bill would kill me. So my best hardware are used only on tasks where I make money.

Gaming is done with whatever I have left around here, and as long it doesn't consumes too much electricity - that right now is pretty bigger than a Steam Deck but... it's also disassembled because I prefer to play on Steam Deck nowadays, I can do it on my coach or bed, and can just pause the damned thing instead of having to save/load the whole game every time I find some minutes to play. And so I'm postponing buying the component that is broken on that thing, because I always have better things to do with the money, like my son's health care.

Interesting enough, I'm playing more nowadays with my Steam Deck that I used to do with my nice powerful (and currently disassembled) gaming rig. Guess where are that missing component on my priority list? Definitively not on even on the first page.

The absolutely majority of people will be more or less like us: not affording the hardware, or even affording it but for profitable tasks only because electric bills, who would guess?, are also on the rise together food and renting costs. And when both is not a problem, the poor stand-up guy just don't have time to play.

Money is going to be a pretty scarce commodity in the next years, the World is going into a recession. Point.

Edited Tuesday at 10:22 PM by Lisias
Adding link, fixing the statistics (95k, not 98k!)

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

Agreed. But it's good enough for a discussion on a Forum. And even by using dumb approximations, it gives us pretty interesting numbers, like that matemagical of mine when I ended up calculating that could be possible for KSP2 had reached about 95K sells instead of the 80Ks if they had allowed the game to run fine on a GPU with 4GB of VRAM.

The mathematical average is somewhere around 7542Mb VRAM for the 50th percentile. Funnily enough in that post you link you use the "most popular" GPU (1060 at the time) to justify your point, so I'll stand by my "most popular" pc parts nowadays to justify mine just fine.

 

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

Being the precise reason the game must support both of them seamlessly instead of using the money to add every single possible eyecandy possible to please only the top tier and rellying only on modders to support the others. 

On the contrary, UE5 for example brings all of those graphics options by default, and applying Nanites so that meshes with hundreds of millions of polygons "work" is as simple as a single button. Nowadays it's actually more work to optimize down than to slap a DLSS-ON label on things and ask for a 2070 than to painfully go through every option making sure it's toggleable and the toggle actually has the expected impact on performance.

Of course, this changes a lot with a custom engine, but that's not what KSP2 did, is it? The way games are built nowadays means it's just easier to "add every single possible eyecandy" than to work the way down the performance tree and in come cases even the engine's own source code to ensure retrocompatibility and low-detail performance.

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

It's years that people (like me) are warning, and this just don't sink on some heads - the World is developing on a very, very harsh economical crisis. Anyone relying on top hardware are going to be out of business, including hardware sellers.

And people are hellbent on moving forward with the policies that put the world in such a crisis, but I'll stand any day by the idea that a 3060 is not high end hardware, it's the bare minimum you get on basic and cheap prebuilts. Nowadays a 4060 can even run for cheaper (it is a worse card after all) and even that still hits 8GB VRAM.

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

Anyone relying on top hardware are going to be out of business, including hardware sellers.

Meanwhile, AI is the biggest seller of graphics cards, and exactly what people have to thank for keeping the 5090 at the price it is, and keeping the 5080 and below with puny vram capacities, whilst still being expensive. Hardware has gotten expensive because it sells like hotcakes. Everything related to datacenters (AI or not) is booming and even client purchases have started to recover after the post-covid slump. The one thing really on its way down is gaming as servers and AI make the hardware more expensive.

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

Let's talk about something else: is anyone following the Windows 11 adoption rate? Had anyone noted that, by the first time in History, the adoption rate is shrinking, with users rolling back to Windows 10 in greater numbers than updating to 11? Had anyone noted that this happened exactly as Microsoft tightens the grip over demanding new hardware?

Had anyone tried to plot that curve over the hardware distribution normal from Steam?

This won't blow up until after win10 is put out of service this october and the last warnings are sent to layman users. The blip of power/knowledgeable users switching away from Windows has already passed and it was a <1% blip on Linux and mac adoption (and mac is still going down). I know the uni lab I overwatch will not touch win11 and will remain on win10 until authorities get involved and demand it, which could be years from now. We're not internet or AI dependent thankfully.

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

Gaming is done with whatever I have left around here, and as long it doesn't consumes too much electricity

Another thing you have to thank the crypto and now AI boom and of course the datacenter proliferation. It's much more profitable to sell electricity to those guys whilst you have to manage with gas heating and be a good boy and use paper straws.

This is not a crisis, this is centralized, high energy consumption technology and its peripheral culture proliferating at a very accelerated rate and the layman having to pay for it, both in the price of services, as well as the price of hardware, being perpetually assaulted by subscriptions without ownership, the commodification and gentrification of things, and so on.

  

5 hours ago, Grenartia said:

Yes, I'm aware most of my hardware is basically a decade old. But that's why I don't have time for nonsense about "pwetty cwouds". inb4 "upgrade": I've been unemployed for 5 years, and will likely remain unemployed for the foreseeable future, so unless someone's gonna start an upgrade donation drive for me (which I'm not asking for, to be clear), an upgrade isn't really in the cards. 

I wouldn't ask you to upgrade... I'm juggling money around to try and upgrade myself... and I still have to somehow buy a laptop for work too. However, what I would ask for, is for you to recognize that you're now part of a minority group running very old hardware, and that games have no reason (economical) to target your build... and your build should not be what dictates how a game is made.

Edited yesterday at 12:56 AM by PDCWolf

[Lisias]

21 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

The mathematical average is somewhere around 7542Mb VRAM for the 50th percentile. Funnily enough in that post you link you use the "most popular" GPU (1060 at the time) to justify your point, so I'll stand by my "most popular" pc parts nowadays to justify mine just fine.

Because the 1060, the most popular GPU a few months after KSP2 launch, was a curiosity, and not the core of the argument.

Please read the post again: the argument is that lowering the bottom line to 4GB GPUs would potentially increase  the sells from 80K to 95K - of course, in the statistical World.

So, and again by using 8GB as the bottom line, a game would potentially reach about 50% of the total user base.

Lowering to 4GB, today, would potentially reach about 18% more people, or almost 70% of the total user base.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

As from January 2025, we have:

Perhaps you would be working on a market in which one could ditch 18% of the potential market without consequences. Good for you.

IMHO, the Game Industry is not there anymore.

  

21 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Meanwhile, AI is the biggest seller of graphics cards, and exactly what people have to thank for keeping the 5090 at the price it is, and keeping the 5080 and below with puny vram capacities, whilst still being expensive. Hardware has gotten expensive because it sells like hotcakes. Everything related to datacenters (AI or not) is booming and even client purchases have started to recover after the post-covid slump.

<...>

And exactly how do you plan to sell games to them? I hope you did noticed that the grey line, Gaming, is plummeting...

Edited yesterday at 01:17 AM by Lisias
brute force post merge

[PDCWolf]

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Because the 1060, the most popular GPU a few months after KSP2 launch, was a curiosity, and not the core of the argument.

Please read the post again: the argument is that lowering the bottom line to 4GB GPUs would potentially increase  the sells from 80K to 95K - of course, in the statistical World.

So, and again by using 8GB as the bottom line, a game would potentially reach about 50% of the total user base.

Lowering to 4GB, today, would potentially reach about 18% more people, or almost 70% of the total user base.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

As from January 2025, we have:

Perhaps you would be working on a market in which one could ditch 18% of the potential market without consequences. Good for you.

IMHO, the Game Industry is not there anymore.

 

 

From that same image: 65.86% of gamers have 8GB Vram or more.

Including those who have 6 or more into the spec would add 11.83% of gamers into that pool, or about 60% of the remainder gamers previously left out. Going as low as 4GB Vram, when you consider real life things like the added overhead of testing, the fact those GPUs will not receive game-ready driver updates for your game, and the extra development time to add and test the low graphics options, and in some cases to even develop those low graphics options (like redoing textures or texture compression algorithms), it's not a question of "how much people we can sell our game to", it's a question of "how much extra cost is it to develop retrocompatibility?".

Creating low graphics options, specially on newer engines, eats into development time and development costs. It's not economically viable, and even if it was, going as low as supporting 4GB is not even statistically sound, with 6GB being a somewhat acceptable tradeoff if you really need the extra market cap.

13 minutes ago, Lisias said:

IMHO, the Game Industry is not there anymore.

It's not, but not because they're targeting the wrong hardware, the industry is where it is because of a series of bad decisions prioritizing the wrong things rather than making good games. Confidence is low, hardware sales are more or less as they were pre-covid.

[Lisias]

2 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

From that same image: 65.86% of gamers have 8GB Vram or more

What means that supporting 4GB would increase the market to  65.86% + 11.83% + 7.31% = 85% of the potential user base. Interesting... the Bell Curve is working...

Now... Perhaps you may be talking specifically about the USA market, and not the World's? If yes and you are talking USA only, you may have a point. But, yet, please note that USA currently it's less then 20% of the total Steam Traffic. 4% less than China.

https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

(As from February 2025).

Fun fact: Antarctica had a 58.2 GB traffic on this chart! Dude, there's gamers everywhere - I'm looking forward for the Moon's data in the future!

I invite you to sum up Eurasia and South America, the continents that are going to get some economical backslash in the near future (dude, Germany is done...).

Even if you are right on USA, USA have nowadays less then 20% of the gaming traffic in the World. It's absolutely unwise to bet only on this market.

Of course I'm assuming that traffic == sells, what's almost surely wrong. But, still, it's a good enough heuristics.

[Lisias]

12 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Confidence is low, hardware sales are more or less as they were pre-covid.

What means that hardware sales is on a retraction. The Nominal GDP of the World increased from 88.1T (2019) to 106T (2023). And we don't have 2024 yet.

Spoiler

https://datacommons.org/tools/visualization#visType%3Dtimeline%26place%3DEarth%26sv%3D{"dcid"%3A"Amount_EconomicActivity_GrossDomesticProduction_Nominal"}

If after an increase of more than 17.9T (we don't have 2024 numbers yet), the hardware sales are still the same, then we have less people buying hardware. Way less people, because the population had grown too.

[Bej Kerman]

6 hours ago, Grenartia said:

Yeah, this is the kind of response I expected, but, like, there is a bare minimum of graphical fidelity that facilitates good gameplay. I.E., you can tell the difference between Kerbin and the Mun. Clouds are extraneous. Sure, they look pretty, but making them a priority for development over actual gameplay features (I do consider paintable parts a feature, because there's at least some utility to being able to colorcode things) is a bad investment of dev time and money. How many people say "damn, we didn't get colonies in KSP2, but at least we've got clouds!"?

But are paintable parts really a bare necessity? Or textures for that matter? I must say, Elite did perfectly fine with black-and-white wireframes 

[Lisias]

13 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

But are paintable parts really a bare necessity? Or textures for that matter? I must say, Elite did perfectly fine with black-and-white wireframes 

Well... This game was originally made for the BBC Micro B:

But Acorn was also selling a way more limited machine, called Electron, and they ported Elite to it too:

Granted, the main difference is that the Model B one has more colors on the wireframes. But, hey, both fo them were already an huge advance: non visible wires were being hidden, most games of that era couldn't do it even on more colourful machines:

But, yet, they also released a year later the Elite Enhanced, for BBC Models B with a thingy called The Tube, a coprocessor (in reality, a whole new independent processor with its own memory, transforming the machine into a de facto and the jure dual CPU solution!):

Now, a few years later Acorn launched a new 32 bits computer called Archimedes (one of the first ARM computers in history). And, yes, they ported Elite to it:

 

Quickly followed by Atari ST and Amiga 500 versions (that had, well, some more powerful graphics but weaker processors, so the rendering window is smaller, did you noticed?):

Look! Shading!

Elite had sold approximately 1 Million Copies on the most different platforms, including ZX Spectrum:

In the 80s, when entire industries that managed to sell 500.000 computers were considered a moderated success.

And how they managed to sell 1 Million copies on a time in which selling 100k to 150k were already considered a great result?

Well... Trimming the game to fit in whatever computer the user had at home, instead of expecting the user would buy a new computer each time they launched a new version of the game. Anyone willing to see how they accomplished this, they released the sources for most of these ports here: http://www.elitehomepage.org/archive/index.htm

For the sake of comparision, Donkey Kong - a stupendous success in the early 80s, sold about 15M copies in multiple platforms over the decade (from gamewatches to famicom). The Atari 8bit version of Donkey Kong sold 25.000 copies.

Edited 19 hours ago by Lisias
Tyops, as usulla...

[Dakitess]

7 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

[...] Creating low graphics options, specially on newer engines, eats into development time and development costs. It's not economically viable, and even if it was, going as low as supporting 4GB is not even statistically sound, with 6GB being a somewhat acceptable tradeoff if you really need the extra market cap. [...]

Is it ? For real ? Like, do we have insight about that asumption ? Fair enough, it won't be totally "free" to ensure some low-graphics settings. But with the nowadays tools, using generic game engine and so on, is it more than 1% of the total work time to be spent on ensuring some ability to degrade graphics and improve framerate with very very very (very (very)) common settings that we see for more than 15 years now ? I doubt.

And if it's 1-2% of extra work to allow low rig to be able to run your game, I really don't understand why this conversation, again, about clouds being "not necessary".

Damn, guys, hell, do we really want to stick in 2010-15 ? I don't get it, do you really want the dev to be lazy ? To not spend time on scenery ? Why even a new game then ? For new parts, new gameplay, without new graphics ? Wow, really, it's strictly impossible for me to get around this.

It became some kind of "gameplay is what matters the most" trend, for every game, like, "we don't care" : of course we do, it's mandatory ! You would not have the nowadays game with the incremental evolution of graphics and physics ! And at a time, it was all about water realism, then texture, tesselation, fake relief, lightning, resolution, vertices, optimization, etc etc etc : without those "I don't care about that game being more aesthetic" we would be stuck with damned ugly game.

And again and again, scenery and overall graphics SERVE the gameplay. A LOT. Like, really. Please, go ahead, enjoy your 20yo Tomb Raider with so many vertices and textures that you miss the platform. Enjoy the camera doing excrements because the wall and the whole environment hitbox is not well enough defined. Enjoy the lack of shadows, details, textures of a beautiful scene, it surely is dispensable. It's not, it's just limited by the era the game appeared.

Let us having a KSP-like with beautiful clouds, scenery, well detailed parts, state of the art terrain, correct lightning. I bet a finger that you'll still get the ability to run 720p resolution with 1/8 textures and no shadows, running on a 1050 or even a 2020 iGPU.  Really I do, and then I don't understand why you would call for dev laziness. Damn guys.

The ONLY way to get upset by research of good graphics is if it pushes the bar too high with a game that no one can properly run. Oh wait : KSP2 is ugly AND does not run well, haha. No need for aesthetic when even an outdated looking game is running so poorly. Blame the dev, the optimization, the choices, not the wish to get clouds and trees.

[Lisias]

4 minutes ago, Dakitess said:

Let us having a KSP-like with beautiful clouds, scenery, well detailed parts, state of the art terrain, correct lightning.

That's the whole point: in order to some have the most beautiful graphics the money can buy, you also need to sell the game to people that don't care about them in order to make the whole enterprise affordable for everybody.

And to be able to convince people to fund a game with features they will not be able to use, you need to really excel on the features they will.

No one is telling people to do not add volumetric clouds into the game. We are complaining about not being able to run the game without it, and (adding offense to the injury) dragging the feet on essential features that renders the clouds irrelevant if not made right.

[Dakitess]

Which is... An issue with KSP2 development. Nowhere near a generalization to be made. None other game is struggling because of clouds or unable to deactivate / degrade them to get a game running on basic rigs.

Again : I'm totally supporting the idea that a KSP successor should (or even MUST) run on... Very very old / basic computer. Just like KSP did, while being particularly badly optimized. I would even dare to say that my expectation of KSP2 would be to run 1080p with low settings (whatever it means, like lowering all the settings possible, but keeping 1080p) on a 2020 iGPU. Yes, yes, an iGPU. Because it's in the ADN of KSP to run on students laptop. On an unplugged computer in the train (might go down to 720p then haha, it's fine). It's really part of KSP, it has been played in places and condition like few other games. I even consider that if Stock KSP is running 20FPS with a given rocket in KSP, on a old-ish laptop, then it should run 30 FPS on the very same laptop, very same craft reproduction, in 720-1080p low, while being 3 times more beautiful. Because... Optimization, dev from scrach. KSP1 is supposed to be a junk when it comes to optimization, so the next one should be a high step better in this regard. I would not understand how it would not happen, except for laziness and bad choices / skill development.

BUT this is totally compatible with beautiful graphics and aesthetic. Sure, volumetric clouds should not be impossible to deactivate if it's a bottleneck for low end PC. That's an evidence. Just like we CANT have a new KSP game in 2023+ without cloud in Vanilla. How could it be ? A space game, dealing with rocket, plane, atmoshere, etc, without... Clouds ? C'mon ! It's just a matter of developing them corectly.

[PDCWolf]

5 hours ago, Dakitess said:

Is it ? For real ? Like, do we have insight about that asumption ? Fair enough, it won't be totally "free" to ensure some low-graphics settings. But with the nowadays tools, using generic game engine and so on, is it more than 1% of the total work time to be spent on ensuring some ability to degrade graphics and improve framerate with very very very (very (very)) common settings that we see for more than 15 years now ? I doubt.

And if it's 1-2% of extra work to allow low rig to be able to run your game, I really don't understand why this conversation, again, about clouds being "not necessary".

At the level of off-the-shelf engines, yes. Off-the-shelf stuff offers easy ways to implement 'good looks', with one of the most popular being the paid version of unity (before their whole debacle) offering almost one click post-processing effects that looked gorgeous. It's much more than 1%, even for something basic like say you enable those post-processing effects... In engine that's a rendering flag that conjures up some pre-made shaders near the end of the rendering pipeline, honestly one of the 'easiest' options to make toggleable... however that will derive in creating UI work to present the option to the customer, testing time to test the proper workings of said option (especially if you change unity versions down the line!) and it will duplicate visual inspections to see that things look correct with and without the PP shaders correctly. And again, that's just shaders, which in that particular case are really dumb, simple, lightweight end of the line shaders. 

Things like volumetrics (clouds, fog, sometimes even lighting) are much deeper and much more crucial to the rendering pipeline, so much so in most games you aren't even allowed to outright turn them off, just simplify them. And in the games you are allowed to turn them off? Most times your feedback will no longer be taken into account because you've destroyed the lighting of every scene, the expected view distance, and so on. Unlike shaders, this would need to be tested in different graphics APIs, different graphics card vendors (Remember how KSP2 clouds had issues at first with all AMD cards and then with AMD RX 6XXX cards?) and couple with different settings to see what breaks and what looks bad. It's a ton of overhead, much more than 1-2%.

TL;DR

• For toggling graphics settings, the most you can hope for is the toggle already comes in the game engine you're using, meaning the work is just a couple hours to get the UI to have the option, and then some small overhead of testing on every version, a bit bigger when you change unity versions.
• If the setting involves changing to different shaders, or changing to different qualities of textures or meshes, then you're looking at days of work, days of design making the lower resolution assets, and you've basically at least duplicated your testing load by having to test scenes in multiple settings. You're also now testing performance, which requires a ton of probing, measuring, and tracking of data to see if the option is having the expected impact.
• If your setting requires different rendering techniques (volumetric to static for example, as you can't outright remove clouds or fog), or LODding of meshes, or anything that requires multiple versions of assets, you're looking at months of production work to create the assets and effects, and then you're looking at rigorous testing that has to take place in different hardware configurations, driver versions, and so on.