The game failed because...

[Flush Foot]

4 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

immediate satisfactory

Ahh... there's an idea! I was intending to split my time between my recently-started modded-KSP1 playthrough and Dyson Sphere Program, but maybe I'll return to my Satisfactory save that I basically abandoned in Dec 2023 when DSP and KSP2 both put out 'significant' patches.

[Acvila]

Because someone took a lot of bad decisions... After I saw first video from Scott, I knew this game it's not for me and far from the original. The bad part is that because of the hopes of a good game i stopped playing KSP after that failure of a launch, also because of the damn launcher!

[Meecrob]

47 minutes ago, Icegrx said:

When the goal is to layoff people to reduce costs, you’ll find that refunds are extremely unlikely.

especially if projects are canceled. They aren’t going to turn their money pit into a bigger money pit. 

I'm not going to debate tried-and-true methods of damage control that have been used since trade was invented. You screw up, you own it, you fix it, you ask forgiveness. Take Two has done none of those. The layoffs are because Take Two thinks they are more business-savvy than they are.

[NexusHelium]

On a completely unrelated note, who else be watching Matt Lowne's stream right now?

[Flush Foot]

3 minutes ago, NexusHelium said:

On a completely unrelated note, who else be watching Matt Lowne's stream right now?

Thanks for the heads-up!

[AtomicTech]

35 minutes ago, NexusHelium said:

On a completely unrelated note, who else be watching Matt Lowne's stream right now?

I'm not; what's going on?

[NexusHelium]

1 minute ago, AtomicTech said:

I'm not; what's going on?

I think he's streaming until we get news on KSP and it's development.

[Flush Foot]

Just now, NexusHelium said:

I think he's streaming until we get news on KSP and it's development.

Or until bedtime

[NexusHelium]

Just now, Flush Foot said:

Or until bedtime

We'll see lol

[AtomicTech]

1 minute ago, NexusHelium said:

I think he's streaming until we get news on KSP and it's development.

Gotcha lol

Keep us posted

[NexusHelium]

Just now, AtomicTech said:

Keep us posted

well. the game is beautiful as usual.

...

that's about it lol

[m4inbrain]

5 hours ago, regex said:

lolwut dude? It's non-stop doomsaying in here, what the hell are you reading?

Yeah, now it is. 

We literally had threads about "toxic positivity", just because you decided for yourself to simply ignore the early stages of the KSP2 release doesn't mean they didn't happen. Nor does it mean that you get to rewrite history. People were absolutely curbstomped when they came out and said what is now considered mostly the consensus about the game. 

[Vanamonde]

Lots of personal attacks going on. They've been removed. Please keep it civil. 

[Alewx]

... Nate just knows to make shiny promises, and create hype, but does not deliver.

Still remember, he did what the big publishers always demand, make it more accessable for broader public, aka dump things down. stupid flash animations made ppl learn orbital mechanics in KSP, it was because it was required to get somewhere, it was an incentive to learn because it did not assist you.
And then the woke staff, that is a giant red flag, combined with the whole style over substance development, they simply do not even understand the concept of make things actually accessable by making them readable, but noo we have to use some stupid font style that is just so 80s.

What makes me angry the most is that someone like Nate and these that caused the fail, will always just land on their feet and continue on burning the next project while the others have to suffer from their wrong doing, it sucks.

[Icegrx]

29 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:

Lots of personal attacks going on. They've been removed. Please keep it civil. 

Oh boy, you have your work cut out for you tonight @Vanamonde 

[Superfluous J]

5 hours ago, NexusHelium said:

On a completely unrelated note, who else be watching Matt Lowne's stream right now?

Not me. I've got plenty of better things to do and do you really think someone's going to call him and let him know the "real" information?

[K33N]

20 hours ago, SmokerCraft said:

This forum. And Discord.

And the inability of the whole KSP2 team to deliver on anything they said.

But this forum, and Discord.... Anyone who said anything critical was pushed out. (an obvious exaduration... only here or Discord would anyone have to spell out generalizations and sarcasm) You all created an environment where it was OK to under achieve. I really, really despise this place. 

The environment they curated on their official discord didn't help the community or the devs, but let's not pretend it was anything other than the developer and publisher that were responsible.

[Madrocketman]

22 hours ago, SmokerCraft said:

This forum. And Discord.

And the inability of the whole KSP2 team to deliver on anything they said.

But this forum, and Discord.... Anyone who said anything critical was pushed out. (an obvious exaduration... only here or Discord would anyone have to spell out generalizations and sarcasm) You all created an environment where it was OK to under achieve. I really, really despise this place. 

While I was still doing KSP YouTube content I had quite the paparazzi lifestyle on following updates, especially on the former account that got deleted back in 2021. I watched it get announced at the beginning of high school and got to test early access when it came out near graduation. So here's what I would have to say on the matter.

The public environment around development seemed to sour when the performance requirements were released and early access soon afterward. Before then, I couldn't recall mass disapproval of the development of KSP 2. I could think of a few names that would be doomers about development when they would announce a delay, but most of the KSP community was very patient and understanding about the delays.

If it is dead, which I'm not sure about, I haven't played the game in a year so I haven't been necessarily in the heat of the moment as I have found interest in other things like Amtrak, I think what "killed the game," was the apparent lack of significant progress. Yeah, we could tell if they have enhanced a new extraterrestrial planet or changed some graphics whenever they released a trailer or screenshot. But to have less than the KSP 1 base game available at the start of early access, and take an entire year to get some science into the game? Like when was multiplayer expected to release, in 2028? I think most of the KSP community was exhausted by the worn-out hype. 

It seems there were some management issues. Throughout development, I could recall the controversy that came when Star Theory was replaced by Intercept Games. And it seems that the game was held back in development from such. However, that is speculation on my part, not official. I don't think it was the forum's fault, or the discord for that matter. 
 

4 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Lots of personal attacks going on. They've been removed. Please keep it civil. 

Been forever since I have replied to a post on the forums. But still, the same banana on the website keeps civility present. Nice to see you around Vanamonde  

[Jaypeg]

23 hours ago, SmokerCraft said:

This forum. And Discord.

And the inability of the whole KSP2 team to deliver on anything they said.

But this forum, and Discord.... Anyone who said anything critical was pushed out. (an obvious exaduration... only here or Discord would anyone have to spell out generalizations and sarcasm) You all created an environment where it was OK to under achieve. I really, really despise this place. 

if anything it was the toxisity that was caused from this kind of mindset.
This had not only no impact on the game but is also untrue. THe discord and forums are 90% complaints, they just aren't as awful as you want them to be

[Cytauri]

As I’ve said in other posts, KSP 2’s lack of communication (weekly updates on development, dev chats, etc..) was the true problem with this project. I’m sure they had some stuff that they have been doing behind closed doors, but just didn’t share it due to either them not being able to, or simply just not doing so. That made people lose interest because we didn’t know what the hell was going on. If you look at another game that gets a lot of criticism about its slow development process, Star Citizen, you can see that every week or so, they have a post talking about what they did in the past few weeks. Just today, they released their post and it has a load of details about what progress they’ve made and what’s to come. I think that is what the true problem with KSP 2 along with the absolutely uncountable other problems. 

[jebycheek]

Long story short: too much promises too little being fulfilled-> lack of transparency because there isn't really much to show-> disappointment and suspicion-> low sell, bad rating->lay off.

[WelshSteW]

They didn't have the skills to do what they wanted to do.

We should have realised this when they tried to put one of the best mods into KSP1, the alarm clock. They had everything they needed. They had a working version, with source code, and they still produced a version of it which was utter crap.

And I think that's why so much time was spent on making things look pretty, because that's all they were able to do.

 

They didn't fix the poor performance when you use more than a few parts, they didn't fix the wobbly rockets issue (in fact they made it worse), they didn't have re-entry heating, they had a broken aero system...

[Gydra54]

10 minutes ago, WelshSteW said:

They didn't have the skills to do what they wanted to do.

We should have realised this when they tried to put one of the best mods into KSP1, the alarm clock. They had everything they needed. They had a working version, with source code, and they still produced a version of it which was utter crap.

And I think that's why so much time was spent on making things look pretty, because that's all they were able to do.

 

They didn't fix the poor performance when you use more than a few parts, they didn't fix the wobbly rockets issue (in fact they made it worse), they didn't have re-entry heating, they had a broken aero system...

I used to think these takes were mean unfounded speculation, but I have come to adopt the same opinion over time.

I don't think anyone on the KSP2 dev team is a "bad dev" per say, I just don't think most of them are the right devs. You cannot make a KSP with normal game devs. You need someone that is highly skilled, highly creative, someone that can take real physics concepts and translate them, sometimes in very unintuitive ways, into something that works in a video game. If you pick the right people, you can probably make something significantly better than KSP1 with half the employees as IG.

Take the clouds for example. Yes BlackRack had a few years modding head start on clouds, but the improvement was absolutely enormous. In the same amount of time KSP2 has been in development, BlackRack already had a far superior cloud and atmospherics solution, on their own. This is the impact of having "the right person." Honestly, seeing that default KSP atmospheric renderer in KSP2 gameplay videos was a massive red flag in hindsight. It feels more and more like IG was just apeing KSP1's solutions, and just trying to tweak them because they cannot come up with innovative solutions of their own, or are even unaware of pre-existing superior solutions in the modding community. Both are unfortunate possibilities.

Obviously this is all speculative, there could be any number of things in IG hindering development, but I think this is definitely a factor.

I can only hope by some miracle this all leads to a transfer to a different team that has better composition, but I doubt it.

[Siska]

1 hour ago, Gydra54 said:

You cannot make a KSP with normal game devs. You need someone that is highly skilled, highly creative, someone that can take real physics concepts and translate them, sometimes in very unintuitive ways, into something that works in a video game. If you pick the right people, you can probably make something significantly better than KSP1 with half the employees as IG.

 

but it was done before with KSP1 so....

I think here, the problem was:

• Underestimating the game
• Overestimating your capabilities as a PM
• Not delivering in time because of the latter two
• Mismanegement

Literally the bigger the dev team is, less good games they create overall. Similar to Bethesda's Starfield, the team there was over 500 people, while on Fallout 4 over 200, Skyrim a bit over 100. 

Also with bigger games, finnacial risk is way higher.

And as for KSP2, i said a long time ago it is done, because no one want's to buy it because of overhyped and underwhelming launch of EA. So financial calculation is logical for a game studio.

Why to invest even more money and sallaries if:

• No one will buy your game
• Player base is 10% of KSP1
• Bad reviews on Steam

They did it to themselves.

[Oak7603]

It failed due to over promising and under delivering by the studio. It's as simple as that.

I think I read that KSP2 has been going for 7 years in total and although the real development only started in the last few years, if anyone can say the release schedule, updates, performance, or anything other than the promotional pieces the studio put out were anything near what they hoped and expected for KSP2, even as an early access, then I would argue that you are some sort of fanboi or similar type.

Don't get me wrong, I get it. I paid full price for this too. I watched as it was sold cheaper not long after. I watched as the updates dribbled out. I tried to play it with the bugs - over 360 hours worth of playtime, so not a small amount - all while trying to stay positive, posting threads of the missions that I was doing, reporting the bugs, doing what I was asked to, but it wasn't enough.

I conceded to the truth a long time ago because this failed a long time ago.