The game failed because...

[PopinFRESH]

2 hours ago, m4ti140 said:

...The devs weren't given a chance to finish it. Whether it was corpo or studio higher ups that caused the delays in development doesn't really matter.

I think it is obvious that the game was supposed to launch as a feature complete game in 2020. It started development at some point at the end of 2017/beginning of 2018. I think more than 4 years of additional time, nearly 3 times longer than the original projection, is certainly "giving them a chance to finish it".

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, m4ti140 said:

The only thing that killed the game was corporate greed and mismanagement. Nobody from the team was deleting or shutting down suggestions, the only pushback I noticed was from users, I did have run in myself with that, I won't say who but everyone can read through the forums if they want to know There were certain individuals that were acting like the game was perfect as is and attacking anyone who posted suggestions, which devs asked for as that was the point of EA program to begin with, in a forum specifically dedicated to it. But again, those were not admins or devs, those were users, even if we put on a tinfoil hat and assume they were T2 paid trolls, all they could do is yap, it had no influence over the devs.

What killed the game isn't the right question to ask, the correct question to ask is who killed the game. T2 pencil pushers did. Corporations aren't a force of nature. The devs weren't given a chance to finish it. Whether it was corpo or studio higher ups that caused the delays in development doesn't really matter.

Don't cry about corporate greed when they got 4 delays and the chance to launch their mess as an unplayable EA without getting the boot for being completely incapable. Any other project would've died by 2020 when they killed the first studio.

FOUR DELAYS. That's the opposite of greed, that's burning money on a team that clearly is unable to deliver and might've completely mislead them with whatever they presented back in 2019 (remember the trailers?).

And even when they got the chance to finish it (from 2023 till FS!), they ruined it by making it so mediocre and basic nobody wanted the damn thing.

[Pthigrivi]

30 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Don't cry about corporate greed when they got 4 delays and the chance to launch their mess as an unplayable EA without getting the boot for being completely incapable. Any other project would've died by 2020 when they killed the first studio.

FOUR DELAYS. That's the opposite of greed, that's burning money on a team that clearly is unable to deliver and might've completely mislead them with whatever they presented back in 2019 (remember the trailers?).

And even when they got the chance to finish it (from 2023 till FS!), they ruined it by making it so mediocre and basic nobody wanted the damn thing.

I mean I would think at this point the best thing would be for you to take your own advice and just not place so much credulity in what developers say when it comes to timelines. The much beloved Factorio has been promising an expansion for years and we still don't have an official date. No one cares. Elon is constantly making basically absurd projections about how long things will take and no one cares. That part of it just doesn't actually matter. We do at this point know how long it took to bring the game from zero to a buggy but decent foundation, something that could have been released as an EA release, and it was between 6 and 7 years. That number doesn't surprise me, and it shouldn't have surprised T2. Instead of just cooling their jets and giving it another year to bake and then actually making decent project with long-term prospects for growth they flushed millions of dollars down the toilet. Thats because the their stock has been in a slump and they need to show a decent body count to investors to restore confidence. Those investors don't care if KSP2 is good or not or makes money or not 5 years from now. They'll be long gone by then. They have no real interest in the long-term health of T2 or anything else. They want to buy low and sell high as quickly as possible. And so runs the world away. 

Edited May 9 by Pthigrivi

[PDCWolf]

22 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I mean I would think at this point the best thing would be for you to take your own advice and just not place so much credulity in what developers say when it comes to timelines. The much beloved Factorio has been promising an expansion for years and we still don't have an official date. No one cares. Elon is constantly making basically absurd projections about how long things will take and no one cares.

I'm a Factorio customer. You know why people sit and wait patiently without complaint? because the game they paid for was so good they've probably finished it multiple times and are very happy with it, AND the dev has an amazing track record (one of the best EA experiences) of making really well informed reports on progress (actual progress) and delivering results.

KSP2 failed to deliver results, failed to deliver anything in a timely manner, failed to build trust.

24 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

We do at this point know how long it took to bring the game from zero to a buggy but decent foundation, something that could have been released as an EA release, and it was between 6 and 7 years.

Google how many years it's been since 2017 when development of KSP2 started (spoiler: 7 years). Time's up.

25 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

 That number doesn't surprise me, and it shouldn't have surprised T2

It didn't, which is why they gave them 4 extra years after the 3 they say they needed to produce a 2020 release.

25 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Those investors don't care if KSP2 is good or not or makes money or not 5 years from now. They'll be long gone by then. They have no real interest in the long-term health of T2 or anything else. They want to buy low and sell high as quickly as possible. And so runs the world away. 

You have always been free to start your own indie/AAA game company or publishing business and prove them wrong. This part of your post is just eat the rich drivel so really nothing to discuss about it.

[Pthigrivi]

9 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Time's up.

Times up for what though? Your personal expectations? Its not unusual for games to take 6-10 years to develop, especially when there's a studio change in the middle. You have personally been following all of these release dates very closely. You frankly seem more focused on that than anything else about the game. Out in the general world of gamers though no one cares. They could have delayed it another 3 times and no one would care. All that matters is what the actual play experience at the time of release is like and how it grows and is supported following that. Obviously what they released last march wasn't it, but if they'd released what we currently have it would have been a whole different story. Exactly one thing killed this iteration of the game--impatience. 

[Scarecrow71]

1 minute ago, Pthigrivi said:

Its not unusual for games to take 6-10 years to develop

And we are already 7 years and 2 studio closures in.  How much more time do you think we should give them?

2 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

They could have delayed it another 3 times and no one would care.

This entire community would care.  And if this boils down to bad business practices, I'm sure someone at the FTC might care.  Or the SEC.  Or several other gaming companies that might see an opening to come in and either perform a hostile takeover OR to start worming into buying the IP.

3 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

All that matters is what the actual play experience at the time of release is like and how it grows and is supported following that. Obviously what they released last march wasn't it, but if they'd released what we currently have it would have been a whole different story.

And at the time of release the game was barely a passable alpha tech demo.  Gameplay was horrid, bugs galore, and performance was rotten, even on higher-end machines.  The pace of bug-fixes/patches was pretty slow for an early access release, and we got 1 piece of new content prior to For Science - grid fins.  Oh joy, we can try to control our craft that wobbles all over the place even though SAS shouldn't be that broken to begin with.  For Science didn't fix much, and it actually hurt the game because of how dumbed-down the actual gathering of science was.  And how rigid the contracts/missions were.  And how broken some of the science-gathering parts were (such as the automated sample collector constantly being "blocked" by some mysterious force that couldn't be accounted for).  Not to mention that, even after FS, we still had day 1 game-breaking bugs present that they still couldn't fix (orbital lines disappearing, for example), and a maneuver node gadget that simply didn't work.  I want to believe that if they released the game with FS in February things would have been different, but after 10 months they still couldn't fix core, foundational issues.

7 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Exactly one thing killed this iteration of the game--impatience. 

Again, how much time do you think we should give them?  It's been 7 years since announcement, we've had multiple studio changes, multiple rounds of developers coming and going, and they still couldn't give us a game worth buying or playing.  SEVEN YEARS.

Let me ask you:  how have we been impatient?  Or are you talking about Take Two forcing a release on a game that wasn't ready (presumably; we don't know for sure if that is what happened or not)?  Are we just not supposed to ask questions and try to figure out how this all happened?  Should we just wait indefinitely for this?  Do you think we should just look the other way on all of this, heads stuck in the sand, and say to ourselves "It will all be fine if we just shut up"?

Impatience didn't kill this game.  Bad development decisions, an over-hyped non-existent product, and lousy management all killed this game.  If anything, being impatient was the only thing that brought most of this to light.

[PDCWolf]

4 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Times up for what though? Your personal expectations? Its not unusual for games to take 6-10 years to develop, especially when there's a studio change in the middle. You have personally been following all of these release dates very closely. You frankly seem more focused on that than anything else about the game. Out in the general world of gamers though no one cares. They could have delayed it another 3 times and no one would care. All that matters is what the actual play experience at the time of release is like and how it grows and is supported following that. Obviously what they released last march wasn't it, but if they'd released what we currently have it would have been a whole different story. Exactly one thing killed this iteration of the game--impatience. 

Not mine, the time T2 decided it'd burn money waiting for the game to turn a profit.

Out in the "general world of gamers", the game only sold 400.000 copies, being the AAA backed rebirth of a ten years old classic that sold 5+ million copies. You don't care about delays? that's great. In the "general world of gamers" when you say a date and fail to deliver your product loses hype, thus visibility, and in the end, sales. Sure, people aren't here scrutinizing development and most were actually holding onto their money... until nothing happened for a year and they moved on because some amazing games have come out.

It's not impatience, it's that the market keeps moving and more and more amazing stuff keeps coming out (even through a horrible year for gaming like 2023), and suddenly your product gets forgotten and that money being saved for maybe a playable version... well they got Helldivers 2 with that money and still had $10 to spare. Or they got Baldur's Gate 3 for that price, or the Elden Ring DLC, or Alan Wake, and so on.

That you believe people would somehow patiently sat here eating up 4+ years of trailers just shows the huge disconnect you have with the, as you say, "general world of gamers".

[FreeThinker]

24 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

And we are already 7 years and 2 studio closures in.  How much more time do you think we should give them?

7 years already, 7 months ago someone complained that for 7 months there was little progress with KSP2, I'm detecting a theme here ...

 

Edited May 9 by FreeThinker

[PDCWolf]

13 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

7 years already, 7 months ago someone complained that for 7 months there was little progress with KSP2, I'm detecting a theme theme here ...

And before merging forever with it in the hyperspace, the godlike descendants of humanity, a hivemind of a trillion, trillion, trillion humans joined across the universe asked the Analog Computer one last time: "When will KSP2 be ready?" AC is unable to answer but keeps pondering the question, even after the last star has died and humanity has long since merged with it in hyperspace.

Eventually, after uncountable eons, AC discovers the answer, but has nobody to tell, since the universe has long died already, so it decides to answer by demonstrating instead:

And AC said: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And KSP2 reached 1.0.

[Pthigrivi]

12 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

And we are already 7 years and 2 studio closures in.  How much more time do you think we should give them?

And at the time of release the game was barely a passable alpha tech demo.  Gameplay was horrid, bugs galore, and performance was rotten, even on higher-end machines.  The pace of bug-fixes/patches was pretty slow for an early access release, and we got 1 piece of new content prior to For Science - grid fins.  Oh joy, we can try to control our craft that wobbles all over the place even though SAS shouldn't be that broken to begin with.  For Science didn't fix much, and it actually hurt the game because of how dumbed-down the actual gathering of science was.  And how rigid the contracts/missions were.  And how broken some of the science-gathering parts were (such as the automated sample collector constantly being "blocked" by some mysterious force that couldn't be accounted for).  Not to mention that, even after FS, we still had day 1 game-breaking bugs present that they still couldn't fix (orbital lines disappearing, for example), and a maneuver node gadget that simply didn't work.  I want to believe that if they released the game with FS in February things would have been different, but after 10 months they still couldn't fix core, foundational issues.

Again, how much time do you think we should give them?  It's been 7 years since announcement, we've had multiple studio changes, multiple rounds of developers coming and going, and they still couldn't give us a game worth buying or playing.  SEVEN YEARS.

Oh I totally agree FS still included day one bugs, the structure of science gathering was good but a bit skeletal, over-rigid, and had pacing problems. I would have liked to see better mapping and LoS coms networks. Those are the kinds of things I expect from an EA release, and those are the kinds of things I'd expect to be addressed over the following year or two. You asked how much longer but I said exactly how much longer in the post you referenced--one more year. They released after 6 years (including lost time to the studio-rebuild) and they should have waited 7. Thats the answer. 
 

18 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Let me ask you:  how have we been impatient?  Or are you talking about Take Two forcing a release on a game that wasn't ready (presumably; we don't know for sure if that is what happened or not)? 

Yes Im talking about impatience on the part of T2. Many players were impatient too but all would have been forgiven if the release product was decent and the follow through was there. You and I agree thats not what happened and that sucks. 
 

19 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

It's not impatience, it's that the market keeps moving and more and more amazing stuff keeps coming out 

Except it is now 2024 and KSP really doesn't have a major competitor. I've tried Juno but its frankly joyless and jankier than KSP1 was. KSP carries a certain magic in a bottle by combining hard science with a light-hearted atmosphere. With colonies and resources I think it could have been a truly incredible game that made money for decades. That's been cut short by short-term thinking. 

[PDCWolf]

1 minute ago, Pthigrivi said:

Except it is now 2024 and KSP really doesn't have a major competitor. I've tried Juno but its frankly joyless and jankier than KSP1 was. KSP carries a certain magic in a bottle by combining hard science with a light-hearted atmosphere. With colonies and resources I think it could have been a truly incredible game that made money for decades. That's been cut short by short-term thinking. 

Games don't compete genre to genre, games compete for a fixed amount of disposable income people have to spend on them. We here, still discussing a dead product, happen to be the exception, not the rule. That KSP doesn't have a competitor is a problem for us KSP fans, of which there might be tens of thousands amongst here, the discord, the subreddit, and maybe up to a million at the absolute peak of things.

However the gaming market moves by appealing to the gaps where disposable income is at the ripest (why games release closer to Christmas, or closer to the mainline human birthing season). Again, the guy that was saving their $50 for release and didn't spend them (or got a refund) went and put it down for the RE:4 remake, TLOU1 PC, Ghostwire:Tokyo or Dead Island 2. The guy that held until FS! and wasn't convinced by it probably got Helldivers 2, Granblue, Palworld, Chaos Gate, FF7, and so on, and the money is just not there for KSP anymore.

And sure, they could've perpetually aimed their consequent releases for dates like those (like how I guessed Colonies might be july/august for the steam sale parade that starts around there), but the reality is there's less and less people interested because by then they would've passed the game up for purchase at least 2 big chances, and at least 3 minor patches inbetween.

[Pthigrivi]

5 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Games don't compete genre to genre, games compete for a fixed amount of disposable income people have to spend on them. We here, still discussing a dead product, happen to be the exception, not the rule. That KSP doesn't have a competitor is a problem for us KSP fans, of which there might be tens of thousands amongst here, the discord, the subreddit, and maybe up to a million at the absolute peak of things.

However the gaming market moves by appealing to the gaps where disposable income is at the ripest (why games release closer to Christmas, or closer to the mainline human birthing season). Again, the guy that was saving their $50 for release and didn't spend them (or got a refund) went and put it down for the RE:4 remake, TLOU1 PC, Ghostwire:Tokyo or Dead Island 2. The guy that held until FS! and wasn't convinced by it probably got Helldivers 2, Granblue, Palworld, Chaos Gate, FF7, and so on, and the money is just not there for KSP anymore.

Oh absolutely--KSP is a niche game and would probably always be a niche game. Frankly BG3 is a niche game, it just happened to be a good one. The amount of time a game takes to develop obviously can't be unlimited but I have never argued it should be unlimited. I have argued they should have taken 1 more year. One more year development doesn't really change what its up against. It's always going to be up against a range of niche titles with varying quality. What I've said again and again is all that matters is how good is it when that time comes so it can hold its own in the pack. Would I expect T2 to wait 15 or 20 years for that? No. Would one more year have been smart? Probably. 

[herbal space program]

24 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

And yet, said expansion has yet to come out.

As a fairly new player of Factorio, I can see how it shares both the brilliance of its initial concept with KSP1 and the conceptual difficulty of making a sequel to it that will provide new content that is equally engaging. Both games did one thing extremely well, but how to add to that with the same level of immersive magic is by no means clear to me. A lot of people around here expressed a lot of excitement about colonies and/or interstellar, but for my part I was having significant trepidation about how these additions might clash with various aspects of the original game to the point where the magic is gone for me. And that's not a problem you can blame on the developers or the execs at TT, it's the fundamental, harsh reality that some great movies actually don't have plausible sequels.

Edited May 9 by herbal space program

[PDCWolf]

  

31 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Would one more year have been smart? Probably. 

That's really up to risk analysis to assess the response to the title and see if another year would've changed the public opinion enough. They didn't just hit a timer and sent everybody home, there's tons of money hungry people trying to do projection analysis to decide if pursuing something is not worth it anymore.

T2 is down so bad because of GTA VI being in the pipeline, being a really heavy thing to carry to success. And even then most people are sure it'll never meet the infinite expectations fans might have at this point.

28 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

And yet, said expansion has yet to come out.

And we wait patiently because in all these years, factoriodev has built mountains of trust and good results. You don't need to bother the worker when you have seen the results. As for KSP2... we never saw results, even after they abandoned communication.

20 minutes ago, Ryaja said:

Off topic: is it worth $35? I have the steam funds but don't know if I should buy other games or factorio.

Yes. It's absolutely worth it. Even just the base game will give you hundreds of hours of playtime if you like incremental, a-word games. It does take some trial and error or wiki research to get going, but at some point you just want more and more.

Edited May 9 by PDCWolf

[Icegrx]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Times up for what though?

At my job, If I am given a task and tell my boss. “I’ll get to it later” or “I’m still working on it” I can probably get away with it a couple of times. If I continue to do this with showing very limited progress I’m likely to get fired. 

[Bej Kerman]

21 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

42 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

And yet, said expansion has yet to come out.

And we wait patiently because in all these years, factoriodev has built mountains of trust and good results. You don't need to bother the worker when you have seen the results.

That just sounds to me like the dev is using gained trust to slack off. Years is an unreasonable time to wait for one expansion whose selling point is "don't you get good vibes from this developer?".

Classic story of make promises, keep fans waiting.

[PDCWolf]

1 minute ago, Bej Kerman said:

That just sounds to me like the dev is using gained trust to slack off. Years is an unreasonable time to wait for one expansion whose selling point is "don't you get good vibes from this developer?".

Classic story of make promises, keep fans waiting.

Yeah, trust he built on results. When the expansion comes out we'll see if he deserves that trust taken away, but he built it the right way without hyping anything and showing actual progress and results.

To me this just sounds like a salty tantrum that players aren't giving the same service to KSP2. They're not equal cases, they'll never be.

[Bej Kerman]

21 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Yeah, trust he built on results. When the expansion comes out we'll see if he deserves that trust taken away, but he built it the right way without hyping anything and showing actual progress and results.

"When the expansion comes out", *if* the expansion comes out. Sounds like you'll be waiting patiently for another decade before you start smelling lies.

22 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

To me this just sounds like a salty tantrum that players aren't giving the same service to KSP2. They're not equal cases, they'll never be.

Whatever makes skepticism towards your favourite developer sound less founded.

[PDCWolf]

25 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

"When the expansion comes out", *if* the expansion comes out. Sounds like you'll be waiting patiently for another decade before you start smelling lies.

Whatever makes skepticism towards your favourite developer sound less founded.

Again, trust built on results and evidence. It's much easier to trust that the guy is actually working when every friday he produces a report of this quality. Meanwhile the failures operating this project were unable to produce anything even a tenth of the quality, let alone the almost unfailing consistency to post it weekly.

When you compare that to "here's a preview of the reentry fx" in march only to get anything related to it again by october and still having to wait till december for the update that barely includes the first buggy version... yeah, the differences are clear as day.

Enjoy your salt mine.

[Cryptobux]

Gents, this is one of the best threads I've read on the KSP2 situation. Congrats on the reasoned discussion and rebuttals, good job on (mostly) not making personal attacks.

I tried making some similar remarks on Discord, but you can guess how that went down.

Edited May 9 by Cryptobux

[VlonaldKerman]

This guy called it 11 months ago (timestamp 11:34)- "KSP 2 will definitely be developed for another 12 months, but the game is basically dead."

 

[Vanamonde]

A digression about Factorio has been moved here.

If you want to talk about that game, please take the discussion there. 

[FreeThinker]

9 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

This guy called it 11 months ago (timestamp 11:34)- "KSP 2 will definitely be developed for another 12 months, but the game is basically dead."

That prediction was scaringly accurate.

[Superluminaut]

The game failed because the devs did not recognize the scope of anything in the game. 

Remember Rask and Rusk with patched conics approximation.

"We have a solution!" - Nate

[kerbiloid]

19 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Its not unusual for games to take 6-10 years to develop

From scratch with blind eyes. While KSP-2 already had a working and mostly debugged prototype with almost 10 year long player experience, and their bug tracker.