Is KSP dying?

[Proot]

KSP is not dying at all. In fact is so full of possibilities that makes me scared. But, of course, the success of the "product life" depends on SQUAD... I would have liked a small graphic boost before the final release, but the real challenge for SQUAD is to continue expanding, completing and perfecting the Kerbin system. Maybe even grow to new systems, far beyond Kerbol. Because this game actually never ends, only (after literally years of play) suffers the lack of new targets. New adventures.

So no, KSP is not dying at all. Hundreds of features can be added yet. If SQUAD knows how to surround himself with the right people, they can turn this game into an historic milestone, even far beyond what it already is. A goose that lays golden eggs.

But above all a game fun as hell for all of us. An experience shared by several generations. Not many games, what the hell, not even many activities in our lives that can achieve it.

Edited February 8, 2015 by Proot

[Mr Tegu]

KSP II anyone?

[BudgetHedgehog]

There is a rather disturbing trend. From after 0.25 to now, the overall trend line is drawn with a negative slope

Funny, July 2014 to September 2014 was also a downward trend. And April to June before that. And January to March.. It's almost as if it's going up and down. If only there were some thing to connect the 'up' bits in early January, April, July, late September, December..

Saying that the recent downward trend is significant means nothing if it happens between every single recent release. I personally don't see any downward trend that Steam KSP hasn't seen before.

[Ringkeeper]

i can only say, how i feel at the moment.

The game is alpha, every now and then a patch comes. Most of the times, mods break or the save can't be used otherwise. I build already so many bases, stations and whatever that i just can't do it anymore at the moment. And there is also no ingame need for them. Yes, with Mods like MKS/OKS the have a bit of a purpose, but thats endgame. In the beginning you get so many contracts "send a base/station to X" that you cluster your orbits with useless crap.

And there is yet no real good autoupdater for mods. Mods are spread out over X pages. 64bit not stable enough or mods don't support it and on 32bit your just too limited.

So i just check the game for couple days after a patch and wait for the day the major stuff is fixed.

[KerBlam]

The game is alpha

The Game is in Beta

And there is yet no real good autoupdater for mods

CKAN works wonderfully, in most cases. It's a WIP like anything else, but it functions.

64bit not stable enough or mods don't support it and on 32bit your just too limited.

Windows 64bit is not supported. Linux 64 works great. Your choice of OS is the issue (Disclaimer: I dislike Windows with a vengeance so you can't expect anything more from me )

[Moonfrog]

I think people play for a while, then take a break. I think is quite common with games, alot of the community have already played the game for years, probably done nearly everything they wanted to do. Real question we should ask, is how many new members are we getting into the community? I used to post alot more when i first got the game, but now, most questions are already answered that i know, theres so many youtube videos, that everything could be accused of being a copy by now. Just become saturated with media, that all that is left is to play the game. Look at the threads, u will not got to space today, and how big they are. May be people buying ksp and playing it, but not on the forums, there is a lack of what to do on the forums, is there a question that has not already been asked yet? I think its just saturation. When people heard of overhall and resources in version 1 that is coming, i bet alot of people are going, hmm should i continue iwth my carreer mode or wait. I think alot of people start fresh with a new version. What would be really cool and good judge, would be a persisitant multiplayer server, then each day u would log on and see someones space station or rocket flying about maybe in version 2.0

[Kedwin Hubble]

I And finally no KSP Youtuber is treated like a god and guarded by an army of angry fanboys, that insult you after say something about him.

Scott Manley is pretty godly.

[Ravenchant]

Eh, less forum activity doesn't mean the game is dying. It's time for midterm exams, and a lot of the playerbase is in school. You don't want them to launch rockets when they should be studying, do you now ?

As for me, I used to be active on the forum, now I...skim through the Addons section from time to time, but that's about it. Chalk it up to three factors:

1) hardly feeling like playing KSP during the past few months (burned out)

2) having to focus on university work

3) I found /r/kerbalspaceprogram and like it more than the forum

*shrugs*

[sporkafife]

No, of course KSP isn't dying. I've been playing since the update that added C7's spaceplane parts (I can't remember the version number) and while I don't play the game as much as I did then, I still play it plenty. And I play it loads when a new update comes out. Think of it like a relationship. At first it's like "wooow, so exciting, must do EVERYTHING" and you spend every minute thinking about, whereas after a while it matures and becomes something longer lasting. Although you still get that frenzy of love every time something new and exciting happens (a new update!)

As for the community, this must be the 4th or 5th time I've seen the "KSP community is dying/changing and I don't like it" thread. Is it changing? I don't know. But at the end of the day, communities do change over time. Squad now has a consistent weekly schedule to their community interactions, which wasn't true for a long time. I remember us all waiting weeks between hearing anything, and when we did it would be a cryptic post from Novasilisko on an update thread!

(THIS NEXT PART IS MY OPINION, PINCH OF SALT REQUIRED) The fact that the forums activity has mostly changed from "look at this awesome thing I did" to "let's split in half to bash/defend the latest decision by Squad" is probably why it doesn't seem to have as deep interaction any more. I'm not even going to get in to where my opinion lies on the matter, but I'll just say this: there have been plenty of "controversial" decisions made by Squad throughout development (even going back to changing the desktop icon in 0.14.something!) and it has always been fine.

[Xavven]

Steam has some very awesome statistics for just this kinda thing:

http://steamcharts.com/app/220200

So no, it's not dying

Nice! Thanks for the link to that.

Here's a thing about line graphs... People look at the last segment of the line and try to draw conclusions about the whole graph. I copied the average monthly data into Excel and added moving averages, which sometimes helps people cancel out the noise (the variance) and look at overall trends. Yeah, I know some statistics professors out there hate moving averages, but us finance majors like them, so STFU. Note that this does not represent the total KSP population since a very significant portion of players bought the game from the online store.

Edit: Sorry about the first graph title. It should read "Since March 2013"

The conclusion I draw from this is that KSP experienced the greatest player growth on Steam in the first year it became available in the Steam store. Over the past year, the Steam player base has remained stable.

So, based on actual data, does anyone care to argue that KSP is dying? I don't see a downward trend here at all.

[KerBlam]

The fact that the forums activity has mostly changed from "look at this awesome thing I did" to "let's split in half to bash/defend the latest decision by Squad" is probably why it doesn't seem to have as deep interaction any more.

I'm relatively new here and I've noticed this.. It's a bit of a shame. It is a game after all, we should all be having fun and making wack stuff that explodes other stuff and taking mad screenies and being rep-santa.

My favourite posts are the ones where someone has made some crazy contraption fly, or completed some insane mission, like the guy that drove around Eve... It inspires me to try other things. I don't particularly like these threads where it's 'SQUAD did something bad IMO' or 'Is KSP dead?'... It's not very positive, and it's not at all inspirational.

Mods: Maybe there could be a sub-forum where people can have a whinge about SQUAD or KSP (and the rest of us can ignore it).

It could be called 'The place for super important opinions that really really matter' or something.

[LordFerret]

I'd like to see the 'average players' better defined in those graphs; Does it mean those who bought and own it, or those who played it that day, or those who are actively playing it at that moment the data was generated? That other graph, the Google trends graph, I believe is showing current hits/popularity on a search term at a given 'now' moment.

LOL... where would KSP stand if 'relative strength' were calculated?

Also, cpast made mention about a change in the number of data points after various dates; Often historical values for such things get boiled down to an average - from hourly to daily to monthly.

[Fleb]

Yep guys. KSP is dying. Close forums, uninstall from PC. The forums are empty, no one plays it on Steam. Devs have given up on it, there won't be any updates for awhile.

/sarcasm

Oh no! It can't be true! :.(

[rogvivi]

I played the ksp demo for the first time when the game was around 0.24, bought it right away. 10 minutes later I was already lurking these forums, amazed at the sheer amount of content and positivity, checking all the mods, youtube videos etc... I saw how in two releases the game went from early access to beta, then ??? , then 1.0. The game has this sheer amount of untapped potential, killing x64 killed some of it for me tho.

I would say most people might, like me, believe that ksp isn't ready for 1.0 yet, so we wait and see. We know lot's of stuff will change for 1.0 so, Do I start a new career dealing with my mod list, my settings, my ram, my balance etc? Do I wait for 1.0, check how that turns out? And where do we go from there?

All in all I'd say the community is far from dying.

[KerBlam]

Is KSP dead?

Edited February 8, 2015 by KerBlam

[CaptRobau]

Make of this what you will.

It all depends on the search terms you use:

http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%22kerbal%20space%20program%22%2C%20ksp%2C%20%2Fm%2F0h68f9g&cmpt=q&tz=

[GusTurbo]

I'm relatively new here and I've noticed this.. It's a bit of a shame. It is a game after all, we should all be having fun and making wack stuff that explodes other stuff and taking mad screenies and being rep-santa.

My favourite posts are the ones where someone has made some crazy contraption fly, or completed some insane mission, like the guy that drove around Eve... It inspires me to try other things. I don't particularly like these threads where it's 'SQUAD did something bad IMO' or 'Is KSP dead?'... It's not very positive, and it's not at all inspirational.

Mods: Maybe there could be a sub-forum where people can have a whinge about SQUAD or KSP (and the rest of us can ignore it).

It could be called 'The place for super important opinions that really really matter' or something.

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-488-488-90/15/1555/6P9DD00Z/posters/complaint-department.jpg

I think maybe the quality of General Discussion has gone down a little because of arguments, but the rest of the forum still has a lot of vitality. For example, the Spacecraft Exchange is still turning out stuff that continues to amaze me.

[Fengist]

As I have said in other posts, one of the biggest problems with KSP is once you conquer your latest idea, there's nothing more to do. Once you grasp the mechanics of landing on the Mun, doing so again is less challenging so you move on to bigger and more complex ideas. Once you conquer those, there's nothing to do until you come up with yet another idea. Here's a perfect example: I recently circumnavigated Eve by land. Now that I've finished, there's no further use for that vehicle. Eve is an amazing planet, but let's face it, it doesn't even have an anomaly. Other than conquering it's atmosphere, gravity and in my case, size, there's no reason to go there again and even less of a reason to go to any one particular place on Eve.

Go look at the challenges forum. It's a collection of ideas to be conquered. Once you accept a challenge and conquer it, there's no reason to do it again unless you want to improve your performance. And those ideas have restrictions. In it's present form, KSP is a game of creation. While building a small colony on the Mun is within it's reach, building a Dyson Sphere is not. Because the game is limited by part count, in-game physics and what your machine can handle, there is a limit to the ideas you can come up with.

In it's latest incarnation, career mode did increase KSP's staying power for a while. But once you open the entire tech tree and realize the missions are just randomly repeating themselves, you've conquered even that and there's no further reason to continue. Only one thing keeps veteran KSP players going and that's their imagination. Once the mechanics are conquered, they have to pretend this or pretend that in order to create a reason for playing KSP. One look at the mission reports forum and you'll see what it takes to keep playing KSP. While many KSP players have very vivid imaginations, let's face a fact here. Many of us, gave up pretending in our childhood.

The one thing lacking in KSP is long term playability. KerBlam's post above with the image of the cat and mouse is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. Once that cat caught the mouse and thot it dead, it had no further reason to chase it. When the cat realized the mouse was alive, the chase was on again. Humans are no different. It's not about the having, it's about the getting. Once we 'have' there's no reason to 'get' it again. And though I'm hopeful of the upcoming resources release, unless there's something I'm missing, even it doesn't create any long-term goals.

While I don't have an answer, Squad needs to find a reason for players to keep going: a reason to build that Mun base and keep going back to it to expand, modify, update. As it is now, we build... and abandon. And if that reason isn't found, I fear it will be relegated to those of us creative enough to keep finding new ways to challenge ourselves.

[SkyRender]

Is this topic still going? We've established already that the interest fluctuations are consistent between versions and have an upward trend of increasing interest. People move on, and come back later. That's the nature of gaming, really. Trying to turn it into some sort of panic or make it out as something to worry about is making mountains out of molehills.

[regex]

The fact that the forums activity has mostly changed from "look at this awesome thing I did" to "let's split in half to bash/defend the latest decision by Squad" is probably why it doesn't seem to have as deep interaction any more.

There have always been both types of posts, since I got here at least, and people have been complaining about/criticizing KSP since Harv first posted on the Orbiter forums about it (can you believe his original idea was 2d and that he thought the average player was too stupid to understand orbital mechanics? Look where it is now, be glad the people in that thread talked some sense into him.)

The community has grown, that's why your perception of "camps" is heightened. More people to have an opinion. Also, as has been said, go check out the other forums here instead of GD, there's still plenty going on.

[wumpus]

Early-adopters will be predominantly geeks who find the new stuff earliest.

Such geeks will want to know how the system works, will practice all aspects of how it works now and watch the way it develops.

They work together, to develop findings and publish instructional or exceptional documents and videos.

*At some point most programmes are handed-over to gamers instead of geeks.

*They want defined progress, 'score', hand-holding and instant-gratification because games aren't meant to be hard work.

*They work alone, post "I WON THE GAME" documents and "Let's play", look at me!, videos.

*Gamers are a majority and pay a lot. That's why software companies make pretty explosions.

*They move-on early, having "WON" enough and seen all the explosions they want.

First: KSP is seriously geeky in itself and likely to attract more geeks than gamers even after launch.

Some of Squads choices fall both ways:

I'm surprised by the "No Steam Achievements". These seem tailor made for KSP (and are already backfitted under "XP"). Score one for the geeks.

On the other hand, Steam wants deltaV either to be a deep, dark, secret (or else have you compute them by hand). We'll see once the engineering report is included in 1.0

Have you even *tried* the new career mode? They not only avoid hand-holding, they chop off your hands and won't let you upgrade back to andriod hands until you at least orbit Kerbin manually.

Does anybody here want *less* pretty explosions? It seems to be a direct contradiction between hand-holding, win-buttons, and pretty explosions. Keeping pretty explosions means they are at least doing something right.

Lastly, I think the "gamers" are more likely to keep trudging on to put a flag on every planet/moon. The geeks might take their time playing with rocket designs, but it doesn't follow that they will spend more time with the game. They *are* more likely to mention it elsewhere and try to drum up support (because it is such a geeky game), but the time doesn't follow.

The one thing lacking in KSP is long term playability. KerBlam's post above with the image of the cat and mouse is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. Once that cat caught the mouse and thot it dead, it had no further reason to chase it. When the cat realized the mouse was alive, the chase was on again. Humans are no different. It's not about the having, it's about the getting. Once we 'have' there's no reason to 'get' it again. And though I'm hopeful of the upcoming resources release, unless there's something I'm missing, even it doesn't create any long-term goals.

Part of the thrill of KSP is that you can always design a new rocket, although these posts show that geeks aren't going to play this game forever. I've put off going to other planets partly because of release timing and contracts consuming my time and partly because of playing in the sandbox coming up with better rocket designs. For pretty much any (PC) game, I'd look to the modding community for long term playability anyway. My guess is that nuturing colonies (possibly intersteller ones) will be the end-game for KSP.

Oh, and counter point:

Yes, Scott Manley has published 33 hours worth of youtube just of him playing a game of KSP. These aren't his tutorials, just a playthrough. Presumably he has enough followers (who watch 33 hours of him playing) to keep going.

[WOODY01]

There is nothing unusual happening and nothing out of norm for an EA game.

For long time community members topics on game features being added or not is usually something worth discussing for them while others they have nothing else to add they have not already.

Long term community members are most likely ready to take a break, lose interest in the game and the forums. Nothing out of the ordinary here or suggesting the KSP forum or game is dying.

It is within social norms for a people in a community like this and similar situations to grow apart or interact with each other less. We are not exactly good friends and family here, just people sharing an interest and discussing it on a faceless forum.

As for the Stats posted that is a sign of a game keeping players interest. Check out Steam Stats and compare the stats for successful games and unsucessful games.

I purchased Sunless Sea in EA and the numbers during EA were lower than KSP's and the forums on the devs site and Steam were much less active. That game on release made it to Steam's top 5 in sales when released. The both forums for Sunless Sea would get a spike in activity when updates were released then of course dwindle.

Judging by other games I have had with similar to difficulty and content likely to draw in an enthusiast(ex: Silent Hunter 3) this game and community have a long vibrant life ahead of it. We will get a large influx to this community when the game leaves EA, bringing new modders and other people who will become longtime community members.

KSP has a long life ahead of it and it's death is not nigh

[DuoDex]

Welp, I feel like writing a wall of text now. I've only been on the forums about a year, but I've noticed what a lot of people have been saying. There's a big buildup in hype before the release, then a crash as everyone goes and plays KSP instead of coming on the forums. Then, the hype starts for the next release. Probably what'll happen with this release is because its a "longer dev cycle" the downward trend will continue until it's just the regulars. (I consider myself a regular). Then we'll get a MASSIVE buildup in hype for 1.0 with the forums maybe even crashing.

Plus, we're going up against an excessively large userbase here. When KSP was still 0.17 or so, the amount of traffic the forums get regularly now would have been huge. It's just that there's two groups-the regulars and the hypers. The hypers come on before release, but the regulars are already there. The only difference is that there used to be no hypers.

However, some of the more overarching points people have made are valid as well. I liked how geeky the game was. It might just be me, but it seems to be much less so now. Squad has disgustingly decided to cater to the tastes of those 'gamers' drawn here by the lure of Beta instead of those who were here since 0.13 or whatever. (Been playing since 0.21 and proud of it!) KSP is not a game, it's an imperfect simulation that's fun to screw around in.

But let it be for better or for worse, KSP is not dying. It's just changing course like it has been since the very first public alpha. What makes people worried now is that it's changing course in a different way then it has been before.

[obi_juan]

I still playing some very old games:

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999)

Homeworld (1999)

Homeworld 2 (2004)

And I know that I will play KSP for several years, because is a unique game... Will the community reduced by the time, yes I am sure of that... But I play to relax so I will play for several years.

PS: Now I am waiting to Homeworld HD

[theend3r]

KSP is still quite popular. While browsing game torrents on kickass I saw KSP 0.90 on the second page with over 900 seeds which is quite a lot. Athough it may be true that the community is becoming wider but less deep. I remember Kasuha being one of the most helpful people with innovative ideas and techniques but it seems he's no longer active. Neither am I actually, since I'm experiencing my 2nd KSP burnout plus I'm waiting for some mods to update and hopefully a better support of larger scale modding (i.e. solution tothe RAM problems). I'll probably go back to KSP in a few months.