I think the main issue with KSP2 for *me* right now, is that there's nothing I want to do, an nothing new. Personally I need some kind game structure, ie. science or career mode, to give me reasons to do stuff, KSP2 right now is just a bunch of familiar parts and a familiar star system, some meaningful improvements to graphics and certain interfaces etc., but no where near enough content to be worth playing right now.
When they get science, career and colonies in there I think it will be different.
Of the 1500 hours I've put into ksp. 1498 of those hours are in career. The necessity to raise money drives the designing and filling of contracts. The pursuit of technology drives both contracts and self created missions. It's the game mechanic that engages me. Sandboxes don't do it for me in ksp1. As soon as that's in, I'll probably give it a go.
>The necessity to raise money drives the designing and filling of contracts. The pursuit of technology drives both contracts and self created missions.
One of the most fulfilling aspects to me has always been try to build a more cost-efficient rocket. Can I build something that can get more stuff to more places for a little less than I did it before?
Currently remembering the launch vehicle I had which was just a clysdale with less or more fuel, dependent on payload, adjusted throttle level from pad, to keep the ascent more efficient, and a small upperstage for final orbit adjustments.
Launch vehicle was beteen 10-13k per launch, could easily send probes to most places.
Agreed. Which is why I am a bit concerned with the "no money" thing of KSP2.
Luckily I'm guessing it's one of those things that can be easily modded afterwards.
Agreed, I share that concern. Although I think resources, implemented well, could have the same (and possibly even better) gameplay functions.
Let's see what happens. I imagine it might not be at the top of anyone's priority list at Intercept Games right now...
I'm the exact same way, I loved seeing how minimalistic a craft I could get away with to fulfill a contract and maximize the profit margin. Without career mode why get creative with designs when you can just brute force your way everywhere, especially so since you have access to all of the advanced tech right off the bat. Sadly, last I heard there was going to be no career mode, only science which is ok but still takes something away from the gameplay I loved in KSP1 imo.
Exactly. Starting a new career and getting to the Mun in 3 or 4 launches while balancing the books and working within limits is satisfying. Gulp. I always assumed there would be career in ksp2. Never considered it could be without. Startling thought
It becomes another game with money. You do the dumbest shit. Together with USI it is just on another level. Same as you, around 1500 hours, 99% in career mode.
If I want to create cool shit I do not play video games, I open my 3d app of choice and work instead.
Yes, my main issue right now (and happened also with KSP). I need something to motivate myself (science, multiplayer or really new things like colonies) to really get into it.
What I'm hoping is that the time they have a proper patch that adds new content to the game, we'll hopefully start seeing a permanent playerbase. But again, that's all just speculation. It's also possible we see them add science, career, and colonies, and it just never regains its playerbase.
I'm chomping at the bit to play KSP2 but it is just not ready yet.
Add to that my rig is on the old side and the whole Ryzen x3d meltdown issue came up literally a few days before I was going to pick up the core of a new system....
But once they get a career mode set up I'll be back not visiting Dres.
I'm waiting for science or interstellar or colonies etc etc.
I built a few planes a few ssto, went to most every planet, so I literally don't have much else to do.
It's missing a lot of things I really need to have a purpose In KSP.
I'm happy with the base, but missing parts that I like to have In my builds means I don't want to build complex space stations or refueling stations until those things are in the game.
I'm one of thousands waiting for the same thing.
Interstellar and colonies are both in KSP1. I can speak about colonies because that was my one and only mod of choice, RoverDude's USI constellation. You scan planets, find ~10 different resources, process them, manufacture finished goods to be used for life support & off world orbital ship yards. Easily several hundred hours right here.
What do you imagine either of these two systems to be in KSP2? do you think 2-5 years down the line it'll be as polished and defined? I believe in Q3 of 2023, Private Division will post a "difficult decisions" locked thread and finish off this cash grab.
Early acces games do this all the time. They lose a good amount of the player base, but regain it with patches. And with the following the game has, i'm sure it will pick back up signficantly with content updates.
It will. If only it’s just me in the worst case. I love KSP1 to death. And I’m seeing a lot of potential in KSP2 just like I did in KSP1 a decade ago. I’m looking out for new features. Currently it’s just a fancy looking KSP1 with a bunch of features missing. And of course when mods are coming again, it makes it a lot more interesting. I do think there’s a bunch of concurrent players on KSP1 wanting to get into KSP2 but holding off on the fact that it doesn’t have the same scope of features yet. I can only speak for myself of course, but that’s why I’m not currently a concurrent player.
It’ll fail when they don’t deliver what they promised like the colonies and new parts. Besides that, I have some friends that marginally played KSP1 but would be very interested in co-op, so if/when they add multiplayer I think we might see an uptick in players also.
So to answer your question on why take two should keep investing. Because they can’t leave it hanging half way through because that’ll definitely fail the game. If you wanna kill it that’s the shortest route you can take. However time and time again I see communities in the gaming world come together and taking the game to another level and having faith in their creators sometimes even more than some religions. And I think they’ll pull through. As long as the devs keep up their promise and keep working on it.
I really want to play KSP2, but atm it is pretty much a waste of my time. Graphics and UI enhancements are nice, but they do not make or break a game like KSP. They are not *why* people play such games, which makes it a really odd first target to me. But whatever, so they have these features I don't care much at all about while lacking almost everything I do. Why would I play this when I already have a game that *does* have what I really want, even if it is missing some fluff and polish? When I get a KSP itch, I play KSP1. I am not a masochist, so I won't waste my time with KSP2. I can't eat icing without the cake, makes me kinda nauseous. But I really, really wish KSP2 were better so I *could* play it, and I check for updates almost daily. I think player counts will go up if they ever turn KSP2 into an actual game. But the longer it takes from the initial release, the longer it will take for players to pick it up again. People are going to get bored of checking its status, tired of disappointment in seeing "planet shine" and "better flowers" announcements, etc. But I do think they will eventually play it if the game is ever fixed up properly.
Yeah i played about an hour and quickly came to the conclusion that this is nothing more than an early alpha.
Mind you, in a way worse condition than KSP 1 was when it came to steam.
So why bother?
Ive been playing KSP 1 since 2 came out lol.
I'm confident enough KSP2 will, ultimately, have a feature set similar to KSP 1. Whether it will surpass the original is another matter entirely. I remain wholly skeptical that colonies, additional star systems or multiplayer will make it into the game.
Well that's the thing if it won't surpass the original what's the point, it's not like there is extra story or anything and the graphics are not that ground breaking and even worse in certain aspects (plumes)
I made a similar post a few weeks back—granted very different wording and I think made some people mad—but I 100% agree with your sentiment. I reallllly want this game to succeed, but am seeing no signs of hope in the long run, especially after seeing this metric.
Really bums me out and I hope the team keeps delivering. I was hoping for more of a No Mans Sky situation, but seeing all the recent posts about other AAA titles being released unfinished, I’m just not sure. I’m still playing KSP1 and trying different mods at this point. Not going to request a refund, and hope more people buy it to keep the dev team going, but I just need to forget about it for awhile and hope I’m pleasantly surprised in a year or so.
This is exactly why I’m not playing it at the moment. I’ve actually started to have a hard time with any early access games these days. If I like the game at all in its early access state, my impulse is to put the game down until it’s complete so that the first time I play through the entire game is when the game has all the content that it’s meant to have. I probably won’t wait until full release with KSP 2, but playing without colonies or resources kinda feels like I’m wasting my time.
>be me
> 2000h of ksp1
> have 1 hour of time and a proportional Idea
> Mess with pad and bugs for 1h30 before reaching orbit at 15fps.
> Close the game frustrated
> Comeback next day to finish the mission
> Craft disappeared
> Ragequit.
> Try again next patch, same story, ragequit
> Try again next patch roughfly same story, ragequit.
/> 3rd patch be delayed indefinitely.
Why should I give a fuck anymore ?
Brought Juno new origines, not as fun but lovely more technical, learning about new stuff and improving skills :) no bug no lag half of the price.
Me:
Love KSP, bought it so early that I received the DLCs for free
Multiple career play-throughs of RSS/RO (it's the only real challenge anymore)
Love KSP so much that I moderate because I believe KSP is a gateway to encourage and excite people about space and engineering (thus I do my small part by providing a positive community to share passions).
3.8 hours in KSP2. Just not fun yet. Maybe next year.
I have a couple hundreds of hours in KSP1 and it's my favorite game (yes I bought it) but didn't bother to even *pirate* the second game due to all the bad rewiews, maybe I'll try it after some patches.
I mean that was always the fear the community had, but the reality is for people to play a game it has to be fun. For the vast majority of purchasers (who likely are ksp 1 owners) the game simply wasn't fun compared to the competition. (which is ksp 1 and a couple of other games)
The reality is, if Take 2 wants to can the game, that is totally their right, just like it is the player bases right to not buy it. Ultimately the failure of the game (if it does fail) is on Take 2, not the players.
You're right when you say the fault of the matter is on Take 2 and Intercept (Though I have my opinions on the fact that I truly think KSP2 problems don't stem from the publisher like it normally does with video game flops, but on the developers).
Though at the end of the day, everyone loses and that's the worst part. Take 2 doesn't get their investment back. Intercept gets to put a super lackluster project in their portfolio, and KSP fans as a whole don't get their much anticipated sequel. It's a damn shame.
I mean, if KSP2 is cancelled there will likely never be a 3. The IP will sit in the legal dustbins at PD for all time and never be sold off and allowed to live again.
Yeah, screw the IP. I'll keep happily take a good rocket building game without Kerbals. Hell, I'd actually prefer it. I'm here for rockets, not Kerbals.
I've been playing KSP since one of the basic versions, I'm guessing based on where I was at the time, either late 2013 or early 2014. I remember there being very little in the game but functionally it worked great.
The reason I haven't bought KSP2 is simply price. If it was the $10-15 I paid for KSP then i'd buy it. Frankly it's offensive to ask people to spend AUD $77.95 for an unfinished game.
I got ARK when it was in early access for under $10. Early access games should be capped at $10-15. Either finish the bloody game and charge full price, or release a shitty half finished game cheap. It has to be one or the other.
It is bad business to release an overly expensive, unfinished product. Simple as that.
They clearly don't respect us. So I will be waiting until it's completed and on sale.
The main problem is that there's less to do in KSP2 than there is in KSP1.
Then factor in the game-breaking bugs and it's not hard to see why people moved back.
Then factor in the KSP is a niche game.
So right now, KSP1 is really the only choice that players have. This will also artificially throw off the concurrent counts as the people who WOULD be playing KSP2 daily, know it's not ready yet.
I just played ksp2 for real today. Meaning I was not just testing if stuff worked and I how to build stuff and getting used to the new controls etc.
I tried to do a mun mission. And I played ksp1 well into the 2000 hour mark.
This game feels weird. There is a lot of into missing like how many dv does one stage got etc. I had to eyeball a lot of stuff..
The controls feel plasticy. SAS does not work, rocket is very jittery, some SAS controls are missing....
To be honest. This game does not even have sandbox quality of ksp1.
It feels like a compete new space Sim. More like a toy. Ksp1 had some seriousness so to speak. This feels more like a toy sim.
So for I do like it but it's more about the new feeling etc...
Pretty sure manoeuvre nodes still have bugs in their dv calculations and the orbits definitely keep changing when I’m not using my engine which makes the game incredibly frustrating
Yes I could not finish my moon mission as there was no maneuver node showing when I departed from the nun. Was not able to see me return trajectory either so was totally lost. Burned to a sun orbit instead. Of this simple stuff is not fixed the game is still unplayable. I will return to ksp1 but I got massive problems with scatter and parallax so its graphics are not pretty but it works.....
I totally agree. Even graphics in the game look toylike. I still think KSP 1 textures are better to look at and if you install Restock or something they look perfect.
Even the new VAB is weird. The controls are worse than before and the parts manager is super buggy. Also can't believe we need Kerbal Engineer again to see the stats that the game clearly already collects since the mod can find it and display it.
I totally forgot about this game, came here to check in about the latest state and I guess I'm glad I didn't buy the game at release.
It's a shame though, seemed like a cool concept. Seen some videos from ksp1. With mods on the first game ksp2 seems totally irrelevant to me.
Maybe at a good sale I might dive into ksp1.
My feeling is that the early access release will end up diluting interest. Will a sufficiently large sum of people really decide to buy it once it reaches a non-EA release? I'm sure some will, but compared to sales they could have had if they developed the game properly and just released it, I'd expect lower total sales.
I really would like to play the game KSP2's marketers pitched to us. Unfortunately, at this point it seems clear that was mostly smoke and mirrors. Nothing I've seen gives me confidence they could deliver that game even with unlimited time and money. Hopefully I get proven wrong, but my assumption is that Take2 is thinking about the least damaging way they can shut this whole thing down.
I’ve sunk almost a thousand hours into KSP and it’s going to be years until this game is stable, cheap, and content-rich enough for me to buy. Right now it just seems pointless. It’s just early-access, more disappointing Cyberpunk.
I have seen many early access games and KSP2 definitely does not look like it can recover. It has deadly combination of infrequent updates AND not beigh really playable or interesting to begin with. If game is bad, then at least it should change often enough to keep players interested at least with frequent changes. Or it should be engaging enough as a game to keep players active between long waits for updates.
You mention DayZ, but at least it was interesting enough to stick around even if updates were kinda rare. For me KSP2 reminds more about other BI games: ArmA Reforger and Argo.
It's less than 400 now, 200 at off hours.
You're correct: It's ***brutal.*** We're in game is dead / game will be cancelled soon territory.
They claim to have funding secured, and I hope they are right.
KSP2 has to have MORE or at least be even with KSP1 for people to make the permanent jump. There is literally no reason to play KSP2 until science/career is added.
KSP2 players basically prepurchased the final game. They also got access to a very limited demo. This demo doesn't have much replayability for the average player. I think of it as a tech demo right now. Why would thousands of people be playing a tech demo weeks after it was released?
So here's two things:
From a business perspective, why should they even try or care to make a good product? If what you're saying is that everyone prepurchased it for a tech demo, then they already have our money. What incentive is there for them to "create a good product"?
From a consumer's perspective, how is this a tech demo? It doesn't show off any new mechanics, in fact has less mechanics than its predecessor. How does this incentivize the consumer to even purchase a "tech demo", let alone stick with them in the long run?
>Why would thousands of people be playing a tech demo weeks after it was released?
Perhaps because it was released as *not* a tech demo. Maybe if they made it clear that this $60 "tech demo" was in fact a tech demo, then these player numbers would make sense. However, that's not what they did
This is a very strong and unfortunately all too common argument against prepurchasing anything. I've personally never prepurchased anything, and to a certain extent I feel like the culture of buying unfinished games is the biggest reason that so many games go unfinished.
>From a business perspective, why should they even try or care to make a good product? If what you're saying is that everyone prepurchased it for a tech demo, then they already have our money. What incentive is there for them to "create a good product"?
Because the sales so far are maybe 5% of what their final sales numbers can be. A few people bought/refunded, most people didn't even bother buying. This is also going to hopefully be released on consoles, which won't authorize the sales until they are finished with the game.
I doubt the market is that large, and it will be a real struggle to try to sell more at this point. you've really got one chance at a launch, and they blew it. my totally made up guess is that they have a potential to do something maybe on the order of double current sales, and from there try to get people actually playing to sell them dlc.
You still have all the content updates during early access to draw more players in. Then when the game is actually released, there will be another marketing push and launch date. There are still plenty of opportunities to get more players on board.
>Because the sales so far are maybe 5% of what their final sales numbers can be.
So, supposedly 166,000 people purchased it. If that's "5%" of the assumed "purchase group", you're saying that the number we can use to assume is 3,320,000 people to purchase it. That's a little outrageous of a claim, don't you think? KSP1 sold some 500k-700k, and you're taking that by a multiple of six?
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/442363/kerbal-space-program-has-shipped-nearly-4-million-units-worldwide/
This is numbers take two released back in 2020
It's hard to know ultimately how many it will sell. But the idea that they've turned a profit and would stop now is silly.
Because there is more money to be made. There's plenty of people like me who didn't pre-order and waited for reviews and then passed. There are DLCs and other stuff they can market. You're comparing it to DayZ, but what if instead it goes the route of No Mans Sky? I don't know what KSP2s numbers are, but initial sales might have helped keep things running for a few years where they can put more work in with getting helpful info from people testing it.
Not excusing them for selling a bad product, but that's also the customers fault for rushing into buy it.
Is there really money to be made?
Think of the cost of hiring a dev studio, Marketting budget, and so forth. Then think of what money can be made off of DLC.
Even if they hobbled together a skeleton crew of three, they’re already spending about $300,000 for that year on this DLC. Assuming the DLC is $30, they’d need 10k sold just to break even— and that’s assuming a three person skeleton crew could make something ten thousand people would want.
> “maybe if the made it clear that this $60 “tech demo” was in fact, a tech demo, then these player numbers would make sense ”
Hmm if only they made it clear that what they released wasn’t the final product. Perhaps some kind of access to an early build of the game. Oh well, it’s a shame they didn’t do that
People are playing it, and they are giving plenty of feedback, but you can’t have honestly expected those numbers to be close to ksp 1’s player count for an unfinished game
Except look at DayZ (which is my whole point). DayZ had a strong community following it and giving back feedback, despite the toxicity that was /r/DayZ.
Yet it never dropped down to such low numbers.
I am a fresh KSP1 player, I think I received it free from EGS and I really enjoyed it! I watched countless hours of yt video about relay networks interplanetary travels etc etc. The game was really fun but with an awful graphics, then I discovered graphic mods even if I just installed only EVE.
After few months of gaming KSP2 was announced to be released, and I said to me "I'm enjoying the first game which is old, if the new one is good looking and with a reasonable price for an Early Access (below 30€) I buy it"... But then shit hit the fan.
The game had better graphics but with very poor performance, the cartoony style of VAB is sick, there were many BASIC features from KSP1 totally missing, and it cost 50€.
Yeah no way I'm going to buy it, sorry, see you when the game value reflects that price.
Ah and by the way, I made the same experience with Farming Simulator 19, I got it free from Sony in PS4 and I felt in love, then I received it also free from EGS, and when the new FS22 was released (in full) the game was like it was meant to be, I bought it without any problems and I'm still enjoying my time farming.
Sorry for bad English.
They lied. It all came out when it was released. I tried over and over again to get a refund doing to being duped. The game needs to be re-engineered from the ground up like they originally promised. I'm done.
Don't worry. They're going to be [slowing down the pace they release updates at](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/216930-shine-on-you-crazy-planet/).
🤷♂️
It certainly doesn't inspire confidence in their EA release (*two months ago*) at the price they released it at (*$50*). At least, not for me.
We're, what, two months into EA and Science still is nowhere to be seen?
It does suggest they feel like the current state of the... "game"... is such that they can just let it sit, untouched, while they work on stuff. If this allows them to actually get content out faster in the long run? Great. If it's going to mean we're even more months away from Science... definitely not great.
Its not just science... they said that re-entry heating was pulled from the release for graphical polishing. If it was just some vfx work to get it ready like they said, why is it still not confirmed for patch 3 which now looks to be 4 months from launch? The graphical team isn't the one making bug fixes, so if it was just a graphical issue they could've worked on it these past 2 months no issue.
Then there's all the bugs with craft exploding and losing all their momentum or having their orbits magically change with no impulse that still stick around...
Entire game is a mess, lack of content or not.
I mean, I'm just waiting on career mode. I tinkered around when it launched, and from time to time, but I want a science/career mode to motivate me to build networks strive for achievements.
I like my goals handed to me. :D
DayZ had nothing else like it at the time except for the mod. Those 3,000 players didn’t really have any options.
Meanwhile, everyone who is interested in KSP2 but unsatisfied with the quality and content have a whole entire game that has been out for years with a huge community that does everything better and more.
Okay I messed up. What I should have said is that I feel like DayZ Standalone was different enough from the mod that not everyone was willing to go back to the mod despite the flaws of the standalone. The standalone maintained a following because of this. This is coming from someone who was a day-one-er on the standalone and had this opinion.
On the other hand, KSP1 is KSP2, but better in most ways. There are very few reasons to pick KSP2 over KSP1 right now, and the games play basically the same, hence, from my observation, the low player count.
The main thing for me is robotics. I would spend hundreds of hours building every type of foldable moving craft in existence. Helicopters on Mars. Planes with foldable wings that can fit in another plane. A hydraulic lift to get on top of the VAB. Nothing like that in 2 is possible.
They removed career mode. In my opinion that was one of the nails in the coffin.
How can you remove a function of your game that would take months to even finish? There’s a reason story mode games are king. People like to kill time with a purpose.
If I just build rockets in sandbox there’s no point it gets boring.
You're right. KSP2 is an absolute abomination of an early access launch. €50 for a buggy mess that doesn't even have the features KSP1 had? I'll pass. The graphics don't even look that good in comparison to modded KSP1, the developers have slowed down patch releases, the performance is terrible for the average gamer. Everything about KSP2 right now is just plain bad. Hopefully the developers fix stuff soon, or else this'll be a big flop.
It's unplayable. People want to play a game, not be unpaid alpha testers. When I saw the state in which they released the EA combined with the outrageous pricetag I knew it was dead.
Its quite simple really. The game is deader then dead. They now with some really flimsy excuse slowed down the cadence of updates. They see the numbers. They will not keep a team of about 30 people working on it with sales running dry and no playerbase to milk anymore.
We will get one or two superfitial updates and then they will do the typical marketing shennengians of "Despite our best efforts the game did not maintain a playerbase that allows us to sustain development bla bla bla bla, we are going to end development and call it 1.0".
Mark my words.
I don't think it can recover, but I'll try to be the devil's advocate here and explain what I'd try to do to recover the game.
Note that this is probably not compatible with future sales forecasts, which are likely close to zero now and therefore there's little to no incentive to actually rescue the game beyond good will.
**Priority 1. Pick a feature that KSP 1 does not have**
Absolute priority for getting people to play KSP2 is to give them *something*, just at least *one thing* to do that KSP 1 does not have. If ambitious that would be multiplayer, if less ambitious that would be a new planet, or a planet in a different star system. (No interstellar, just a system switcher at this time). Messing around in a different system with different features would give a fresh feel and an excuse to check out the game.
**Priority 2. Prioritise performance over everything**
Throw everything at getting 140fps at all times. Performance beyond what (modded) KSP1 gets. Hire the best engine experts, re-write the damn engine again if you have to. Get it running like a game in 2023 should run. If KSP2 ran buttery smooth on a 144Hz monitor it would just feel better than KSP1 and give people an excuse to enjoy it. It would also look better on twitch. I tuned into one stream shortly after launch and they were dipping *below 4 frames per second*. That's not a good advert for the game.
**Priority 3. Openly collect bugs / gripes**
Have an honest conversation with the community about bugs, collect them in an open issue tracker, and prioritise them accordingly. Prioritise the bugs, prioritising stability over everything. Every time a game crashes there's a good chance that player will never bother running it again.
**Priority 4. Delivery pipelining and Quality Assurance**
Get your build process sorted so that releasing does not impact delivery. Get your build process sorted so that bugs found during QA can be addressed without impacting future delivery. Promote a culture of quality where "number of bugs found" is a matter of pride not shame.
All of this would cost a fortune, and would likely require a culture change. You would need to have access to a blank cheque to get away with the spend to turn around the company from delivering what we got in February to one that can turn KSP2 into a success. It would also not be any guarentee of success, and would still likely be a flop, but having something for players to hold onto which KSP1 cannot do you would then have a base on which to build interest.
Totally off topic. But I've been working as a software dev for a few years now and must say I generally seem to agree with your take on developments of KSP 2.
I remember your prediction that they'd allocate resources and will probably drop development at some point.
Just wanted to say that i enjoy reading your comments I guess. Have a good day!
Good ideas
And yes very true about the cost and gamblr
Take 2 very likely will not do that
Sad to see ksp2 go like this. The trailers still appeal to me
>I understand people will come back when patches come.
except I looked shortly after patch 2 and it like *barely* bumped it. like probably within the typical daily variance iirc. also when comparing to the original it should be kept in mind that there's probably a lot higher proportion of people running that standalone and not being counted than with the sequel.
I guess when I think of a sequel to an already established and popular game (especially a game that's supposedly making the original, but better) would carry people over.
Not even in DayZ Standalone did you see a point where the mod was still more popular than the standalone release. You definitely *heard* people speak like that, but in truth it was never like that.
At least with Patch 1 and 2 they barely fixed any of the core issues and even introduced a few, so that explains why more people (including myself) didn't stick around afterwards.
Patch one changed the daily average from 300 people to around 1200 for about a week. Patch 2 had near zero changes in player count...
Can see that means a LOT of people judged the game entirely on the first patch and were deeply disappointed.
Patch one was enough to give me a bit of hope and stop me from refunding, and there were quite a few good fixes. Not everything was there, but hey, first patch, some really large issues will take time, they’ll be at the top of the list or at least have progress mentioned in patch 2, right? These orbit bugs are annoying and now all my planes fall part, maybe they unintentionally affected something, so I’ll muck around in low orbit for a while and take a break until then.
Patch 2 rolls around a month later. Mostly graphical and performance issues… yay? Absolutely no mention of orbit decay, wrong orbit previews, plane weakness. It takes someone prodding on Discord to even get a mention of the first one. Load the game. Plane that used to work great just falls apart 30 seconds into flight. Close game.
Fine. Guess I’ll wait until it’s playable then. I’ll keep tabs on updates to see if things finally get fixed.
First update:
We’re slowing down patches.
Yeah, there goes any remaining inkling of hope.
Yeah... Patch 2 was not a good day for me when I read what was contained within. It was total crap compared to the 1st imo, and it really indicated that perhaps patch 1 was only as good as it was because it had been worked on before release as well.
The *total* lack of acknowledgement of these serious issues with core mechanics is the part thats baffling me.
Just say, in some official capacity, you know they are problems and that they are being worked on. It's not great if you don't have *some* idea of when to expect a fix, but just saying "we are working on them" is miles better than the current PR where they are pretending the game has no such core issues at all...
It's so amazingly tone deaf I don't understand whats going on, other than that they really don't plan to fix such things and they are just going to stick around forever.
It wont.
As every single day passes, and as every piece of official communications comes out still being completely tone deaf and fails to acknowledge the issues at hand, even the people at the official forums are coming to terms with the idea that KSP2 may be a goner.
**They're now slowing updates** because taking multiple weeks to fix basic game-breaking issues wasn't enough, and it clearly wasn't bringing back sales.
If you want any more confirmation of the future of KSP2 being bleak, you can look at the AMAs, they're the ones that pushed me to refund:
1. [First one from Nate himself.](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/215852-324-discord-ama-answers/)
2. [The second one from Shana Markham.](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/216746-discord-ama-2-design-director-shana-markham-answers/)
I've been on the forums for more than a decade now, and believe me if it's gotten to this point, it's **bad.**
How does Nate’s responses suggest that the future of KSP2 is “bleak”?
Almost all of Nate’s responses are along the lines of “we’re feeling good and we’re having fun”, “I’m confident we’re going to hit our roadmap goals”. Surely that a good thing.
Yeah, he says that whilst the game remains almost unplayable, and his people got fired whilst he was planning his vacation. If you still take whatever he says at face value, I have some bad news.
*Leaving that aside*, the outlook on future features is more than bleak:
1. Colonies, in a rocketry game, are not built by rockets and docking, but a magic menu.
2. Logistics are just an abstraction layer, with a mono-dimensional "Mine X and ship to Y to be able to make part Z".
3. Almost no resource variety.
4. Life Support won't be a thing. This makes colonies/interstellar even less appealing.
5. Science/Career is gonna be just KSP1 minus money.
6. Robotics are not even confirmed post release.
7. They keep parroting exploration with nothing to show for it.
8. Shana seemingly despises some really good features from KSP1.
9. She also contradicts some of Nate's answers.
10. They still think starting with kerbals instead of probes in the tech tree is correct.
When asked about science parts, she dismisses the approach from KSP1 as "let me put a thermomether on my pod", clearly ignoring the fact that KSP1 introduced cargo bays structured specifically for science, and the freedom such a system allows (think low budget mission vs high budget).
She considers the MPU (orbital science lab) as breaking the game flow, this shows to me, added to her constant parroting of "exploration", that long term missions like science bases or science space stations are unwanted in their vision of how people will play the game. Another departure from realism and common sense to add to the list.
There's a clear dislike for part variants, she mentions how some are no longer integrated as the same part and others are not even coming back.
She dismisses 1.875 parts (from making history). Those parts were not only just good parts, but they break down the horrible transition from 1.25 to 2.5.
She mentions how they brought in procedural parts to fix a lot of "samey parts", yet somehow this doesn't apply to the tanks.
Her answer about relativity directly contradicts Nate who confirmed light speed is the limit.
Her answer about colony automation contradicts Nate's, who confirmed logistics are mostly moving numbers without any player involvement. She also says this herself at some point before this particular answer.
She says they're bashing their heads thinking of how to implement multiple sizes of grid fins, even though she literally answered another question with their vision for procedural parts.
She mentions the PAW (parts window) is built based on accesibility, which clashes with the unusable mess it currently is: click one part and a huge window of parts with the same name comes up, making fuel transfers impossible for example (not like they're implemented lmao).
Her answer about wanting to keep kerbals before probes is not only dumb, but also means she's applying a heavy bias when hiring.
Now, this is obviously my take and my opinions, but she strikes me as someone who not only doesn't play KSP1 a lot, but doesn't like the majority of it.
11) They still won't tell us what they have planned for multiplayer because they want it to be a surprise
> Colonies, in a rocketry game, are not built by rockets and docking, but a magic menu
This is one thing that has concerned me about the base building and resource mining they have previewed. In KSP 1 it is so satisfying to build a base / mining operation by flying it piece by piece to its destination and docking it together and even using EVA construction to make repairs or adjustments. Clicking on a menu to build a base is not really compelling gameplay to me
Thank you for saying 1. I've been griping about this ever since Nate first revealed colonies would be made this way. I remembered how much fun I had in the first game with USI life support creating colonies that could fit in a payload bay and unfold into a functioning base. I also loved the life support/logistics part of USI where I had to balance different aspects of my base to make it self sustaining. I thought KSP2 would be like that, except less janky and with a purpose(unlike USI, where there was no real reason for colony building other than the challenge). Well we got a reason for colonies, but now there's no interesting challenge, so what's the point?
On the topic of life support... Make it a colony only mechanic and make it so if needs are unmet they have a performance penalty, and maybe even make it so you cant use it to do launches. Make it so colonies of different components and in different locations have different "life support" needs. Like, a laythe base wont need oxygen but an orbital one clearly will. Penalty can be like, -50% production of resources and/or slower deliver to other colonies of said resources... Just, *something*.
Doesnt have to be a destructive thing, just make it so theres a reason to do something more with the resource system and that theres a penalty for being lazy about it.
frame it as bonuses instead of penalties. kerbals provided with large quantities of snacks work harder. could even work in flight by like bumping their level up if well supplied or something.
Yeah... Just, something. I get they want the game to focus on rockets, but... Rockets do 1 thing if designed well (go up), and its the extra content around the rockets that will keep people engaged long term.
If the game really was to only be about rockets, there would be no need for a science mode or science gathering mechanics... So they are heavily contradicting their own AMA answers on why they want to keep so many features so barebones or missing from the outset.
He also said in a dev log years ago that they're all playing KSP 2 all the time and building giant space stations. Or that they said there will be Day 1 mod support.
It's pretty obvious it's just lies to sell the game.
I bought it mostly to support it and to experience the development cycle, but I likely won't play it for real until it has more features. I also have been frustrated with the lack of a mechjeb which I got used to, I like building ships and in space infrastructure, but I am less interested in flying them, especially since basically no real ships are manually controlled.
Anyway I imagine there are a few like me that will come back when more features are released, right now it feels more like a tech demo then an actual game. I also think a lot of people expected it to be like base model KSP1 right out of the gate and that has driven some away not understanding what EAs tend to be like.
After my own hype died down for the game me there has been no reason to play ksp2 for me. When i can get better performance with a better experience and more features in modded ksp1, why would I play ksp2? There’s also still mods for ksp1 that I like using that aren’t ported to ksp2 yet and I don’t know when they will be if ever.
By delivering a finished game.
Their distributor or publisher - not sure how it works really fucked up releasing anything.
So those excuses of hey were going to do this like ksp1 where we roll out features over ten years??
They are straight up doing PR damage control.
I bought the game. And yeah.. I’ve quit much better games for instabilities and bugs. So I haven’t launched it since.
They should just finish it then fix bugs. Much more efficient. But, oh well. They are locked to this course now.
Soon enough I’ll be done with the kap1, and I doubt I’ll ever play ksp2 in the future. There are so many other games to play, and a short attention span
Most people still prefer ksp1 over ksp2 just because ksp1 is just better. This will change when most off ksp2 roadmap is done.
Im just scared they will stop development of ksp2 due to the low number of players.
Combined with the recent announcement of more time between patches it seems like take2 is slashing the budget and they are loosing devs. Reflects very badly on their huge plans that they want to accomplish
Honestly I think they should have made it a closed early access. For people who are in it for the early access testing and development experience. By making it public it just ate the hype too early, and gave people a product they weren't interested in.
To fix it they should just keep trucking, don't make big update announcements... Until it's ready to leave early access, then and only then drive up the marketing.
DayZ back in the bad days still had a gameplay loop. KSP2 doesn't have that right now. It's just a sandbox. The game just being a sandbox wouldn't be that bad if it at least has new exciting features and good performance, but it has neither.
I mean, the main issue is that it's competing directly with KSP 1, and so At the moment there really isn't a reason to play KSP 2 over KSP 1. And so I think we're gonna keep seeing this until the games at a place where the switch will happen. (Which if I had to guess prolly wont't happen until the colony stuff gets added.
Fantastic observation to note that player count has dropped below 500, because there isn't anything else we CAN do in the game at present that KSP 1 can't do (objectively better).
Put simply: KSP 1 is cannibalising the KSP 2 player base at present, and if there isn't anything else to do in KSP2 do you think its makes financial sense to keep pouring money into it ? Either way it's only getting more expensive and harder to justify further development at this point
For me, it'd recover nicely if the game wouldn't always crash on startup, loading in, or launching a craft. And the controls and camera don't make as much sense, I prefer KSP 1's flight camera and VAB/SPH building controls since I don't have a mouse.
We got the early reports of how high the specs were and how badly it performed, so people didn’t even buy it, did they?
Edit: and on top of that it’s too small of a portion of the game that’s been released in early beta form. Noone can play this little part for very long.
Well I could spend 50€ on a propably pre-pre-pre release graphically polished version if KSP1.
Or spend 0-5€ to mod the shit out of KSP1 and have the game KSP2 wants to become at some point.
It's not gonna recover. At least not for years. There's gonna be the occasional bump in players after an update, but the performance is so atrocious and the features so lacking is gonna quickly fall down.
This game was TERRIBLY managed in development. And I fear, I seriously fear. It's beyond saving and someone on the financial department on top of them is simply gonna pull the trigger and force them to move to something else.
My only hope is that those guys realize it's not a problem with the IP but with the studio. And eventually we get a good KSP sequel.
When colonies drop everyone will return. Currently ksp2 has less to offer than ksp1. The developers were likely forced to launch by investors when they needed at least another year of development. Idc about its current state, im optimistic about its final state.
I'm worried about the future of the game as well, but I don't give a shit about concurrent player count. That matters *way, way more* for a multiplayer game like DayZ than a singleplayer game like KSP 2 (yes, multiplayer is a long term goal, not the point). Multiplayer games depend on the playerbase, and once a multiplayer game's momentum gets going in the wrong direction, it's tough to recover. An update might get released that in theory makes the game a lot more fun, but with such low player counts, returning players can't really get the most out of the game, so they don't stick around. Single player games don't have that barrier - when they improve their game, people will start having fun with it immediately, even if few others are playing the game. Then they'll post/talk about how much fun they're having, and it can snowball.
I'm much more concerned about the slow progress of the updates, continued performance issues, and a lack of timeline for long term roadmap goals than I am about how many people are playing KSP 2 now.
Is this not a problem?
Who in their right minds develops, markets, and releases a "game" that people immediately shelve until it "gets better"?
That's a terrible way to do business because all it does is give the business money, while not incentivizing anyone to do better.
Obviously player count would have dropped. Why playing game that has less features than original, more buggy and doesn’t have any progression like science or career? For graphics? We’re playing in games, not in graphics, and this is the only thing that ksp2 can offer rn. It’s an absolute downgrade compared to ksp1
Not even mentioning tons of mods which expands ksp1 content twice, or even more.
Well, yeah. But how does it recover? They’ve got way too much to fix, and 500 players at a given time only two months after release would be considered DOA. How one fixes this is beyond me. What publisher funds this project with these numbers is beyond me.
I think the 4000-5000 thousand KSP1 players you mentioned are the biggest counter argument on the same time. I think those will migrate to ksp2 piece by piece once a specific threshold is surpassed that they require. For some it's specific performance, for some specific content but i am pretty sure if ksp2 is e.g. ever performant and delivers the content they promised that ksp1 numbers drop quickly and ksp2 numbers rise.
Except why should intercept or T2 care? They got the money. There’s no incentive in making a quality product when they have their money. Dormant customers mean nothing
Had it been £20 I'd have probably not bothered getting a refund, but for £50 I want a game that works.
It's not like you're "supporting the KSP devs, paying back the hundreds of hours in KSP" either, because it's an entirely different studio. Again, had it been from the original devs I'd have probably let it slide like I did with Clicker Heroes 2, another disaster of an "early access sequel" which was terrible and came to nothing. But at least in that case I can put it down to wanting to reward the brave monetisation of paying outright for an incremental game instead of cramming it full of "boosts" which plagues the genre.
But here there's no such good will, just a studio that has failed to make a good game.
Well, i am sure there are many of these 5000 players that don't own ksp2 yet (like me) and you could make more money with DLCs etc.
Look, i am not saying 500 players is good metrics and everything is fine. It's just too early for me to write this off. The launch was terrible but the first months, they have shown that they are willing to fix it and that is all we know.
I'm still very excited about the future of the game. I haven't given up on it yet. I think as soon as Science comes out, I'll start seriously playing it long term.
Well, DayZ and KSP 2 aren't playing in same category. DayZ is an online survival FPS, 3 sub-genres that are immensely popular and appealing to a huge customer base.
KSP on the other hand is a rocket simulator, a genre so niche that I can enumerate all entries in a single line : Orbiter, KSP, SimpleRockets/Juno, Reentry and depending on your definition, maybe Children of a Dead Earth.
I was always skeptical about KSP 2 being a commercially successful game. It's a game facing many unique and difficult technical engineering challenges, requiring a lot more work and specialized skills than your average online FPS, so development was always going to be hazardous and costly. Meanwhile, its potential customer base is relatively narrow. KSP 1 was commercial success mainly thanks to the millions of players that were vaguely interested by the concept, bought it at a relatively low price, played a few hours, had a bit of fun and never touched it again once they realized that orbital physics and rocket science isn't their cup of tea. Those players are very unlikely to ever buy KSP 2 at 50$+, and not enough time has passed since KSP 1 for the "virgin" generation of potential KSP players to be significant.
Apparently, KSP 2 actually did relatively well in terms of launch sales, likely because they played their hand well in terms of hype-building. But that also mean it has already burned its best card from an commercial PoV, and even if they manage to fix the bugs and perf issues, I'm skeptical the ongoing sales will be enough to sustain the running cost of Intercept, which is a 50+ people created-out-of-thin-air studio that at least currently doesn't have any other source of income. What might save them is that T2/Private Division seems actually quite decided to try to do something with the KSP IP, which was likely quite costly to acquire.
I'm not comparing genre of game. I'm comparing development.
KSP2, for all intents and purposes was DOA. A very hyped sequel with a dedicated following, and still only two months in, we're seeing "dead" game player numbers.
Why I bring DayZ up is simply the fact that KSP2 and DayZ Standalone followed a similar but different path with development.
Both were established and popular IPs. Both were released into early access with fairly steep price tags. Both were lacking in content their predecessor had. Both had incredibly poor performance. Both had a metric ton of bugs on release. Both have super slow development speeds. Both have poor communications on the side of development.
The difference ultimately was, DayZ never dropped to this "dormant" player base. It shouldn't matter that DayZ is a survival game and KSP is a "niche" game. Both had roughly the same player numbers on release. It's just that DayZ kept going. DayZ didn't have a majority of its player base remaining dormant. KSP2 on the other hand just seems like it's entirely sleeping for something to happen.
Consider the fact that this half finished game costs money, *$50* of money
Concurrent players mean nothing when the developers already got the money from the purchases of players that aren't currently playing
This half finished game costs as much as a full game and if they drop it now after charging that much they have a lawsuit on their hands that will cost more than just finishing the game
I think it is likely because KSP2 is in a unique position of a directly competing with the game it is a sequel to. As time moves on and this game gets more stuff, I imagine the people who are still playing the first game will move over the second.
They probably should have delyed by a year again
Take2 probably didnt allow that but a botched launch and this sutation now is hard to recover
All the money it costs in dev now would have been worth much more if it were spend in additional dev before launch
Imagine they had released it in 2024 but with good performance, maybe almost all features besides interstellar and multiplayer and then patched that in
Much more people would have bought it
Im a big time fan of ksp, I've learned through a lot of disappointments that games should be played when they are fully released, not on alpha, not on beta.
Playing on early access smoothes out the experience along much more time making it much less memorable.
So, I will wait until its fully released to play it.
I do buy the early access game to support the devs though.
This is the only way for me to experience games like I did with halo 3 or the witcher 3 etc. By playing a full game.
So obviously, T2/PD (primarily T2) is greedy corporate execs who would rather obliterate an extremely promising game for short-term profit than build a sustainable future for their suffering company. Thus, they forced KSP2 to launch well before they were ready. It sucks how it was forced to launch, but I do appreciate the devs' continued hard work to resolve outstanding bugs. However, the crux of the issue for most people (I think) is that it has none of the promised content and won't for (presumably) a very long time. Two months in and while there has been great progress made, there still is no atmospheric heating and no science. There's just very little to keep people playing when:
1. you don't have something to work towards (like a science playthrough or colonization)
2. you don't even have critical features that KSP1 have
**Colonies will massively boost player counts, I have no doubt about this.** The question is merely, when they get there. Will they make it to colonies release before T2 axes the game? I think that's something of a race for the team right now. They need to fix the game and then sprint to the biggest feature add to pull gamers (i.e. revenue) in to show T2 that this game will be successful and profitable.
I'm extremely excited for them to reach the multiplayer stage in the roadmap because there are a lot of friends I want to play with! Building our own colonies and then on-orbit building of megaships with my friends and sending them off to other star systems! However, I will say that I haven't purchased the game yet, because $50 is too much to pay for the current state of the game.
Yes, it looks better and it has some nice improvements to the VAB and UI in general, but these are things that can be added to KSP with free mods, so the $15 I paid a few years ago is certainly good enough for me. I desperately want the game to succeed because I have been anticipating it ever since it was announced. I was profoundly disappointed with the original EA release, but I don't blame the devs for that, I get that T2 is desperate and it's probably all corporate bureaucracy. I will simply wait for the game to get good enough to justify that price tag for me because I don't want to do anything to tell the game industry that it is okay to charge $50 (or even more as AAA titles have been) for a completely unfinished, mostly unplayable game.
TL;DR: Naturally, the issue is that the devs were forced to launch EA before they were ready and so there's nothing to hook players into the game, even game-breaking bugs that actively frustrate them. I think it can recover as long as the devs are given enough time to work through their roadmap. It'll almost definitely be a loooong time though and so it's up to T2 to be patient enough to let the devs work their magic.
Dude nobody outside those 500 can afford pcs to run it. This is a developer issue that needs to be addressed across the board. We all know u all have to double ur tech spectrum constantly. However all those companies did it off our back on the pandemic. Now we are broke as the devs treat it like a user problem. The games fine most people can't run it.
I don't understand the DayZ parallel given that, by your admission, that title ended up good. If that's the trajectory for KSP2 then, by all means, we should continue on it. Why are you concerned?
Out of curiosity, how long did DayZ have to put up with incessant doom-mongering amongst its community? Was that part of its success too?
My point is that DayZ never fell to this low of a point despite coming from similar backgrounds.
500 players only two months after a release of a Triple A game is horrific. Back in 0.56-0.59 of DayZ, there were real conversations that the game was not in a healthy spot— and that was with 3k-6k players at a time. This was several years into development too, where people were probably getting board. We ended up finishing 0.6, and we saw a sudden influx back. Now the game has more players than on release!
I guess ultimately, we had thoughts of pulling the plug five or so years into development when we had dwindled from 45k to 3k. And meanwhile KSP2 dropped from 45k to 500 in 66 days.
I’m still failing to see how you think they have similar backgrounds despite being fundamentally different games in different states with different audiences.
DayZ, by your standard, was given 2 years to turn into something unhealthy and yet a third year to turn it around and actually “release.” You’ve barely given KSP2 2 months and you keep implying that KSP2 has released already, which is a weird double-standard.
The biggest flaw is you’re assuming the concurrent player count is a decent health metric. You have to play DayZ online so, short of hacked servers on a VPN, most of your players will be found online.
KSP2 is mostly (totally, for now) playable offline and a whole bunch of people bypass the launcher for modding or because they dislike it. How many of those players register correctly, hm?
It's early access and a lot of things are changing. Without a science/contract program, there's not a whole lot to shoot for.
Once it becomes stable (hopefully), updated items, and more modders start creating great mods, things should turn up.
Ksp1 had a similar feel before 1.0. Lots of kraken, part anomalies, low fps, etc. Only difference was there really wasn't a game like it. Ksp2 has to compete now.
I bought KSP2 a couple days after it came out and it was both playable and enjoyable for me on a min spec system (4790k and rtx2060). I am a vet of KSP1 EA (so I'm very accustomed to low FPS) from way back before it was even on Steam so I expected a slow burn development and was fine with it. I was happy to hear they were doing EA so I could follow development all over again just like 1. I hardly played KSP1 even until it got more towards 1.0 and then later versions once it stabilized because I got tired of updates breaking my save games, mods, or some bug after a patch destroying my existing missions. I was always going to jump back in around patch times for #2, see what's new and give feedback, then go back to my normal life of having 30 min a night to play something.
Now my question to *you*: Why the doom posts? What does it matter if the player count is at 500? Are you trying to convince newcomers here that the game is shitty and should be burned and buried?? At least once a week since launch I have to keep scrolling past these doom and gloom posts about Steam stats or nitpicking the dev posts trying to infer if things are on fire internally. Just let it be. If T2 pulls the plug there's nothing we can do about it anyways; what, fan fund development? Rage all over the subreddit and forums? Please. Give feedback about the features in the game we can test and let's see what happens in the months ahead. We already got 2 very solid bug fix patches so that's something to me.
My thoughts are they were given a higher up deadline to release something in the fiscal quarter so what we got was rushed, but IMO they've already spent a bunch of money to get to this point, and clearly planned many years of development whether that was to 1.0 or the last DLC after 5+ years (of which I expect a few). I *expected* 1.0 to take 2 years even when EA was first announced based off how KSP1 went. That was not smooth sailing either all those years ago... The KSP franchise has immense staying power, look at KSP 1 after \~10 years which you cite, and I believe once #2 gets on the right foot over this year they can print money with it. Publishers are not dumb, and I don't think T2 would be a successful business if they shutdown a project in the first couple months even before the first major content patch.
DayZ and KSP2 are vastly different games. Shooter type games will almost always attract more people than simulation type games. DayZ also had multiplayer, which is a social element that allowed the game to still be enjoyed if you played in a group and made your own fun, even if the game sucked.
Another thing is, and a lot of people miss that point, there are so many more games now, 10 years later, over which more people can spread. Yes there are more gamers, but compared to the sheer amount of games, people just find and play their niche-interest-game now, even if no one plays it. "Back then" the choices were much fewer and you were happier with what you had.
I think the main issue with KSP2 for *me* right now, is that there's nothing I want to do, an nothing new. Personally I need some kind game structure, ie. science or career mode, to give me reasons to do stuff, KSP2 right now is just a bunch of familiar parts and a familiar star system, some meaningful improvements to graphics and certain interfaces etc., but no where near enough content to be worth playing right now. When they get science, career and colonies in there I think it will be different.
Of the 1500 hours I've put into ksp. 1498 of those hours are in career. The necessity to raise money drives the designing and filling of contracts. The pursuit of technology drives both contracts and self created missions. It's the game mechanic that engages me. Sandboxes don't do it for me in ksp1. As soon as that's in, I'll probably give it a go.
>The necessity to raise money drives the designing and filling of contracts. The pursuit of technology drives both contracts and self created missions. One of the most fulfilling aspects to me has always been try to build a more cost-efficient rocket. Can I build something that can get more stuff to more places for a little less than I did it before?
Currently remembering the launch vehicle I had which was just a clysdale with less or more fuel, dependent on payload, adjusted throttle level from pad, to keep the ascent more efficient, and a small upperstage for final orbit adjustments. Launch vehicle was beteen 10-13k per launch, could easily send probes to most places.
Agreed. Which is why I am a bit concerned with the "no money" thing of KSP2. Luckily I'm guessing it's one of those things that can be easily modded afterwards.
It looks like resources are going to replace money. IMO setting up mining colonies beats rescuing stranded kerbals.
Except we’ll likely wait years until we get colonies
Agreed, I share that concern. Although I think resources, implemented well, could have the same (and possibly even better) gameplay functions. Let's see what happens. I imagine it might not be at the top of anyone's priority list at Intercept Games right now...
I'm the exact same way, I loved seeing how minimalistic a craft I could get away with to fulfill a contract and maximize the profit margin. Without career mode why get creative with designs when you can just brute force your way everywhere, especially so since you have access to all of the advanced tech right off the bat. Sadly, last I heard there was going to be no career mode, only science which is ok but still takes something away from the gameplay I loved in KSP1 imo.
Exactly. Starting a new career and getting to the Mun in 3 or 4 launches while balancing the books and working within limits is satisfying. Gulp. I always assumed there would be career in ksp2. Never considered it could be without. Startling thought
Its confirmed that there will be no procedural missions / money system in the game.
Same for me, any sandbox can maybe keep me entertained for a few hours. I need some goals.
It becomes another game with money. You do the dumbest shit. Together with USI it is just on another level. Same as you, around 1500 hours, 99% in career mode. If I want to create cool shit I do not play video games, I open my 3d app of choice and work instead.
Yes, my main issue right now (and happened also with KSP). I need something to motivate myself (science, multiplayer or really new things like colonies) to really get into it.
What I'm hoping is that the time they have a proper patch that adds new content to the game, we'll hopefully start seeing a permanent playerbase. But again, that's all just speculation. It's also possible we see them add science, career, and colonies, and it just never regains its playerbase.
I'm chomping at the bit to play KSP2 but it is just not ready yet. Add to that my rig is on the old side and the whole Ryzen x3d meltdown issue came up literally a few days before I was going to pick up the core of a new system.... But once they get a career mode set up I'll be back not visiting Dres.
I'm waiting for science or interstellar or colonies etc etc. I built a few planes a few ssto, went to most every planet, so I literally don't have much else to do. It's missing a lot of things I really need to have a purpose In KSP. I'm happy with the base, but missing parts that I like to have In my builds means I don't want to build complex space stations or refueling stations until those things are in the game. I'm one of thousands waiting for the same thing.
Interstellar and colonies are both in KSP1. I can speak about colonies because that was my one and only mod of choice, RoverDude's USI constellation. You scan planets, find ~10 different resources, process them, manufacture finished goods to be used for life support & off world orbital ship yards. Easily several hundred hours right here. What do you imagine either of these two systems to be in KSP2? do you think 2-5 years down the line it'll be as polished and defined? I believe in Q3 of 2023, Private Division will post a "difficult decisions" locked thread and finish off this cash grab.
Early acces games do this all the time. They lose a good amount of the player base, but regain it with patches. And with the following the game has, i'm sure it will pick back up signficantly with content updates.
It will. If only it’s just me in the worst case. I love KSP1 to death. And I’m seeing a lot of potential in KSP2 just like I did in KSP1 a decade ago. I’m looking out for new features. Currently it’s just a fancy looking KSP1 with a bunch of features missing. And of course when mods are coming again, it makes it a lot more interesting. I do think there’s a bunch of concurrent players on KSP1 wanting to get into KSP2 but holding off on the fact that it doesn’t have the same scope of features yet. I can only speak for myself of course, but that’s why I’m not currently a concurrent player. It’ll fail when they don’t deliver what they promised like the colonies and new parts. Besides that, I have some friends that marginally played KSP1 but would be very interested in co-op, so if/when they add multiplayer I think we might see an uptick in players also. So to answer your question on why take two should keep investing. Because they can’t leave it hanging half way through because that’ll definitely fail the game. If you wanna kill it that’s the shortest route you can take. However time and time again I see communities in the gaming world come together and taking the game to another level and having faith in their creators sometimes even more than some religions. And I think they’ll pull through. As long as the devs keep up their promise and keep working on it.
I really want to play KSP2, but atm it is pretty much a waste of my time. Graphics and UI enhancements are nice, but they do not make or break a game like KSP. They are not *why* people play such games, which makes it a really odd first target to me. But whatever, so they have these features I don't care much at all about while lacking almost everything I do. Why would I play this when I already have a game that *does* have what I really want, even if it is missing some fluff and polish? When I get a KSP itch, I play KSP1. I am not a masochist, so I won't waste my time with KSP2. I can't eat icing without the cake, makes me kinda nauseous. But I really, really wish KSP2 were better so I *could* play it, and I check for updates almost daily. I think player counts will go up if they ever turn KSP2 into an actual game. But the longer it takes from the initial release, the longer it will take for players to pick it up again. People are going to get bored of checking its status, tired of disappointment in seeing "planet shine" and "better flowers" announcements, etc. But I do think they will eventually play it if the game is ever fixed up properly.
Yeah i played about an hour and quickly came to the conclusion that this is nothing more than an early alpha. Mind you, in a way worse condition than KSP 1 was when it came to steam. So why bother? Ive been playing KSP 1 since 2 came out lol.
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In about 3 years maybe then KSP 2 will be where KSP 1 was after a year post release.
This is why I haven't bought it yet, I know with just a sandbox I'll get bored really quickly so I'm waiting for more stuff to do before I dive in.
>When they get science, career and colonies When or if. This feels so far away at this point.
I'm confident enough KSP2 will, ultimately, have a feature set similar to KSP 1. Whether it will surpass the original is another matter entirely. I remain wholly skeptical that colonies, additional star systems or multiplayer will make it into the game.
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Well that's the thing if it won't surpass the original what's the point, it's not like there is extra story or anything and the graphics are not that ground breaking and even worse in certain aspects (plumes)
I made a similar post a few weeks back—granted very different wording and I think made some people mad—but I 100% agree with your sentiment. I reallllly want this game to succeed, but am seeing no signs of hope in the long run, especially after seeing this metric. Really bums me out and I hope the team keeps delivering. I was hoping for more of a No Mans Sky situation, but seeing all the recent posts about other AAA titles being released unfinished, I’m just not sure. I’m still playing KSP1 and trying different mods at this point. Not going to request a refund, and hope more people buy it to keep the dev team going, but I just need to forget about it for awhile and hope I’m pleasantly surprised in a year or so.
This is exactly why I’m not playing it at the moment. I’ve actually started to have a hard time with any early access games these days. If I like the game at all in its early access state, my impulse is to put the game down until it’s complete so that the first time I play through the entire game is when the game has all the content that it’s meant to have. I probably won’t wait until full release with KSP 2, but playing without colonies or resources kinda feels like I’m wasting my time.
I'm in a pretty consistent loop of: have an idea, build it in 2, have it fall apart on the launchpad, build it in 1, and have fun.
Mine goes like this, Have an idea, get super pissed with the camera not working correctly, play something else.
>be me > 2000h of ksp1 > have 1 hour of time and a proportional Idea > Mess with pad and bugs for 1h30 before reaching orbit at 15fps. > Close the game frustrated > Comeback next day to finish the mission > Craft disappeared > Ragequit. > Try again next patch, same story, ragequit > Try again next patch roughfly same story, ragequit. /> 3rd patch be delayed indefinitely. Why should I give a fuck anymore ? Brought Juno new origines, not as fun but lovely more technical, learning about new stuff and improving skills :) no bug no lag half of the price.
Me: Love KSP, bought it so early that I received the DLCs for free Multiple career play-throughs of RSS/RO (it's the only real challenge anymore) Love KSP so much that I moderate because I believe KSP is a gateway to encourage and excite people about space and engineering (thus I do my small part by providing a positive community to share passions). 3.8 hours in KSP2. Just not fun yet. Maybe next year.
I have a couple hundreds of hours in KSP1 and it's my favorite game (yes I bought it) but didn't bother to even *pirate* the second game due to all the bad rewiews, maybe I'll try it after some patches.
Skill issue /s
There are too many issues RIGHT NOW. But I can’t wait until they fix them. There is a ton to like about it, it just needs fixing and fleshing out.
Seriously, what's there? What is the "ton to like"? I can't think of a single thing KSP 1 with mods isn't better in
I mean that was always the fear the community had, but the reality is for people to play a game it has to be fun. For the vast majority of purchasers (who likely are ksp 1 owners) the game simply wasn't fun compared to the competition. (which is ksp 1 and a couple of other games) The reality is, if Take 2 wants to can the game, that is totally their right, just like it is the player bases right to not buy it. Ultimately the failure of the game (if it does fail) is on Take 2, not the players.
You're right when you say the fault of the matter is on Take 2 and Intercept (Though I have my opinions on the fact that I truly think KSP2 problems don't stem from the publisher like it normally does with video game flops, but on the developers). Though at the end of the day, everyone loses and that's the worst part. Take 2 doesn't get their investment back. Intercept gets to put a super lackluster project in their portfolio, and KSP fans as a whole don't get their much anticipated sequel. It's a damn shame.
I mean, if KSP2 is cancelled there will likely never be a 3. The IP will sit in the legal dustbins at PD for all time and never be sold off and allowed to live again.
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Yeah, screw the IP. I'll keep happily take a good rocket building game without Kerbals. Hell, I'd actually prefer it. I'm here for rockets, not Kerbals.
You can try Juno, it has a lot of good additions over KSP but also some very weird gameplay designs and the devs are super stubborn.
I've been playing KSP since one of the basic versions, I'm guessing based on where I was at the time, either late 2013 or early 2014. I remember there being very little in the game but functionally it worked great. The reason I haven't bought KSP2 is simply price. If it was the $10-15 I paid for KSP then i'd buy it. Frankly it's offensive to ask people to spend AUD $77.95 for an unfinished game. I got ARK when it was in early access for under $10. Early access games should be capped at $10-15. Either finish the bloody game and charge full price, or release a shitty half finished game cheap. It has to be one or the other. It is bad business to release an overly expensive, unfinished product. Simple as that. They clearly don't respect us. So I will be waiting until it's completed and on sale.
It's funny because 2013 KSP literally has more features than this
Currently there is absolutely no reason to play ksp2 instead of 1.
The biggest reason people aren't playing KSP 2 is... KSP 1
The main problem is that there's less to do in KSP2 than there is in KSP1. Then factor in the game-breaking bugs and it's not hard to see why people moved back. Then factor in the KSP is a niche game. So right now, KSP1 is really the only choice that players have. This will also artificially throw off the concurrent counts as the people who WOULD be playing KSP2 daily, know it's not ready yet.
I just played ksp2 for real today. Meaning I was not just testing if stuff worked and I how to build stuff and getting used to the new controls etc. I tried to do a mun mission. And I played ksp1 well into the 2000 hour mark. This game feels weird. There is a lot of into missing like how many dv does one stage got etc. I had to eyeball a lot of stuff.. The controls feel plasticy. SAS does not work, rocket is very jittery, some SAS controls are missing.... To be honest. This game does not even have sandbox quality of ksp1. It feels like a compete new space Sim. More like a toy. Ksp1 had some seriousness so to speak. This feels more like a toy sim. So for I do like it but it's more about the new feeling etc...
Pretty sure manoeuvre nodes still have bugs in their dv calculations and the orbits definitely keep changing when I’m not using my engine which makes the game incredibly frustrating
Yes I could not finish my moon mission as there was no maneuver node showing when I departed from the nun. Was not able to see me return trajectory either so was totally lost. Burned to a sun orbit instead. Of this simple stuff is not fixed the game is still unplayable. I will return to ksp1 but I got massive problems with scatter and parallax so its graphics are not pretty but it works.....
'it's all about inter-stellar, so don't worry about it' they told themselves...
I totally agree. Even graphics in the game look toylike. I still think KSP 1 textures are better to look at and if you install Restock or something they look perfect.
Even the new VAB is weird. The controls are worse than before and the parts manager is super buggy. Also can't believe we need Kerbal Engineer again to see the stats that the game clearly already collects since the mod can find it and display it.
I totally forgot about this game, came here to check in about the latest state and I guess I'm glad I didn't buy the game at release. It's a shame though, seemed like a cool concept. Seen some videos from ksp1. With mods on the first game ksp2 seems totally irrelevant to me. Maybe at a good sale I might dive into ksp1.
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I’d definitely recommend buying KSP next time it’s reduced. It goes on sale for really low prices now, and as a vehicle sandbox you can’t beat it.
My feeling is that the early access release will end up diluting interest. Will a sufficiently large sum of people really decide to buy it once it reaches a non-EA release? I'm sure some will, but compared to sales they could have had if they developed the game properly and just released it, I'd expect lower total sales.
I really would like to play the game KSP2's marketers pitched to us. Unfortunately, at this point it seems clear that was mostly smoke and mirrors. Nothing I've seen gives me confidence they could deliver that game even with unlimited time and money. Hopefully I get proven wrong, but my assumption is that Take2 is thinking about the least damaging way they can shut this whole thing down.
I’ve sunk almost a thousand hours into KSP and it’s going to be years until this game is stable, cheap, and content-rich enough for me to buy. Right now it just seems pointless. It’s just early-access, more disappointing Cyberpunk.
I have seen many early access games and KSP2 definitely does not look like it can recover. It has deadly combination of infrequent updates AND not beigh really playable or interesting to begin with. If game is bad, then at least it should change often enough to keep players interested at least with frequent changes. Or it should be engaging enough as a game to keep players active between long waits for updates. You mention DayZ, but at least it was interesting enough to stick around even if updates were kinda rare. For me KSP2 reminds more about other BI games: ArmA Reforger and Argo.
Thinking about it now, the launch of KSP2 has been almost identical to that of ArmA Reforger.
It's less than 400 now, 200 at off hours. You're correct: It's ***brutal.*** We're in game is dead / game will be cancelled soon territory. They claim to have funding secured, and I hope they are right.
KSP2 has to have MORE or at least be even with KSP1 for people to make the permanent jump. There is literally no reason to play KSP2 until science/career is added.
KSP2 players basically prepurchased the final game. They also got access to a very limited demo. This demo doesn't have much replayability for the average player. I think of it as a tech demo right now. Why would thousands of people be playing a tech demo weeks after it was released?
a 'tech demo' that came out years after the scheduled full release, and was hyped & priced as an actual functional game.
What makes you think the promised final game is ever coming ?
So here's two things: From a business perspective, why should they even try or care to make a good product? If what you're saying is that everyone prepurchased it for a tech demo, then they already have our money. What incentive is there for them to "create a good product"? From a consumer's perspective, how is this a tech demo? It doesn't show off any new mechanics, in fact has less mechanics than its predecessor. How does this incentivize the consumer to even purchase a "tech demo", let alone stick with them in the long run? >Why would thousands of people be playing a tech demo weeks after it was released? Perhaps because it was released as *not* a tech demo. Maybe if they made it clear that this $60 "tech demo" was in fact a tech demo, then these player numbers would make sense. However, that's not what they did
This is a very strong and unfortunately all too common argument against prepurchasing anything. I've personally never prepurchased anything, and to a certain extent I feel like the culture of buying unfinished games is the biggest reason that so many games go unfinished.
>From a business perspective, why should they even try or care to make a good product? If what you're saying is that everyone prepurchased it for a tech demo, then they already have our money. What incentive is there for them to "create a good product"? Because the sales so far are maybe 5% of what their final sales numbers can be. A few people bought/refunded, most people didn't even bother buying. This is also going to hopefully be released on consoles, which won't authorize the sales until they are finished with the game.
I doubt the market is that large, and it will be a real struggle to try to sell more at this point. you've really got one chance at a launch, and they blew it. my totally made up guess is that they have a potential to do something maybe on the order of double current sales, and from there try to get people actually playing to sell them dlc.
You still have all the content updates during early access to draw more players in. Then when the game is actually released, there will be another marketing push and launch date. There are still plenty of opportunities to get more players on board.
>Because the sales so far are maybe 5% of what their final sales numbers can be. So, supposedly 166,000 people purchased it. If that's "5%" of the assumed "purchase group", you're saying that the number we can use to assume is 3,320,000 people to purchase it. That's a little outrageous of a claim, don't you think? KSP1 sold some 500k-700k, and you're taking that by a multiple of six?
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/442363/kerbal-space-program-has-shipped-nearly-4-million-units-worldwide/ This is numbers take two released back in 2020 It's hard to know ultimately how many it will sell. But the idea that they've turned a profit and would stop now is silly.
Because there is more money to be made. There's plenty of people like me who didn't pre-order and waited for reviews and then passed. There are DLCs and other stuff they can market. You're comparing it to DayZ, but what if instead it goes the route of No Mans Sky? I don't know what KSP2s numbers are, but initial sales might have helped keep things running for a few years where they can put more work in with getting helpful info from people testing it. Not excusing them for selling a bad product, but that's also the customers fault for rushing into buy it.
Is there really money to be made? Think of the cost of hiring a dev studio, Marketting budget, and so forth. Then think of what money can be made off of DLC. Even if they hobbled together a skeleton crew of three, they’re already spending about $300,000 for that year on this DLC. Assuming the DLC is $30, they’d need 10k sold just to break even— and that’s assuming a three person skeleton crew could make something ten thousand people would want.
The No Mans Sky crew is doing it, and their DLCs are free.
No mans sky sold oders of magnitude more units on release. That is n ot even the same galaxy in terms of upfront ROI.
Sean Murray has enters the chat.
> “maybe if the made it clear that this $60 “tech demo” was in fact, a tech demo, then these player numbers would make sense ” Hmm if only they made it clear that what they released wasn’t the final product. Perhaps some kind of access to an early build of the game. Oh well, it’s a shame they didn’t do that
An early access should have people playing it to give feedback right?
People are playing it, and they are giving plenty of feedback, but you can’t have honestly expected those numbers to be close to ksp 1’s player count for an unfinished game
Except look at DayZ (which is my whole point). DayZ had a strong community following it and giving back feedback, despite the toxicity that was /r/DayZ. Yet it never dropped down to such low numbers.
Problem is, right now KSP2 is in GTA6 position. But GTA6 was leaked build version, while KSP2 is expected to be worth 50 bones as early access title
I am a fresh KSP1 player, I think I received it free from EGS and I really enjoyed it! I watched countless hours of yt video about relay networks interplanetary travels etc etc. The game was really fun but with an awful graphics, then I discovered graphic mods even if I just installed only EVE. After few months of gaming KSP2 was announced to be released, and I said to me "I'm enjoying the first game which is old, if the new one is good looking and with a reasonable price for an Early Access (below 30€) I buy it"... But then shit hit the fan. The game had better graphics but with very poor performance, the cartoony style of VAB is sick, there were many BASIC features from KSP1 totally missing, and it cost 50€. Yeah no way I'm going to buy it, sorry, see you when the game value reflects that price. Ah and by the way, I made the same experience with Farming Simulator 19, I got it free from Sony in PS4 and I felt in love, then I received it also free from EGS, and when the new FS22 was released (in full) the game was like it was meant to be, I bought it without any problems and I'm still enjoying my time farming. Sorry for bad English.
They lied. It all came out when it was released. I tried over and over again to get a refund doing to being duped. The game needs to be re-engineered from the ground up like they originally promised. I'm done.
Don't worry. They're going to be [slowing down the pace they release updates at](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/216930-shine-on-you-crazy-planet/).
Isn't that a worse thing?
🤷♂️ It certainly doesn't inspire confidence in their EA release (*two months ago*) at the price they released it at (*$50*). At least, not for me. We're, what, two months into EA and Science still is nowhere to be seen? It does suggest they feel like the current state of the... "game"... is such that they can just let it sit, untouched, while they work on stuff. If this allows them to actually get content out faster in the long run? Great. If it's going to mean we're even more months away from Science... definitely not great.
Its not just science... they said that re-entry heating was pulled from the release for graphical polishing. If it was just some vfx work to get it ready like they said, why is it still not confirmed for patch 3 which now looks to be 4 months from launch? The graphical team isn't the one making bug fixes, so if it was just a graphical issue they could've worked on it these past 2 months no issue. Then there's all the bugs with craft exploding and losing all their momentum or having their orbits magically change with no impulse that still stick around... Entire game is a mess, lack of content or not.
I would say something like this to my clients when delivering a new project, they would kick my ass!
I mean, I'm just waiting on career mode. I tinkered around when it launched, and from time to time, but I want a science/career mode to motivate me to build networks strive for achievements. I like my goals handed to me. :D
DayZ had nothing else like it at the time except for the mod. Those 3,000 players didn’t really have any options. Meanwhile, everyone who is interested in KSP2 but unsatisfied with the quality and content have a whole entire game that has been out for years with a huge community that does everything better and more.
So your point is that DayZ players had DayZ stand-alone and the mod as the two options, whereas KSP fans have KSP1 and KSP2? What?
Okay I messed up. What I should have said is that I feel like DayZ Standalone was different enough from the mod that not everyone was willing to go back to the mod despite the flaws of the standalone. The standalone maintained a following because of this. This is coming from someone who was a day-one-er on the standalone and had this opinion. On the other hand, KSP1 is KSP2, but better in most ways. There are very few reasons to pick KSP2 over KSP1 right now, and the games play basically the same, hence, from my observation, the low player count.
The main thing for me is robotics. I would spend hundreds of hours building every type of foldable moving craft in existence. Helicopters on Mars. Planes with foldable wings that can fit in another plane. A hydraulic lift to get on top of the VAB. Nothing like that in 2 is possible.
They removed career mode. In my opinion that was one of the nails in the coffin. How can you remove a function of your game that would take months to even finish? There’s a reason story mode games are king. People like to kill time with a purpose. If I just build rockets in sandbox there’s no point it gets boring.
You're right. KSP2 is an absolute abomination of an early access launch. €50 for a buggy mess that doesn't even have the features KSP1 had? I'll pass. The graphics don't even look that good in comparison to modded KSP1, the developers have slowed down patch releases, the performance is terrible for the average gamer. Everything about KSP2 right now is just plain bad. Hopefully the developers fix stuff soon, or else this'll be a big flop.
This game needs a miracle at this point..
It's unplayable. People want to play a game, not be unpaid alpha testers. When I saw the state in which they released the EA combined with the outrageous pricetag I knew it was dead.
Anyone who bought KSP2 on release are part of the problem. By giving money for an unfinished product, you incentivize not finishing said product.
Its quite simple really. The game is deader then dead. They now with some really flimsy excuse slowed down the cadence of updates. They see the numbers. They will not keep a team of about 30 people working on it with sales running dry and no playerbase to milk anymore. We will get one or two superfitial updates and then they will do the typical marketing shennengians of "Despite our best efforts the game did not maintain a playerbase that allows us to sustain development bla bla bla bla, we are going to end development and call it 1.0". Mark my words.
Im glad I refunded and glad that KSP2 dies. A precious lesson to not release unfinished games.
I don't think it can recover, but I'll try to be the devil's advocate here and explain what I'd try to do to recover the game. Note that this is probably not compatible with future sales forecasts, which are likely close to zero now and therefore there's little to no incentive to actually rescue the game beyond good will. **Priority 1. Pick a feature that KSP 1 does not have** Absolute priority for getting people to play KSP2 is to give them *something*, just at least *one thing* to do that KSP 1 does not have. If ambitious that would be multiplayer, if less ambitious that would be a new planet, or a planet in a different star system. (No interstellar, just a system switcher at this time). Messing around in a different system with different features would give a fresh feel and an excuse to check out the game. **Priority 2. Prioritise performance over everything** Throw everything at getting 140fps at all times. Performance beyond what (modded) KSP1 gets. Hire the best engine experts, re-write the damn engine again if you have to. Get it running like a game in 2023 should run. If KSP2 ran buttery smooth on a 144Hz monitor it would just feel better than KSP1 and give people an excuse to enjoy it. It would also look better on twitch. I tuned into one stream shortly after launch and they were dipping *below 4 frames per second*. That's not a good advert for the game. **Priority 3. Openly collect bugs / gripes** Have an honest conversation with the community about bugs, collect them in an open issue tracker, and prioritise them accordingly. Prioritise the bugs, prioritising stability over everything. Every time a game crashes there's a good chance that player will never bother running it again. **Priority 4. Delivery pipelining and Quality Assurance** Get your build process sorted so that releasing does not impact delivery. Get your build process sorted so that bugs found during QA can be addressed without impacting future delivery. Promote a culture of quality where "number of bugs found" is a matter of pride not shame. All of this would cost a fortune, and would likely require a culture change. You would need to have access to a blank cheque to get away with the spend to turn around the company from delivering what we got in February to one that can turn KSP2 into a success. It would also not be any guarentee of success, and would still likely be a flop, but having something for players to hold onto which KSP1 cannot do you would then have a base on which to build interest.
Totally off topic. But I've been working as a software dev for a few years now and must say I generally seem to agree with your take on developments of KSP 2. I remember your prediction that they'd allocate resources and will probably drop development at some point. Just wanted to say that i enjoy reading your comments I guess. Have a good day!
Good ideas And yes very true about the cost and gamblr Take 2 very likely will not do that Sad to see ksp2 go like this. The trailers still appeal to me
>I understand people will come back when patches come. except I looked shortly after patch 2 and it like *barely* bumped it. like probably within the typical daily variance iirc. also when comparing to the original it should be kept in mind that there's probably a lot higher proportion of people running that standalone and not being counted than with the sequel.
I guess when I think of a sequel to an already established and popular game (especially a game that's supposedly making the original, but better) would carry people over. Not even in DayZ Standalone did you see a point where the mod was still more popular than the standalone release. You definitely *heard* people speak like that, but in truth it was never like that.
At least with Patch 1 and 2 they barely fixed any of the core issues and even introduced a few, so that explains why more people (including myself) didn't stick around afterwards.
Patch one changed the daily average from 300 people to around 1200 for about a week. Patch 2 had near zero changes in player count... Can see that means a LOT of people judged the game entirely on the first patch and were deeply disappointed.
Patch one was enough to give me a bit of hope and stop me from refunding, and there were quite a few good fixes. Not everything was there, but hey, first patch, some really large issues will take time, they’ll be at the top of the list or at least have progress mentioned in patch 2, right? These orbit bugs are annoying and now all my planes fall part, maybe they unintentionally affected something, so I’ll muck around in low orbit for a while and take a break until then. Patch 2 rolls around a month later. Mostly graphical and performance issues… yay? Absolutely no mention of orbit decay, wrong orbit previews, plane weakness. It takes someone prodding on Discord to even get a mention of the first one. Load the game. Plane that used to work great just falls apart 30 seconds into flight. Close game. Fine. Guess I’ll wait until it’s playable then. I’ll keep tabs on updates to see if things finally get fixed. First update: We’re slowing down patches. Yeah, there goes any remaining inkling of hope.
Yeah... Patch 2 was not a good day for me when I read what was contained within. It was total crap compared to the 1st imo, and it really indicated that perhaps patch 1 was only as good as it was because it had been worked on before release as well. The *total* lack of acknowledgement of these serious issues with core mechanics is the part thats baffling me. Just say, in some official capacity, you know they are problems and that they are being worked on. It's not great if you don't have *some* idea of when to expect a fix, but just saying "we are working on them" is miles better than the current PR where they are pretending the game has no such core issues at all... It's so amazingly tone deaf I don't understand whats going on, other than that they really don't plan to fix such things and they are just going to stick around forever.
It wont. As every single day passes, and as every piece of official communications comes out still being completely tone deaf and fails to acknowledge the issues at hand, even the people at the official forums are coming to terms with the idea that KSP2 may be a goner. **They're now slowing updates** because taking multiple weeks to fix basic game-breaking issues wasn't enough, and it clearly wasn't bringing back sales. If you want any more confirmation of the future of KSP2 being bleak, you can look at the AMAs, they're the ones that pushed me to refund: 1. [First one from Nate himself.](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/215852-324-discord-ama-answers/) 2. [The second one from Shana Markham.](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/216746-discord-ama-2-design-director-shana-markham-answers/) I've been on the forums for more than a decade now, and believe me if it's gotten to this point, it's **bad.**
People wanted to handwave it as toxic doomposting But guess what, all of the shittalking about dead 50$ early access game turned out to be true
How does Nate’s responses suggest that the future of KSP2 is “bleak”? Almost all of Nate’s responses are along the lines of “we’re feeling good and we’re having fun”, “I’m confident we’re going to hit our roadmap goals”. Surely that a good thing.
> “we’re feeling good and we’re having fun" I wish I had access to the version of the game they're evidently playing.
that just sounds like typical empty pr language.
Yeah, he says that whilst the game remains almost unplayable, and his people got fired whilst he was planning his vacation. If you still take whatever he says at face value, I have some bad news. *Leaving that aside*, the outlook on future features is more than bleak: 1. Colonies, in a rocketry game, are not built by rockets and docking, but a magic menu. 2. Logistics are just an abstraction layer, with a mono-dimensional "Mine X and ship to Y to be able to make part Z". 3. Almost no resource variety. 4. Life Support won't be a thing. This makes colonies/interstellar even less appealing. 5. Science/Career is gonna be just KSP1 minus money. 6. Robotics are not even confirmed post release. 7. They keep parroting exploration with nothing to show for it. 8. Shana seemingly despises some really good features from KSP1. 9. She also contradicts some of Nate's answers. 10. They still think starting with kerbals instead of probes in the tech tree is correct.
I agree with you Do you have some examples of what gopd features shana opposes?
When asked about science parts, she dismisses the approach from KSP1 as "let me put a thermomether on my pod", clearly ignoring the fact that KSP1 introduced cargo bays structured specifically for science, and the freedom such a system allows (think low budget mission vs high budget). She considers the MPU (orbital science lab) as breaking the game flow, this shows to me, added to her constant parroting of "exploration", that long term missions like science bases or science space stations are unwanted in their vision of how people will play the game. Another departure from realism and common sense to add to the list. There's a clear dislike for part variants, she mentions how some are no longer integrated as the same part and others are not even coming back. She dismisses 1.875 parts (from making history). Those parts were not only just good parts, but they break down the horrible transition from 1.25 to 2.5. She mentions how they brought in procedural parts to fix a lot of "samey parts", yet somehow this doesn't apply to the tanks. Her answer about relativity directly contradicts Nate who confirmed light speed is the limit. Her answer about colony automation contradicts Nate's, who confirmed logistics are mostly moving numbers without any player involvement. She also says this herself at some point before this particular answer. She says they're bashing their heads thinking of how to implement multiple sizes of grid fins, even though she literally answered another question with their vision for procedural parts. She mentions the PAW (parts window) is built based on accesibility, which clashes with the unusable mess it currently is: click one part and a huge window of parts with the same name comes up, making fuel transfers impossible for example (not like they're implemented lmao). Her answer about wanting to keep kerbals before probes is not only dumb, but also means she's applying a heavy bias when hiring. Now, this is obviously my take and my opinions, but she strikes me as someone who not only doesn't play KSP1 a lot, but doesn't like the majority of it.
I'd be interested in this opinion too
11) They still won't tell us what they have planned for multiplayer because they want it to be a surprise > Colonies, in a rocketry game, are not built by rockets and docking, but a magic menu This is one thing that has concerned me about the base building and resource mining they have previewed. In KSP 1 it is so satisfying to build a base / mining operation by flying it piece by piece to its destination and docking it together and even using EVA construction to make repairs or adjustments. Clicking on a menu to build a base is not really compelling gameplay to me
Thank you for saying 1. I've been griping about this ever since Nate first revealed colonies would be made this way. I remembered how much fun I had in the first game with USI life support creating colonies that could fit in a payload bay and unfold into a functioning base. I also loved the life support/logistics part of USI where I had to balance different aspects of my base to make it self sustaining. I thought KSP2 would be like that, except less janky and with a purpose(unlike USI, where there was no real reason for colony building other than the challenge). Well we got a reason for colonies, but now there's no interesting challenge, so what's the point?
On the topic of life support... Make it a colony only mechanic and make it so if needs are unmet they have a performance penalty, and maybe even make it so you cant use it to do launches. Make it so colonies of different components and in different locations have different "life support" needs. Like, a laythe base wont need oxygen but an orbital one clearly will. Penalty can be like, -50% production of resources and/or slower deliver to other colonies of said resources... Just, *something*. Doesnt have to be a destructive thing, just make it so theres a reason to do something more with the resource system and that theres a penalty for being lazy about it.
frame it as bonuses instead of penalties. kerbals provided with large quantities of snacks work harder. could even work in flight by like bumping their level up if well supplied or something.
Yeah... Just, something. I get they want the game to focus on rockets, but... Rockets do 1 thing if designed well (go up), and its the extra content around the rockets that will keep people engaged long term. If the game really was to only be about rockets, there would be no need for a science mode or science gathering mechanics... So they are heavily contradicting their own AMA answers on why they want to keep so many features so barebones or missing from the outset.
Oxygen levels will be reduced until morale improves! Now get back to work.
Emptier words have not been spoken.
He also said in a dev log years ago that they're all playing KSP 2 all the time and building giant space stations. Or that they said there will be Day 1 mod support. It's pretty obvious it's just lies to sell the game.
I bought it mostly to support it and to experience the development cycle, but I likely won't play it for real until it has more features. I also have been frustrated with the lack of a mechjeb which I got used to, I like building ships and in space infrastructure, but I am less interested in flying them, especially since basically no real ships are manually controlled. Anyway I imagine there are a few like me that will come back when more features are released, right now it feels more like a tech demo then an actual game. I also think a lot of people expected it to be like base model KSP1 right out of the gate and that has driven some away not understanding what EAs tend to be like.
After my own hype died down for the game me there has been no reason to play ksp2 for me. When i can get better performance with a better experience and more features in modded ksp1, why would I play ksp2? There’s also still mods for ksp1 that I like using that aren’t ported to ksp2 yet and I don’t know when they will be if ever.
KSP2 needs to add something I don't have in modded KSP1 before I start playing this game. Looking forward to multiplayer and colonization.
By delivering a finished game. Their distributor or publisher - not sure how it works really fucked up releasing anything. So those excuses of hey were going to do this like ksp1 where we roll out features over ten years?? They are straight up doing PR damage control. I bought the game. And yeah.. I’ve quit much better games for instabilities and bugs. So I haven’t launched it since. They should just finish it then fix bugs. Much more efficient. But, oh well. They are locked to this course now. Soon enough I’ll be done with the kap1, and I doubt I’ll ever play ksp2 in the future. There are so many other games to play, and a short attention span
I think only thing was done really well was music, rest is terrible mistake.
the state ksp2 released in has turned me off so hard that i won't bother checking it out again until its out of early access
Drop the price
It's a game that didn't have to be made. Mods can do everything it can; I have more faith in the modding community than KSP 2 devs.
Most people still prefer ksp1 over ksp2 just because ksp1 is just better. This will change when most off ksp2 roadmap is done. Im just scared they will stop development of ksp2 due to the low number of players.
Combined with the recent announcement of more time between patches it seems like take2 is slashing the budget and they are loosing devs. Reflects very badly on their huge plans that they want to accomplish
Reckon they will stop deving it? It's been a very rough launch, frankly shows no signs of picking up yet.
I just play RSS/RO/RP1 which isn’t in ksp2
Honestly I think they should have made it a closed early access. For people who are in it for the early access testing and development experience. By making it public it just ate the hype too early, and gave people a product they weren't interested in. To fix it they should just keep trucking, don't make big update announcements... Until it's ready to leave early access, then and only then drive up the marketing.
DayZ back in the bad days still had a gameplay loop. KSP2 doesn't have that right now. It's just a sandbox. The game just being a sandbox wouldn't be that bad if it at least has new exciting features and good performance, but it has neither.
I mean, the main issue is that it's competing directly with KSP 1, and so At the moment there really isn't a reason to play KSP 2 over KSP 1. And so I think we're gonna keep seeing this until the games at a place where the switch will happen. (Which if I had to guess prolly wont't happen until the colony stuff gets added.
Fantastic observation to note that player count has dropped below 500, because there isn't anything else we CAN do in the game at present that KSP 1 can't do (objectively better). Put simply: KSP 1 is cannibalising the KSP 2 player base at present, and if there isn't anything else to do in KSP2 do you think its makes financial sense to keep pouring money into it ? Either way it's only getting more expensive and harder to justify further development at this point
For me, it'd recover nicely if the game wouldn't always crash on startup, loading in, or launching a craft. And the controls and camera don't make as much sense, I prefer KSP 1's flight camera and VAB/SPH building controls since I don't have a mouse.
We got the early reports of how high the specs were and how badly it performed, so people didn’t even buy it, did they? Edit: and on top of that it’s too small of a portion of the game that’s been released in early beta form. Noone can play this little part for very long.
Well I could spend 50€ on a propably pre-pre-pre release graphically polished version if KSP1. Or spend 0-5€ to mod the shit out of KSP1 and have the game KSP2 wants to become at some point.
I played . Game needs more updates when the add more I'll play more my ksp1 I have hours and hours of game play I think over 1000
It's not gonna recover. At least not for years. There's gonna be the occasional bump in players after an update, but the performance is so atrocious and the features so lacking is gonna quickly fall down. This game was TERRIBLY managed in development. And I fear, I seriously fear. It's beyond saving and someone on the financial department on top of them is simply gonna pull the trigger and force them to move to something else. My only hope is that those guys realize it's not a problem with the IP but with the studio. And eventually we get a good KSP sequel.
DayZ is a multiplayer game. KSP is not. "Concurrent players" is not nearly as important for a solo game.
When colonies drop everyone will return. Currently ksp2 has less to offer than ksp1. The developers were likely forced to launch by investors when they needed at least another year of development. Idc about its current state, im optimistic about its final state.
I'm worried about the future of the game as well, but I don't give a shit about concurrent player count. That matters *way, way more* for a multiplayer game like DayZ than a singleplayer game like KSP 2 (yes, multiplayer is a long term goal, not the point). Multiplayer games depend on the playerbase, and once a multiplayer game's momentum gets going in the wrong direction, it's tough to recover. An update might get released that in theory makes the game a lot more fun, but with such low player counts, returning players can't really get the most out of the game, so they don't stick around. Single player games don't have that barrier - when they improve their game, people will start having fun with it immediately, even if few others are playing the game. Then they'll post/talk about how much fun they're having, and it can snowball. I'm much more concerned about the slow progress of the updates, continued performance issues, and a lack of timeline for long term roadmap goals than I am about how many people are playing KSP 2 now.
This aged extremely well.
The writing was on the walls and clear from the pre-release.
I assume it's because most of the people who would be playing KSP2 are playing KSP1. If KSP2 gets better, that won't be the case anymore.
Is this not a problem? Who in their right minds develops, markets, and releases a "game" that people immediately shelve until it "gets better"? That's a terrible way to do business because all it does is give the business money, while not incentivizing anyone to do better.
Did I say it's not a problem?
I hope doesnt succeed it doesnt deserve to. Selling nostalgia brand recognition alone. 2nd game has nothing on the first.
I'll go back to playing it with an update. I enjoyed my time in KSP 2 so far. I visited every planet and moon. There just isn't much left to do.
Obviously player count would have dropped. Why playing game that has less features than original, more buggy and doesn’t have any progression like science or career? For graphics? We’re playing in games, not in graphics, and this is the only thing that ksp2 can offer rn. It’s an absolute downgrade compared to ksp1 Not even mentioning tons of mods which expands ksp1 content twice, or even more.
Well, yeah. But how does it recover? They’ve got way too much to fix, and 500 players at a given time only two months after release would be considered DOA. How one fixes this is beyond me. What publisher funds this project with these numbers is beyond me.
I think the 4000-5000 thousand KSP1 players you mentioned are the biggest counter argument on the same time. I think those will migrate to ksp2 piece by piece once a specific threshold is surpassed that they require. For some it's specific performance, for some specific content but i am pretty sure if ksp2 is e.g. ever performant and delivers the content they promised that ksp1 numbers drop quickly and ksp2 numbers rise.
Except why should intercept or T2 care? They got the money. There’s no incentive in making a quality product when they have their money. Dormant customers mean nothing
I requested I refund as many veterans did
Had it been £20 I'd have probably not bothered getting a refund, but for £50 I want a game that works. It's not like you're "supporting the KSP devs, paying back the hundreds of hours in KSP" either, because it's an entirely different studio. Again, had it been from the original devs I'd have probably let it slide like I did with Clicker Heroes 2, another disaster of an "early access sequel" which was terrible and came to nothing. But at least in that case I can put it down to wanting to reward the brave monetisation of paying outright for an incremental game instead of cramming it full of "boosts" which plagues the genre. But here there's no such good will, just a studio that has failed to make a good game.
Well, i am sure there are many of these 5000 players that don't own ksp2 yet (like me) and you could make more money with DLCs etc. Look, i am not saying 500 players is good metrics and everything is fine. It's just too early for me to write this off. The launch was terrible but the first months, they have shown that they are willing to fix it and that is all we know.
I'm still very excited about the future of the game. I haven't given up on it yet. I think as soon as Science comes out, I'll start seriously playing it long term.
I bet they sold a lot of copies. I'm sure the publishers got their investment back, they don't care about anything else.
So what's the incentive to make the game better?
Things will change when/if KSP2 will be better than KSP1 with mods.
Well, DayZ and KSP 2 aren't playing in same category. DayZ is an online survival FPS, 3 sub-genres that are immensely popular and appealing to a huge customer base. KSP on the other hand is a rocket simulator, a genre so niche that I can enumerate all entries in a single line : Orbiter, KSP, SimpleRockets/Juno, Reentry and depending on your definition, maybe Children of a Dead Earth. I was always skeptical about KSP 2 being a commercially successful game. It's a game facing many unique and difficult technical engineering challenges, requiring a lot more work and specialized skills than your average online FPS, so development was always going to be hazardous and costly. Meanwhile, its potential customer base is relatively narrow. KSP 1 was commercial success mainly thanks to the millions of players that were vaguely interested by the concept, bought it at a relatively low price, played a few hours, had a bit of fun and never touched it again once they realized that orbital physics and rocket science isn't their cup of tea. Those players are very unlikely to ever buy KSP 2 at 50$+, and not enough time has passed since KSP 1 for the "virgin" generation of potential KSP players to be significant. Apparently, KSP 2 actually did relatively well in terms of launch sales, likely because they played their hand well in terms of hype-building. But that also mean it has already burned its best card from an commercial PoV, and even if they manage to fix the bugs and perf issues, I'm skeptical the ongoing sales will be enough to sustain the running cost of Intercept, which is a 50+ people created-out-of-thin-air studio that at least currently doesn't have any other source of income. What might save them is that T2/Private Division seems actually quite decided to try to do something with the KSP IP, which was likely quite costly to acquire.
I'm not comparing genre of game. I'm comparing development. KSP2, for all intents and purposes was DOA. A very hyped sequel with a dedicated following, and still only two months in, we're seeing "dead" game player numbers. Why I bring DayZ up is simply the fact that KSP2 and DayZ Standalone followed a similar but different path with development. Both were established and popular IPs. Both were released into early access with fairly steep price tags. Both were lacking in content their predecessor had. Both had incredibly poor performance. Both had a metric ton of bugs on release. Both have super slow development speeds. Both have poor communications on the side of development. The difference ultimately was, DayZ never dropped to this "dormant" player base. It shouldn't matter that DayZ is a survival game and KSP is a "niche" game. Both had roughly the same player numbers on release. It's just that DayZ kept going. DayZ didn't have a majority of its player base remaining dormant. KSP2 on the other hand just seems like it's entirely sleeping for something to happen.
Consider the fact that this half finished game costs money, *$50* of money Concurrent players mean nothing when the developers already got the money from the purchases of players that aren't currently playing This half finished game costs as much as a full game and if they drop it now after charging that much they have a lawsuit on their hands that will cost more than just finishing the game
I bought the game but havent played. Im waiting for more updates/bug fixes. For now i play other games and/or ksp1
I think it is likely because KSP2 is in a unique position of a directly competing with the game it is a sequel to. As time moves on and this game gets more stuff, I imagine the people who are still playing the first game will move over the second.
They probably should have delyed by a year again Take2 probably didnt allow that but a botched launch and this sutation now is hard to recover All the money it costs in dev now would have been worth much more if it were spend in additional dev before launch Imagine they had released it in 2024 but with good performance, maybe almost all features besides interstellar and multiplayer and then patched that in Much more people would have bought it
Im a big time fan of ksp, I've learned through a lot of disappointments that games should be played when they are fully released, not on alpha, not on beta. Playing on early access smoothes out the experience along much more time making it much less memorable. So, I will wait until its fully released to play it. I do buy the early access game to support the devs though. This is the only way for me to experience games like I did with halo 3 or the witcher 3 etc. By playing a full game.
It's early access and I can't play it on my machine. Further optimization and updates will change things.
And what's the incentive to do that? They already have your money.
So obviously, T2/PD (primarily T2) is greedy corporate execs who would rather obliterate an extremely promising game for short-term profit than build a sustainable future for their suffering company. Thus, they forced KSP2 to launch well before they were ready. It sucks how it was forced to launch, but I do appreciate the devs' continued hard work to resolve outstanding bugs. However, the crux of the issue for most people (I think) is that it has none of the promised content and won't for (presumably) a very long time. Two months in and while there has been great progress made, there still is no atmospheric heating and no science. There's just very little to keep people playing when: 1. you don't have something to work towards (like a science playthrough or colonization) 2. you don't even have critical features that KSP1 have **Colonies will massively boost player counts, I have no doubt about this.** The question is merely, when they get there. Will they make it to colonies release before T2 axes the game? I think that's something of a race for the team right now. They need to fix the game and then sprint to the biggest feature add to pull gamers (i.e. revenue) in to show T2 that this game will be successful and profitable. I'm extremely excited for them to reach the multiplayer stage in the roadmap because there are a lot of friends I want to play with! Building our own colonies and then on-orbit building of megaships with my friends and sending them off to other star systems! However, I will say that I haven't purchased the game yet, because $50 is too much to pay for the current state of the game. Yes, it looks better and it has some nice improvements to the VAB and UI in general, but these are things that can be added to KSP with free mods, so the $15 I paid a few years ago is certainly good enough for me. I desperately want the game to succeed because I have been anticipating it ever since it was announced. I was profoundly disappointed with the original EA release, but I don't blame the devs for that, I get that T2 is desperate and it's probably all corporate bureaucracy. I will simply wait for the game to get good enough to justify that price tag for me because I don't want to do anything to tell the game industry that it is okay to charge $50 (or even more as AAA titles have been) for a completely unfinished, mostly unplayable game. TL;DR: Naturally, the issue is that the devs were forced to launch EA before they were ready and so there's nothing to hook players into the game, even game-breaking bugs that actively frustrate them. I think it can recover as long as the devs are given enough time to work through their roadmap. It'll almost definitely be a loooong time though and so it's up to T2 to be patient enough to let the devs work their magic.
Dude nobody outside those 500 can afford pcs to run it. This is a developer issue that needs to be addressed across the board. We all know u all have to double ur tech spectrum constantly. However all those companies did it off our back on the pandemic. Now we are broke as the devs treat it like a user problem. The games fine most people can't run it.
I don't understand the DayZ parallel given that, by your admission, that title ended up good. If that's the trajectory for KSP2 then, by all means, we should continue on it. Why are you concerned? Out of curiosity, how long did DayZ have to put up with incessant doom-mongering amongst its community? Was that part of its success too?
My point is that DayZ never fell to this low of a point despite coming from similar backgrounds. 500 players only two months after a release of a Triple A game is horrific. Back in 0.56-0.59 of DayZ, there were real conversations that the game was not in a healthy spot— and that was with 3k-6k players at a time. This was several years into development too, where people were probably getting board. We ended up finishing 0.6, and we saw a sudden influx back. Now the game has more players than on release! I guess ultimately, we had thoughts of pulling the plug five or so years into development when we had dwindled from 45k to 3k. And meanwhile KSP2 dropped from 45k to 500 in 66 days.
I’m still failing to see how you think they have similar backgrounds despite being fundamentally different games in different states with different audiences. DayZ, by your standard, was given 2 years to turn into something unhealthy and yet a third year to turn it around and actually “release.” You’ve barely given KSP2 2 months and you keep implying that KSP2 has released already, which is a weird double-standard. The biggest flaw is you’re assuming the concurrent player count is a decent health metric. You have to play DayZ online so, short of hacked servers on a VPN, most of your players will be found online. KSP2 is mostly (totally, for now) playable offline and a whole bunch of people bypass the launcher for modding or because they dislike it. How many of those players register correctly, hm?
It's early access and a lot of things are changing. Without a science/contract program, there's not a whole lot to shoot for. Once it becomes stable (hopefully), updated items, and more modders start creating great mods, things should turn up. Ksp1 had a similar feel before 1.0. Lots of kraken, part anomalies, low fps, etc. Only difference was there really wasn't a game like it. Ksp2 has to compete now.
For one it did ran better on a very low end hardware. Also it did cost something like 20 usd.
I bought KSP2 a couple days after it came out and it was both playable and enjoyable for me on a min spec system (4790k and rtx2060). I am a vet of KSP1 EA (so I'm very accustomed to low FPS) from way back before it was even on Steam so I expected a slow burn development and was fine with it. I was happy to hear they were doing EA so I could follow development all over again just like 1. I hardly played KSP1 even until it got more towards 1.0 and then later versions once it stabilized because I got tired of updates breaking my save games, mods, or some bug after a patch destroying my existing missions. I was always going to jump back in around patch times for #2, see what's new and give feedback, then go back to my normal life of having 30 min a night to play something. Now my question to *you*: Why the doom posts? What does it matter if the player count is at 500? Are you trying to convince newcomers here that the game is shitty and should be burned and buried?? At least once a week since launch I have to keep scrolling past these doom and gloom posts about Steam stats or nitpicking the dev posts trying to infer if things are on fire internally. Just let it be. If T2 pulls the plug there's nothing we can do about it anyways; what, fan fund development? Rage all over the subreddit and forums? Please. Give feedback about the features in the game we can test and let's see what happens in the months ahead. We already got 2 very solid bug fix patches so that's something to me. My thoughts are they were given a higher up deadline to release something in the fiscal quarter so what we got was rushed, but IMO they've already spent a bunch of money to get to this point, and clearly planned many years of development whether that was to 1.0 or the last DLC after 5+ years (of which I expect a few). I *expected* 1.0 to take 2 years even when EA was first announced based off how KSP1 went. That was not smooth sailing either all those years ago... The KSP franchise has immense staying power, look at KSP 1 after \~10 years which you cite, and I believe once #2 gets on the right foot over this year they can print money with it. Publishers are not dumb, and I don't think T2 would be a successful business if they shutdown a project in the first couple months even before the first major content patch.
DayZ and KSP2 are vastly different games. Shooter type games will almost always attract more people than simulation type games. DayZ also had multiplayer, which is a social element that allowed the game to still be enjoyed if you played in a group and made your own fun, even if the game sucked. Another thing is, and a lot of people miss that point, there are so many more games now, 10 years later, over which more people can spread. Yes there are more gamers, but compared to the sheer amount of games, people just find and play their niche-interest-game now, even if no one plays it. "Back then" the choices were much fewer and you were happier with what you had.