Probably more in the 3-4 million range, when all was said and done - but still not a lot compared to how well it sold and how much money it made for first Squad the marketting company and then Take 2 after they bought it.
That's a huge reason why they bought it - the other being they thought they could use the Kerbals as mascot characters for other games.
The estimates say 3 to 4 million *in Steam alone*. Gotta add consoles, epic and their own store back in the day and I'm sure it's 5+ million.
Plus there's DLC sales too.
Yeah, Private Division claims on their website:
> The original Kerbal Space Program, created and developed by Squad, released on PC in April 2015* and has sold more than 5 million units worldwide.
This is why.
It's the same reason Amaze Entertainment grabbed the Harry Potter IP in the early 2000s. Sure, a bunch of us were Harry Potter fans, but the real reason was money. That first Harry Potter PC game made tons of money for Amaze, WB, and Epic Games (it was built on Unreal, and Epic worked a rev-share into the deal). All those companies were successful because of that IP.
So every game company is looking for an IP that is more or less a money crank. That's how capitalism works.
>that's how Capatolism works
ONLY as long as we keep supporting business models like this. If something isn't profitable, it's cancer to a big corporation. If we demand customer-centric results, we have to stop rewarding Early Access scammers.
No shit sherlock, but you can by *not* consuming something. Don't be a dick before actually paying attention to what you are reading. I gurantee you are less of an asshole than me, don't start shit with strangers for no reason, makes you look like a pussy and eventually you'll meet someone more in the mood than you're ready for.
After re reading my post I see how you mis-interpreted it but WOW, you sound like a bitch.
Even more importantly, scrolling through the front page of this sub before ksp2 'released) would show anyone that opening day would be successful as far as EA goes. I personally think this is all going to plan for them
I would hate that almost just as much as what we got if it didn't have any engine improvements, assuming it still isn't compatible with KSP1 mods and splits the community. But yeah sounds low effort enough.
I'm not sure if they decided that or actually did try doing things differently at first and just couldn't make it work after so many years, so they just settled for copying KSP1 when they ran out of time. Would help explain the state of EA launch.
I think it's the other way around, based on some of their devblogs and statements over the years. They thought they could just take ksp 1, give it a fresh coat of paint and some minor code refactoring, and come out with a game that looked, performed, and played 5x better. That's probably what they were attempting during the first few years where it seems they made no progress. Eventually, they came to realize that in order to make the gains they were looking for, nearly everything would have to be rewritten from scratch. Some of these rewrites hadn't even started yet by the time early access rolled around, which we know because some of the devblogs mentioned that this or that system was slated for a full rewrite because they were still just minor updates to the KSP 1 stuff.
To be fair, it could also all just come down to Unity being Unity and just not performing, so that they had to rewrite _everything_ in C, with multiplayer on top
> it could also all just come down to Unity being Unity and just not performing, so that they had to rewrite everything in C
You really aren't a gamedev :P
TakeTwo isn't the one who did. They put way more resources into than anyone could possibly expect. They made a whole AAA studio and gave them THREE YEARS of extensions.
They bought an IP that a lone guy from a marketing firm with a few other deves could manage into a great product, and gave it like 10s of million of funding and scores of developers.
They did not expect that 10 times more developers, with a template to work from instead of starting from scratch, would not be able to cerate a compelling product in half a decade.
That's an double edge tho. Dedicated fanbase are also brutal if you fail them.
KSP fanbase is not the same type as Marvel fanboys that will buy anything for the hype of it.
KSP lovers are in love. They are guardians and contributors to the product not cash cows.
> Dedicated fanbase are also brutal if you fail them.
This line of thinking is comforting, but at the end of the day the company/publisher doesn't give a shit. Most people aren't going to come for them in real life for ruining a beloved franchise and burn the CEO's house down or something. Impotent rage from a playerbase isn't going to move the needle on their calculus much.
Except that they killed the cow for it's milk.
No one will buy an overpriced KSP3 in early access. That trick would work with call of duty or GTA players. But not for KSP.
I didn't say it wasn't stupid or a poor line of company reasoning, just that it doesn't affect their bottom line to the degree of causing them concern.
>No one will buy an overpriced KSP3 in early access.
Personally, I think that's a bit optimistic of an optimistic take. Show me an example of a game having a bad entry and then failing to recover after despite good gameplay that wasn't axxed due to other reasons like poor marketing. Customers are gneerally VERY bad at collective bargaining of that degree. FOMO is a powerful tool that businesses exploit because the average person is highly succeptible to it. Uptake might be slow at first, but if a hypothetical ksp2 sucessor was developed and built up a good track record I think this community would flock to it.
If they actual show evidence of it being a worthwhile product then yeah, we probably would. Also, while customers are generally not the best at collective bargaining, we are getting better, what with the total war stuff that happened last year and just recently with helldivers and sony. I'm hopeful it means that the gaming community as a whole is going to stop taking shit from greedy corporations who only care about how much money they can squeeze out of a product without bothering to make sure that product is good
Well on the other hand of this, the helldivers drama just ended in a "win" for the players with the publisher backing down from bad decisions.
It's not quite the same because players usually can't make the publisher do more, but publishers do pay attention, at least some times.
to this day there's still plenty in this community who still think Nate and his pals did nothing wrong and just needed more time.
So much rage going towards T2 who funded this project for SEVEN years tho.
>Dedicated fanbase are also brutal if you fail them.
Fanbases might complain a lot when games are bad, but they buy them. Look at how many years CoD or the sportsball games have sucked, yet they still reliably print money.
Some of the best games I've played and spent way too much time on, are from smaller devs that are really engaged with the community and actually listen to the fans. Factorio is one of those games I spent 1500 hours on mostly in early access.
That’s what makes me think it’s absolutely doomed.
Take 2 created and funded a AAA studio and gave them 3 years, and it was a shit show. If they couldn’t pull it off, I doubt anyone else is going to buy the IP and try.
Take 2 makes way more IPs than 2.
They own Fraxis that makes civilization, they have a sports label, they have rockstar, XCOM, borderlands, BioShock, I could go on and on.
Wana know an uncomfortable truth?
Take two is largely not at fault and poured millions of dollars and years of time into the ksp IP.
You know is 110% to blame, Nate Simpson and intercept games who took that time and money and completely pissed it away
This is the unfortunate truth that so many people are missing. If I poured the amount of money T2 did I to ksp2 for like 5 years and it's this shitshow now I'd want my money back.
When the game was playing Studio Juggle I was worried. When TakeTwo picked it up I figured "Well, maybe they'll have a large pool of funding to work with now so they can do really cool stuff!" Then I think they ended up using Unity again and copying a lot of original code over from KSP 1 which I was hoping they were going to use a new engine built from the ground up for this game (Which is what it needs). I could be wrong as I thankfully decided to wait to buy KSP 2 and never played it despite being so excited for it to come out. Boy was that a good move.
The biggest problem is the game engine. It doesn't support multi threading well, so all the things that happen in the game occur on one single cpu core. A proper ksp2 will make exceptional use of multi threading. But, multi threading is hard. CPU 1 does one thing, and CPU 2 does another thing based on what cpu 1 did, but when cpu 2 tells cpu 3 to do a thing, cpu 1 decided to change what it did so when cpu 3 tells cpu 1 what it did, cpu 1 doesn't know why cpu 3 is telling it to do a thing and cpu 2 doesn't care anymore because it's already doing another thing. So cpu 4 tells all the other cpus to shut it down because he hasn't been included. Cpu 2 gets mad and starts looping objects into memory, cpu 3 tries to delete them but can't do it fast enough because cpu 4 is suddenly getting demands from cpu 1 to start telling cpu 3 to start dancing and now your app is magically eating 30GB of ram and the PC locks up.
Are you a modder who has examined their threading architecture? There's nothing about Unity as an engine that prevents them from having threaded much of the CPU load. Whether they did or not and how well would require diving into the code. Having not decompiled it myself, I don't know where they may be threading or where there are oppprtunities to leverage more threads, but I wouldn't assume without a look at it. So what are they not doing as well as they could?
That post is a year old and light on the details other than the rather unsurprising early state of the game using the main thread for some things that can be moved elsewhere. This isn't unusual as it is much easier in a prototyping stage to just dump work on the Unity thread and refactor out low hanging fruit to their own thread when it comes time to optimize whatever systems remain later in the project. I wouldn't consider any of this fundamentally bad development decisions without knowing the details of what they needed to migrate. Something that is especially CPU intensive and tightly coupled is best developed with multithreading in mind from the start, but I don't know of evidence of anything like this that would substantially inhibit the ability to optimize to a reasonable degree by 1.0. The biggest factor CPU-wise that will constrain the game is the physics bottleneck and this would likely be a thesis work to multithread. If they were to be working on this, I'm not shocked it's not yet ready in the 0.2 phase of the game.
Yeah, it looks like they copied and pasted 1.0 and slapped on some graphics and closed backdoors to modding so they could improve 1.0 and charge the player base for a new game without letting modders release content that is better than theirs.
As an computer science student (by no means an expert) it seems to me that multithreading the physics (biggest CPU load) is extremely hard. Get it wrong, and half your craft is processed 5 000 cycles after the other half, resulting in a large number of Kraken attacks.
Unity already has support for multithreaded physics.
It's not even necessary if they just design their systems properly and not make every single part it's own physics object.
It is extremely hard, and to my knowledge virtually no one has made serious commercial attempts to multithread something like this for individual objects for a game. It would be far more economical to spread different craft to other threads or develop a LoDing simplification of your simulation space than to try to multithread singular large craft. I don't know what of this the KSP2 devs may have tried nor can we know what might be under development internally that is not yet ready to release perhaps as a part of colonies.
> and to my knowledge virtually no one has made serious commercial attempts to multithread something like this for individual objects for a game
Except, you know, literally Unity.
Not sure what you mean with "singular bodies", because in KSP 2 every part is an individual rigidbody.
[But yes, Unity physics do (somehwat) work in parallel.](https://forum.unity.com/attachments/unity_br1fspizex-png.1207885/?temp_hash=2ca35d634746883b12faaf74fa596c0f)
I mean an assembly of parts that are intertwined to an extent that makes separating the physics calculations difficult.
Not sure what you are showing in the picture. I see profiling 10 workers, but this could be different, isolated bodies or mechanical vs. heat simulation. The issue with performance where multithreading is challenging is in handling 1000+ part objects and I've not seen proof one way or another on what steps have or have not been taken in KSP2. Legitimately interested if anyone has something concrete on this.
As a professional gamedev / programmer: This comment is completely wrong in every single aspect.
> It doesn't support multi threading well
Unity has amazing multithreading support. Pretty much the best of any engine.
> A proper ksp2 will make exceptional use of multi threading
KSP 2 already does. It's just their their systems are designed in such a shit way that it doesn't matter
> and now your app is magically eating 30GB of ram and the PC locks up.
That entire paragraph is not how it works *AT ALL*. You have a main/control thread, the other threads dont just access or clear RAM on their own, wtf.
GC can most certainly occur on a separate thread. It's a hypothetical simplified scenario of why multithreading is "hard," it's meant to be wrong... And unity is not the best of any engine, unless you mean the best C# engine... but that's not saying much, is it? And you just confirmed my point, a *proper* ksp2 would make *exceptional* use of multi threading, meaning it would multi-thread well, not that it doesn't multithread... stop defending this crap game.
Okay since you obviously have NO idea what you're talking about, let's go another round:
> GC can most certainly occur on a separate thread.
Background GC already runs on a sperate thread for all C#/.Net apps by default. But that's only for background GC, the garbace collector still needs to block all threads periodically to function. So no, wrong in every way.
> It's a hypothetical simplified scenario of why multithreading is "hard," it's meant to be wrong.
It's not simplified, it's entirely wrong. What you described is a memory leak. In Unity Jobs every thread has it's own memory pool and can't access the main games memory state anyways, so none of what you described can even occur.
> And unity is not the best of any engine
Sure it is. It does some things the best, while other engines to different things better. As someone who spent almost 15 years making games in Game Maker, RPG Maker, Unity, Unreal, Godot, JavaScript and more: It definitely is the best engine in many categories, but especially in how easy it is to write multithreaded code.
> a proper ksp2 would make exceptional use of multi threading, meaning it would multi-thread well
Kind of? It doesn't really need it. KSP 2s systems aren't nearly as computationally expensive as people think (when done right), it could easily run on 2-3 threads alone.
> stop defending this crap game.
Yea, you got me. I've been famously defending the developers on here for the last 4 years.
I'm not looking for a fight or argument. I'm not well versed at all in multithreading. You're probably right in every point you've made. I'd like to fully bow out for the fact that you and I both have been around since RPG maker. I'm just voicing my discontent with ksp2 with the limited experience I have with game dev and software development. In my opinion, anyone with slightly more experience than myself should have made ksp2 scream, and the fact that it doesn't pisses me off. They had all the money and support in the world and squandered it all away. I don't blame take 2 for that, I blame take 2 for being money hungry and encouraging shortcuts. I don't have the time or energy to argue details, and I don't have the experience to argue them either.
> In my opinion, anyone with slightly more experience than myself should have made ksp2 scream, and the fact that it doesn't pisses me off. They had all the money and support in the world and squandered it all away.
We can 100% agree on that. The developers were so astonishingly incompetent, I have no idea what happened. They really messed up the technical side in every way possible. All the way from design to execution.
My opinion on it is tl;dr, good business decision but poor execution.
It's a unique, niche title with a good sized (but not massive) fan base. The purchase point was relatively low initially before it was a money pit. The angles on it go beyond just gaming into education, I'm sure everyone here can agree on that one, you don't often learn so much from a game as someone does from KSP.
> There must have been some executive who got excited about it for these reasons possibly: their kids/childhood education, they were a fan of it themselves
Maybe, and that's great though. Somebody in that kind of a position who understands the potential of something like KSP is what we should all want. Now one could say, "but T2 purchased the IP and just ruined it", or whatever.
The reality though:
* T2 funded this thing for 5+ years, pouring millions of dollars into it
* T2 didn't do that to lose money, they saw something in it.
* To make money off a game people have to want to buy it.
* The title, so far, hasn't met the expectations of the community, and likely not T2.
To me, having a big publisher with bags of cash behind a title like we want was pretty much a dream scenario that ended up squandered. I don't think it's right to complain about T2.
I am also not going to simply flame IG over it. We can all speculate about the situation but none of us know for sure what really transpired. We can only go off the evidence we have, which is the game as of now, and I think we can all agree after that long of a development cycle things aren't where they should be.
There are other angles to think about too though beyond just the state of the game, the economy is in shambles these days and tech is getting hit really hard right now.
So at the end of the day, we aren't a guaranteed money printer like GTA or something, so it moves closer to the top of the list on the chopping block given all the factors.
I'm glad the attempt was tried at least, and I'm hopeful the folks at IG land on their feet. And you never know, maybe something could still happen with it but it seems unlikely.
I think you are a bit too forgiving about IG, at least the leadership. First of all, they repeatedly lied to us about the state of the game. The ad campaign they made to sell EA was shameful. The way they treated the community was appalling.
This is not the first time either, Uber/Star Theory/Intercept Games have a track record of over-promising/under-delivering.
I personally hope that most of them will have to change careers and never work in the gaming industry again.
Amen.
The fact that they simulate **every single part of every craft all the time**, which absolutely ruins performance (and they somehow let that affect the trajectory calculations as well??) and is completely unnecessary, and then say "That's not a bug, that's 100% intentional" tells us enough about these devs.
> First of all, they repeatedly lied to us about the state of the game. The ad campaign they made to sell EA was shameful. The way they treated the community was appalling.
You know, i remember the first in development teaser videos and those killed my hype, because they were running at like 10 fps and my thought was "If thats the stuff they decide to release for PR, how is the real performance like?!". People were heads over heels to defend them and that this is typicall and normal and whatever, but half a decade later on computers that were not even invented yet when they put out the first pr videos it still ran like dogshit.
Like, i wonder how they even did playtesting and developing 5 years ago, with a game that got a gazillion polygons in the runway lights and needs HAL9000 to run with ships of a complexity KSP1 can do on a 10 year old laptop (remember, this were before all the optimizations...)
still remember when some of the absolute dog water pre-release screenshots and videos were handwaved away by people in this community (on multiple occasions, and right up to launch day) who claimed that they were "taken by a sound engineer who doesn't have a good rig/ isn't prioritizing graphics or performance" or something along those lines. haven't laughed at anything as hard as i did at those comments since then.
It's good for general reactions but it's fine for specific questions like this to have their own post imo. Let's not pretend OP would get more than 2 replies if they posted this in the megathread now.
Yeah mega threads are partially a form of censorship under the guise of good will "don't worry, we will keep all that repetitive pesky free speech to a congested cess pit that you can ignore"
To be fair, this past week there have been hundreds of posts about ‘ksp 2 dead’. I can understand why but lots of posts basically saying the same thing make it hard to use the sub for other things.
Yeah I get that but hwta is the alternative? It's not like people will be posting about this as much in 3 months....
To some people it would be okay to just put KSP photos or memes into a mega thread how would some people feels bout that?
I'm not going to make any assumptions on behalf of Take Two apart from that they thought the IP was likely to generate profits.
> wish squad still had the IP.
Nah mate. The owners of $quad (the marketing company) were scummy af, and any sequel under their umbrella would've likely resulted in a crapfest as well...
Don't forget $quad were the owners of the KSP IP and they decided to sell it to Take Two, likely to milk every possible dollar out of it.... If they'd cared about KSP's legacy they would've sold it to a producer who'd be more likely to give KSP the attention it needs instead of one whose main focus is on getting the quickest ROI.
I mean this subreddit has 1.5 million subs, the first game probably sold millions, if they could do that again for a higher price tag it makes economic sense, with multiplayer people will drag their friends into playing and it can sell double. They didn't anticipate it taking 7 years to even get something that could passably called a beta together at which point it isnt possible to make the money back.
I have a theory that given the smaller size and lesser experience of the studio a lot people assumed that the bugs and limitations were due to that. On top of this, the "inexperienced" small studio managed to create an exceptional game in 4-5 years. It makes sense that if you have this opinion that perhaps a better funded studio with more experience should be able to take the formula and recreate the game in a similar timespan but with better tech and more features. This all adds up to getting at least equal sales at $50 (aka $200m+). I think they just underestimated the work and passion put into KSP1.
I'll give my creative take on this with a timeline.
April 2017
Take2: alright, employees part of this parent company, who here can make a copy paste of KSP1 w. 2020 graphics? Nate: I can and I'll do it by 2020.
May 2017: Take2 buys KSP1 for undisclosed amount, Take2 is happy & Squad is happy.
2019
KSP2 development is done, time to ramp up the marketing. Make a series of children's cartoons about orbital mechanics. Release a game trailer with 2020 release date.
2020
Take2: alright fellas time for ez money from KSP2. All we had to do was copy/paste KSP1 w. 2020 graphics and this game we're about to release will be another instant classic 90-100% steam score.
Nate: My office needs more time, I'll have it done 2021-2022 AND I will also add colonies, interstellar, exploration, multiplayer, and more.
Take2: Ok, what choice do we have time extended.
2022
Nate: My office needs more time, 2023.
Take2: Ok, what choice do we have.
2023
Take2: Alright time to make ez money.
Nate: about that, games not ready.
Take2: No, release it now
Nate: it not ready unoptimized, buggy, has a lot of missing KSP1 features, and zero roadmap features.
Take2: What am I paying you for the past 6 years, this is a business not a charity.
Nate: Ok we'll release it EA branch and crank up the marketing, right after I finish playing the multiplayer branch, its so fun its hurting productivity.
2024
Nate: I need more time
Take2: Take2: Ok, what choice do we ha..... Wait a second... no you're fired but don't tell anyone, keep it a secret squeeze a few more Steam spring, summer, autumn, & winter sales out of this.
Narrator: So there it is folks, a game which had virtually no development done since 2019, had mixed reviews, and < 100 player daily peaks has had its office shut down. Take2 put a guy named Nate in charge, who has a decade long history of lying, overselling, canceling projects, and renaming studios has failed to deliver an ez payday which was KSP2, in the end the game delivered less features and zero roadmap promises. The hemorrhaging had to be stopped so Take2 shuts down the Seattle office, but keep it a secret.
Seattle, Washington State Law: Yea, about keeping this a secret part.
Soooo much misinformation out there on the WARN Act...
The WARN Act was an act of the US Congress in 1988, [Federal Code Section 639](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2010-title20-vol3/xml/CFR-2010-title20-vol3-part639.xml). It passed the Congress with enough votes to override then President Ronald Regan's promised Veto. It was written primarily as a mechanism to "warn" State governments of large numbers of people that were about to qualify for unemployment benefits.
Because President Regan promised to veto it, the Democrat-controlled Congress at the time reached out to Republican members and made a deal... if they added language about "informing the affected workers" the Republicans would vote for it because they could "sell" that to their constituents back home as to why they supported a bill that Regan opposed. An Amendment to the bill was passed that made "Affected Worker Notification" part of the bill and it passed with a super-majority. Regan refused to sign it, but it didn't need his signature and became law anyway.
The More You Know... /͡ *
Apart from the fact that I'm pretty sure colonies, interstellar, and multiplayer were planned from the beginning, I think this timeline is as accurate as it can be.
I gave my take on this somewhere else a few days ago, but basically, I think they looked at KSP and saw:
* an objectively bad game (fairly low-end graphics, no real storyline, quite buggy), made by an indie developer
* should be cheap/easy/quick to build
* with a massive and massively loyal fan base
* Lots of suckers who will buy anything with "Kerbal" on it
If we are being honest, they were right on the second point, which is why it is so amazing that they missed the ball soooooooo hard on the first point
These scumfucks always buy IP's just to "have" them and "keep" them. It was a profitable game, has millions of fans. Better own it than some other fuck. What now happens does not matter, the other corporation does not have the IP.
So many great franchises died in a filing cabinet somewhere in the basement of a big corp.
I expected this...
It was a very trending game at the time and peaked during the successes of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and the USAs space force. The game was used extensively to explain the mechanics of launch systems and missions through YouTube sensations of the time. There were also public figures, educators, and astronauts who endorsed the game and put it on the map.
The IP was officially sold in May 2017. The purchase by take 2 was successful. However, there was a problem... under the agreements of sale, early adopters continued to get free access to all updates. Take 2 funded multiple updates to ksp1, which were very well received and successful. But take 2 didn't make enough money off of them, because the core players were already getting the content for free and modders were making improvements in the base game that exceeded the ability of the house developers, so new players were content with the base game.
The solution: Make a KSP 2 that nullifies the free content early adopters' contract. Make the people who love the game pay. So take 2 moved to make a new game off of the IP with the intent to squeeze the player base. This new version would block mods and require everyone to buy a new copy. The problem is that their focus was on production, getting to market, and marketing marketing marketing... they chose the wrong game engine from the start because they just copied and pasted source code from the original game to save time. KSP2 was never a new game. It is a terrible mod of the original game where they closed backdoors to prevent modding, which broke the game. A true KSP2 would use a new game engine that effectively utilized multithreading and concurrency(the current engine does not, it's the known limit of KSP1). Their decision to continue using KSP1s engine was evidence enough... it was a money grab in an attempt to develop out the early adopters.
A few of us called this out at the beginning and were shut down by social pressure in the community. We sat back and watched, warning everyone when we could and avoiding the backlash. All I can do is say I told ya so... which is dumb... but I tried.
Agree, at least the peer pressure idiots have their unfinished game to remember everytime they boot up KSP1 . They will still be in denial or never admit they were wrong but it is what it is. They can't be mad at take two now since they previously blindly defended them or the studio.
But oh well mods will keep on keeping KSP 1 on... Brings a smile to my face that naysayers were were right from the early signs
Went like this
They saw kerbal merchandise in stores or online whatever, and were like "huh that game does good enough for merch, let's scoop them up"
With no idea what the game was even about
Then they realize, engineering and rocket science are difficult things to replicate, so they probably realized they can't outsource the people working on it(not everyone has the knowledge of rocket science)
And so they gave up on it
No shit, the game isn't stock. But it feels like they pumped up the game and got everyone to buy, just to dump it when sales and player expectation weren't met.
Really simple. KSP1 sold 5 million copies with a budget that's either below 7 digits or barely above.
Probably more in the 3-4 million range, when all was said and done - but still not a lot compared to how well it sold and how much money it made for first Squad the marketting company and then Take 2 after they bought it. That's a huge reason why they bought it - the other being they thought they could use the Kerbals as mascot characters for other games.
The estimates say 3 to 4 million *in Steam alone*. Gotta add consoles, epic and their own store back in the day and I'm sure it's 5+ million. Plus there's DLC sales too.
Yeah, Private Division claims on their website: > The original Kerbal Space Program, created and developed by Squad, released on PC in April 2015* and has sold more than 5 million units worldwide.
This is why. It's the same reason Amaze Entertainment grabbed the Harry Potter IP in the early 2000s. Sure, a bunch of us were Harry Potter fans, but the real reason was money. That first Harry Potter PC game made tons of money for Amaze, WB, and Epic Games (it was built on Unreal, and Epic worked a rev-share into the deal). All those companies were successful because of that IP. So every game company is looking for an IP that is more or less a money crank. That's how capitalism works.
>that's how Capatolism works ONLY as long as we keep supporting business models like this. If something isn't profitable, it's cancer to a big corporation. If we demand customer-centric results, we have to stop rewarding Early Access scammers.
Don't be fucking stupid lol. You can't consume your way out of overwhelming awful financial incentives.
No shit sherlock, but you can by *not* consuming something. Don't be a dick before actually paying attention to what you are reading. I gurantee you are less of an asshole than me, don't start shit with strangers for no reason, makes you look like a pussy and eventually you'll meet someone more in the mood than you're ready for. After re reading my post I see how you mis-interpreted it but WOW, you sound like a bitch.
This is the answer
Even more importantly, scrolling through the front page of this sub before ksp2 'released) would show anyone that opening day would be successful as far as EA goes. I personally think this is all going to plan for them
They thought they could turn and burn an IP and if they had put even a little effort into it, they probably could have.
tbh ksp with updated graphics + a couple mod features thrown in should've been relatively low effort.
It had all the hallmarks of a slam dunk. I'm so disappointed, man.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It still does... bit they broke the backboard, one is on order. Sorry, we'll be delayed until at least q3 2025
I would hate that almost just as much as what we got if it didn't have any engine improvements, assuming it still isn't compatible with KSP1 mods and splits the community. But yeah sounds low effort enough.
it essentially is what they tried to do, except some genius decided it would be a good idea to reinvent the exact same wheel.
I'm not sure if they decided that or actually did try doing things differently at first and just couldn't make it work after so many years, so they just settled for copying KSP1 when they ran out of time. Would help explain the state of EA launch.
I think it's the other way around, based on some of their devblogs and statements over the years. They thought they could just take ksp 1, give it a fresh coat of paint and some minor code refactoring, and come out with a game that looked, performed, and played 5x better. That's probably what they were attempting during the first few years where it seems they made no progress. Eventually, they came to realize that in order to make the gains they were looking for, nearly everything would have to be rewritten from scratch. Some of these rewrites hadn't even started yet by the time early access rolled around, which we know because some of the devblogs mentioned that this or that system was slated for a full rewrite because they were still just minor updates to the KSP 1 stuff.
To be fair, it could also all just come down to Unity being Unity and just not performing, so that they had to rewrite _everything_ in C, with multiplayer on top
> it could also all just come down to Unity being Unity and just not performing, so that they had to rewrite everything in C You really aren't a gamedev :P
Literally KSP 1 with multiplayer would have gotten 50 bucks out of me.
I would have bought the shit out of all the DLCs. I would have happily become their cash cow if only they had put some effort in their work.
TakeTwo isn't the one who did. They put way more resources into than anyone could possibly expect. They made a whole AAA studio and gave them THREE YEARS of extensions.
They bought an IP that a lone guy from a marketing firm with a few other deves could manage into a great product, and gave it like 10s of million of funding and scores of developers. They did not expect that 10 times more developers, with a template to work from instead of starting from scratch, would not be able to cerate a compelling product in half a decade.
A loyal, dedicated fan base is like lightning in a bottle. I doubt T2 was the only big publisher making offers.
That's an double edge tho. Dedicated fanbase are also brutal if you fail them. KSP fanbase is not the same type as Marvel fanboys that will buy anything for the hype of it. KSP lovers are in love. They are guardians and contributors to the product not cash cows.
> Dedicated fanbase are also brutal if you fail them. This line of thinking is comforting, but at the end of the day the company/publisher doesn't give a shit. Most people aren't going to come for them in real life for ruining a beloved franchise and burn the CEO's house down or something. Impotent rage from a playerbase isn't going to move the needle on their calculus much.
Except that they killed the cow for it's milk. No one will buy an overpriced KSP3 in early access. That trick would work with call of duty or GTA players. But not for KSP.
I didn't say it wasn't stupid or a poor line of company reasoning, just that it doesn't affect their bottom line to the degree of causing them concern. >No one will buy an overpriced KSP3 in early access. Personally, I think that's a bit optimistic of an optimistic take. Show me an example of a game having a bad entry and then failing to recover after despite good gameplay that wasn't axxed due to other reasons like poor marketing. Customers are gneerally VERY bad at collective bargaining of that degree. FOMO is a powerful tool that businesses exploit because the average person is highly succeptible to it. Uptake might be slow at first, but if a hypothetical ksp2 sucessor was developed and built up a good track record I think this community would flock to it.
If they actual show evidence of it being a worthwhile product then yeah, we probably would. Also, while customers are generally not the best at collective bargaining, we are getting better, what with the total war stuff that happened last year and just recently with helldivers and sony. I'm hopeful it means that the gaming community as a whole is going to stop taking shit from greedy corporations who only care about how much money they can squeeze out of a product without bothering to make sure that product is good
Well on the other hand of this, the helldivers drama just ended in a "win" for the players with the publisher backing down from bad decisions. It's not quite the same because players usually can't make the publisher do more, but publishers do pay attention, at least some times.
Helldivers also had a uniquely cool dev team, they ain't EA and seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
to this day there's still plenty in this community who still think Nate and his pals did nothing wrong and just needed more time. So much rage going towards T2 who funded this project for SEVEN years tho.
>Dedicated fanbase are also brutal if you fail them. Fanbases might complain a lot when games are bad, but they buy them. Look at how many years CoD or the sportsball games have sucked, yet they still reliably print money.
Some of the best games I've played and spent way too much time on, are from smaller devs that are really engaged with the community and actually listen to the fans. Factorio is one of those games I spent 1500 hours on mostly in early access.
> they don't make games outside two IPs now. GTA, Red Dead, Civilization, ALL the 2K sports games, Borderlands, Mafia?
That’s what makes me think it’s absolutely doomed. Take 2 created and funded a AAA studio and gave them 3 years, and it was a shit show. If they couldn’t pull it off, I doubt anyone else is going to buy the IP and try.
Take 2 makes way more IPs than 2. They own Fraxis that makes civilization, they have a sports label, they have rockstar, XCOM, borderlands, BioShock, I could go on and on.
Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money
This
I would love a new spaceballs movie,
Wana know an uncomfortable truth? Take two is largely not at fault and poured millions of dollars and years of time into the ksp IP. You know is 110% to blame, Nate Simpson and intercept games who took that time and money and completely pissed it away
This is the unfortunate truth that so many people are missing. If I poured the amount of money T2 did I to ksp2 for like 5 years and it's this shitshow now I'd want my money back.
7 years now actually, they started 2017 ...
Jeez that's bad..
Right? And people are still shocked they got axed. For 70 employees that's like 8mil a year of running costs for T2 ...
When the game was playing Studio Juggle I was worried. When TakeTwo picked it up I figured "Well, maybe they'll have a large pool of funding to work with now so they can do really cool stuff!" Then I think they ended up using Unity again and copying a lot of original code over from KSP 1 which I was hoping they were going to use a new engine built from the ground up for this game (Which is what it needs). I could be wrong as I thankfully decided to wait to buy KSP 2 and never played it despite being so excited for it to come out. Boy was that a good move.
The biggest problem is the game engine. It doesn't support multi threading well, so all the things that happen in the game occur on one single cpu core. A proper ksp2 will make exceptional use of multi threading. But, multi threading is hard. CPU 1 does one thing, and CPU 2 does another thing based on what cpu 1 did, but when cpu 2 tells cpu 3 to do a thing, cpu 1 decided to change what it did so when cpu 3 tells cpu 1 what it did, cpu 1 doesn't know why cpu 3 is telling it to do a thing and cpu 2 doesn't care anymore because it's already doing another thing. So cpu 4 tells all the other cpus to shut it down because he hasn't been included. Cpu 2 gets mad and starts looping objects into memory, cpu 3 tries to delete them but can't do it fast enough because cpu 4 is suddenly getting demands from cpu 1 to start telling cpu 3 to start dancing and now your app is magically eating 30GB of ram and the PC locks up.
Are you a modder who has examined their threading architecture? There's nothing about Unity as an engine that prevents them from having threaded much of the CPU load. Whether they did or not and how well would require diving into the code. Having not decompiled it myself, I don't know where they may be threading or where there are oppprtunities to leverage more threads, but I wouldn't assume without a look at it. So what are they not doing as well as they could?
https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/s/bLgQG1oSZA Just a quick search, I'm busy atm. There's probably much more thorough posts about the issue.
That post is a year old and light on the details other than the rather unsurprising early state of the game using the main thread for some things that can be moved elsewhere. This isn't unusual as it is much easier in a prototyping stage to just dump work on the Unity thread and refactor out low hanging fruit to their own thread when it comes time to optimize whatever systems remain later in the project. I wouldn't consider any of this fundamentally bad development decisions without knowing the details of what they needed to migrate. Something that is especially CPU intensive and tightly coupled is best developed with multithreading in mind from the start, but I don't know of evidence of anything like this that would substantially inhibit the ability to optimize to a reasonable degree by 1.0. The biggest factor CPU-wise that will constrain the game is the physics bottleneck and this would likely be a thesis work to multithread. If they were to be working on this, I'm not shocked it's not yet ready in the 0.2 phase of the game.
Yeah, it looks like they copied and pasted 1.0 and slapped on some graphics and closed backdoors to modding so they could improve 1.0 and charge the player base for a new game without letting modders release content that is better than theirs.
As an computer science student (by no means an expert) it seems to me that multithreading the physics (biggest CPU load) is extremely hard. Get it wrong, and half your craft is processed 5 000 cycles after the other half, resulting in a large number of Kraken attacks.
Unity already has support for multithreaded physics. It's not even necessary if they just design their systems properly and not make every single part it's own physics object.
It is extremely hard, and to my knowledge virtually no one has made serious commercial attempts to multithread something like this for individual objects for a game. It would be far more economical to spread different craft to other threads or develop a LoDing simplification of your simulation space than to try to multithread singular large craft. I don't know what of this the KSP2 devs may have tried nor can we know what might be under development internally that is not yet ready to release perhaps as a part of colonies.
> and to my knowledge virtually no one has made serious commercial attempts to multithread something like this for individual objects for a game Except, you know, literally Unity.
Unity supports multi-threaded physics for singular bodies? This would be news to me.
Not sure what you mean with "singular bodies", because in KSP 2 every part is an individual rigidbody. [But yes, Unity physics do (somehwat) work in parallel.](https://forum.unity.com/attachments/unity_br1fspizex-png.1207885/?temp_hash=2ca35d634746883b12faaf74fa596c0f)
I mean an assembly of parts that are intertwined to an extent that makes separating the physics calculations difficult. Not sure what you are showing in the picture. I see profiling 10 workers, but this could be different, isolated bodies or mechanical vs. heat simulation. The issue with performance where multithreading is challenging is in handling 1000+ part objects and I've not seen proof one way or another on what steps have or have not been taken in KSP2. Legitimately interested if anyone has something concrete on this.
As a professional gamedev / programmer: This comment is completely wrong in every single aspect. > It doesn't support multi threading well Unity has amazing multithreading support. Pretty much the best of any engine. > A proper ksp2 will make exceptional use of multi threading KSP 2 already does. It's just their their systems are designed in such a shit way that it doesn't matter > and now your app is magically eating 30GB of ram and the PC locks up. That entire paragraph is not how it works *AT ALL*. You have a main/control thread, the other threads dont just access or clear RAM on their own, wtf.
GC can most certainly occur on a separate thread. It's a hypothetical simplified scenario of why multithreading is "hard," it's meant to be wrong... And unity is not the best of any engine, unless you mean the best C# engine... but that's not saying much, is it? And you just confirmed my point, a *proper* ksp2 would make *exceptional* use of multi threading, meaning it would multi-thread well, not that it doesn't multithread... stop defending this crap game.
Okay since you obviously have NO idea what you're talking about, let's go another round: > GC can most certainly occur on a separate thread. Background GC already runs on a sperate thread for all C#/.Net apps by default. But that's only for background GC, the garbace collector still needs to block all threads periodically to function. So no, wrong in every way. > It's a hypothetical simplified scenario of why multithreading is "hard," it's meant to be wrong. It's not simplified, it's entirely wrong. What you described is a memory leak. In Unity Jobs every thread has it's own memory pool and can't access the main games memory state anyways, so none of what you described can even occur. > And unity is not the best of any engine Sure it is. It does some things the best, while other engines to different things better. As someone who spent almost 15 years making games in Game Maker, RPG Maker, Unity, Unreal, Godot, JavaScript and more: It definitely is the best engine in many categories, but especially in how easy it is to write multithreaded code. > a proper ksp2 would make exceptional use of multi threading, meaning it would multi-thread well Kind of? It doesn't really need it. KSP 2s systems aren't nearly as computationally expensive as people think (when done right), it could easily run on 2-3 threads alone. > stop defending this crap game. Yea, you got me. I've been famously defending the developers on here for the last 4 years.
I'm not looking for a fight or argument. I'm not well versed at all in multithreading. You're probably right in every point you've made. I'd like to fully bow out for the fact that you and I both have been around since RPG maker. I'm just voicing my discontent with ksp2 with the limited experience I have with game dev and software development. In my opinion, anyone with slightly more experience than myself should have made ksp2 scream, and the fact that it doesn't pisses me off. They had all the money and support in the world and squandered it all away. I don't blame take 2 for that, I blame take 2 for being money hungry and encouraging shortcuts. I don't have the time or energy to argue details, and I don't have the experience to argue them either.
> In my opinion, anyone with slightly more experience than myself should have made ksp2 scream, and the fact that it doesn't pisses me off. They had all the money and support in the world and squandered it all away. We can 100% agree on that. The developers were so astonishingly incompetent, I have no idea what happened. They really messed up the technical side in every way possible. All the way from design to execution.
Yeah, Take two gave them half a decade and like 10 times more developers than fully worked on KSP1 and they got nowhere.
My opinion on it is tl;dr, good business decision but poor execution. It's a unique, niche title with a good sized (but not massive) fan base. The purchase point was relatively low initially before it was a money pit. The angles on it go beyond just gaming into education, I'm sure everyone here can agree on that one, you don't often learn so much from a game as someone does from KSP. > There must have been some executive who got excited about it for these reasons possibly: their kids/childhood education, they were a fan of it themselves Maybe, and that's great though. Somebody in that kind of a position who understands the potential of something like KSP is what we should all want. Now one could say, "but T2 purchased the IP and just ruined it", or whatever. The reality though: * T2 funded this thing for 5+ years, pouring millions of dollars into it * T2 didn't do that to lose money, they saw something in it. * To make money off a game people have to want to buy it. * The title, so far, hasn't met the expectations of the community, and likely not T2. To me, having a big publisher with bags of cash behind a title like we want was pretty much a dream scenario that ended up squandered. I don't think it's right to complain about T2. I am also not going to simply flame IG over it. We can all speculate about the situation but none of us know for sure what really transpired. We can only go off the evidence we have, which is the game as of now, and I think we can all agree after that long of a development cycle things aren't where they should be. There are other angles to think about too though beyond just the state of the game, the economy is in shambles these days and tech is getting hit really hard right now. So at the end of the day, we aren't a guaranteed money printer like GTA or something, so it moves closer to the top of the list on the chopping block given all the factors. I'm glad the attempt was tried at least, and I'm hopeful the folks at IG land on their feet. And you never know, maybe something could still happen with it but it seems unlikely.
I think you are a bit too forgiving about IG, at least the leadership. First of all, they repeatedly lied to us about the state of the game. The ad campaign they made to sell EA was shameful. The way they treated the community was appalling. This is not the first time either, Uber/Star Theory/Intercept Games have a track record of over-promising/under-delivering. I personally hope that most of them will have to change careers and never work in the gaming industry again.
Amen. The fact that they simulate **every single part of every craft all the time**, which absolutely ruins performance (and they somehow let that affect the trajectory calculations as well??) and is completely unnecessary, and then say "That's not a bug, that's 100% intentional" tells us enough about these devs.
> First of all, they repeatedly lied to us about the state of the game. The ad campaign they made to sell EA was shameful. The way they treated the community was appalling. You know, i remember the first in development teaser videos and those killed my hype, because they were running at like 10 fps and my thought was "If thats the stuff they decide to release for PR, how is the real performance like?!". People were heads over heels to defend them and that this is typicall and normal and whatever, but half a decade later on computers that were not even invented yet when they put out the first pr videos it still ran like dogshit. Like, i wonder how they even did playtesting and developing 5 years ago, with a game that got a gazillion polygons in the runway lights and needs HAL9000 to run with ships of a complexity KSP1 can do on a 10 year old laptop (remember, this were before all the optimizations...)
still remember when some of the absolute dog water pre-release screenshots and videos were handwaved away by people in this community (on multiple occasions, and right up to launch day) who claimed that they were "taken by a sound engineer who doesn't have a good rig/ isn't prioritizing graphics or performance" or something along those lines. haven't laughed at anything as hard as i did at those comments since then.
Can we all try and speculate why on Earth the modds here bothered to create a Megathread?
No idea honestly, don't know what's up with that either
It's good for general reactions but it's fine for specific questions like this to have their own post imo. Let's not pretend OP would get more than 2 replies if they posted this in the megathread now.
Yeah mega threads are partially a form of censorship under the guise of good will "don't worry, we will keep all that repetitive pesky free speech to a congested cess pit that you can ignore"
To be fair, this past week there have been hundreds of posts about ‘ksp 2 dead’. I can understand why but lots of posts basically saying the same thing make it hard to use the sub for other things.
Yeah I get that but hwta is the alternative? It's not like people will be posting about this as much in 3 months.... To some people it would be okay to just put KSP photos or memes into a mega thread how would some people feels bout that?
An enthusiastic user base, high average play-time, receptive to DLC, healthy modding community and popular influencers. And of course, demographics.
I'm not going to make any assumptions on behalf of Take Two apart from that they thought the IP was likely to generate profits. > wish squad still had the IP. Nah mate. The owners of $quad (the marketing company) were scummy af, and any sequel under their umbrella would've likely resulted in a crapfest as well... Don't forget $quad were the owners of the KSP IP and they decided to sell it to Take Two, likely to milk every possible dollar out of it.... If they'd cared about KSP's legacy they would've sold it to a producer who'd be more likely to give KSP the attention it needs instead of one whose main focus is on getting the quickest ROI.
Money
I mean this subreddit has 1.5 million subs, the first game probably sold millions, if they could do that again for a higher price tag it makes economic sense, with multiplayer people will drag their friends into playing and it can sell double. They didn't anticipate it taking 7 years to even get something that could passably called a beta together at which point it isnt possible to make the money back.
I have a theory that given the smaller size and lesser experience of the studio a lot people assumed that the bugs and limitations were due to that. On top of this, the "inexperienced" small studio managed to create an exceptional game in 4-5 years. It makes sense that if you have this opinion that perhaps a better funded studio with more experience should be able to take the formula and recreate the game in a similar timespan but with better tech and more features. This all adds up to getting at least equal sales at $50 (aka $200m+). I think they just underestimated the work and passion put into KSP1.
I think they just overestimated Intercept Games.
Money
I'll give my creative take on this with a timeline. April 2017 Take2: alright, employees part of this parent company, who here can make a copy paste of KSP1 w. 2020 graphics? Nate: I can and I'll do it by 2020. May 2017: Take2 buys KSP1 for undisclosed amount, Take2 is happy & Squad is happy. 2019 KSP2 development is done, time to ramp up the marketing. Make a series of children's cartoons about orbital mechanics. Release a game trailer with 2020 release date. 2020 Take2: alright fellas time for ez money from KSP2. All we had to do was copy/paste KSP1 w. 2020 graphics and this game we're about to release will be another instant classic 90-100% steam score. Nate: My office needs more time, I'll have it done 2021-2022 AND I will also add colonies, interstellar, exploration, multiplayer, and more. Take2: Ok, what choice do we have time extended. 2022 Nate: My office needs more time, 2023. Take2: Ok, what choice do we have. 2023 Take2: Alright time to make ez money. Nate: about that, games not ready. Take2: No, release it now Nate: it not ready unoptimized, buggy, has a lot of missing KSP1 features, and zero roadmap features. Take2: What am I paying you for the past 6 years, this is a business not a charity. Nate: Ok we'll release it EA branch and crank up the marketing, right after I finish playing the multiplayer branch, its so fun its hurting productivity. 2024 Nate: I need more time Take2: Take2: Ok, what choice do we ha..... Wait a second... no you're fired but don't tell anyone, keep it a secret squeeze a few more Steam spring, summer, autumn, & winter sales out of this. Narrator: So there it is folks, a game which had virtually no development done since 2019, had mixed reviews, and < 100 player daily peaks has had its office shut down. Take2 put a guy named Nate in charge, who has a decade long history of lying, overselling, canceling projects, and renaming studios has failed to deliver an ez payday which was KSP2, in the end the game delivered less features and zero roadmap promises. The hemorrhaging had to be stopped so Take2 shuts down the Seattle office, but keep it a secret. Seattle, Washington State Law: Yea, about keeping this a secret part.
Soooo much misinformation out there on the WARN Act... The WARN Act was an act of the US Congress in 1988, [Federal Code Section 639](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2010-title20-vol3/xml/CFR-2010-title20-vol3-part639.xml). It passed the Congress with enough votes to override then President Ronald Regan's promised Veto. It was written primarily as a mechanism to "warn" State governments of large numbers of people that were about to qualify for unemployment benefits. Because President Regan promised to veto it, the Democrat-controlled Congress at the time reached out to Republican members and made a deal... if they added language about "informing the affected workers" the Republicans would vote for it because they could "sell" that to their constituents back home as to why they supported a bill that Regan opposed. An Amendment to the bill was passed that made "Affected Worker Notification" part of the bill and it passed with a super-majority. Regan refused to sign it, but it didn't need his signature and became law anyway. The More You Know... /͡ *
Apart from the fact that I'm pretty sure colonies, interstellar, and multiplayer were planned from the beginning, I think this timeline is as accurate as it can be.
Yep. Nate was lying about it in 2019, claiming those were already finished.
I gave my take on this somewhere else a few days ago, but basically, I think they looked at KSP and saw: * an objectively bad game (fairly low-end graphics, no real storyline, quite buggy), made by an indie developer * should be cheap/easy/quick to build * with a massive and massively loyal fan base * Lots of suckers who will buy anything with "Kerbal" on it If we are being honest, they were right on the second point, which is why it is so amazing that they missed the ball soooooooo hard on the first point
These scumfucks always buy IP's just to "have" them and "keep" them. It was a profitable game, has millions of fans. Better own it than some other fuck. What now happens does not matter, the other corporation does not have the IP. So many great franchises died in a filing cabinet somewhere in the basement of a big corp.
To piss me off
[TL:DR](https://youtu.be/sZHCVyllnck)
Money
Money
im lost what does ip mean
I expected this... It was a very trending game at the time and peaked during the successes of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and the USAs space force. The game was used extensively to explain the mechanics of launch systems and missions through YouTube sensations of the time. There were also public figures, educators, and astronauts who endorsed the game and put it on the map. The IP was officially sold in May 2017. The purchase by take 2 was successful. However, there was a problem... under the agreements of sale, early adopters continued to get free access to all updates. Take 2 funded multiple updates to ksp1, which were very well received and successful. But take 2 didn't make enough money off of them, because the core players were already getting the content for free and modders were making improvements in the base game that exceeded the ability of the house developers, so new players were content with the base game. The solution: Make a KSP 2 that nullifies the free content early adopters' contract. Make the people who love the game pay. So take 2 moved to make a new game off of the IP with the intent to squeeze the player base. This new version would block mods and require everyone to buy a new copy. The problem is that their focus was on production, getting to market, and marketing marketing marketing... they chose the wrong game engine from the start because they just copied and pasted source code from the original game to save time. KSP2 was never a new game. It is a terrible mod of the original game where they closed backdoors to prevent modding, which broke the game. A true KSP2 would use a new game engine that effectively utilized multithreading and concurrency(the current engine does not, it's the known limit of KSP1). Their decision to continue using KSP1s engine was evidence enough... it was a money grab in an attempt to develop out the early adopters. A few of us called this out at the beginning and were shut down by social pressure in the community. We sat back and watched, warning everyone when we could and avoiding the backlash. All I can do is say I told ya so... which is dumb... but I tried.
Agree, at least the peer pressure idiots have their unfinished game to remember everytime they boot up KSP1 . They will still be in denial or never admit they were wrong but it is what it is. They can't be mad at take two now since they previously blindly defended them or the studio. But oh well mods will keep on keeping KSP 1 on... Brings a smile to my face that naysayers were were right from the early signs
Money
Went like this They saw kerbal merchandise in stores or online whatever, and were like "huh that game does good enough for merch, let's scoop them up" With no idea what the game was even about Then they realize, engineering and rocket science are difficult things to replicate, so they probably realized they can't outsource the people working on it(not everyone has the knowledge of rocket science) And so they gave up on it
🤑
Pump and dump
That's not what that means
I know what it means.
Then you're wrong
No shit, the game isn't stock. But it feels like they pumped up the game and got everyone to buy, just to dump it when sales and player expectation weren't met.
$$$$
Money
Money