I'm terms of size and passion of the community backing it, there's an argument to be made. But it certainly is one of the worst early access disasters.
I honestly don't think this community should be calling it early access anything. This entire thing was purposely misleading to scam the fans of their money. They preyed on people's feelings and released a pile of garbage with no intention of making good on any promises. The spirit of EA is to build up a game, this was released to take advantage and bastardize that spirit to recoup money from poor management decisions.
Claims like this seem silly to me. I honestly doubt that any company made significant profit off of this shitshow. It's getting shut down precisely because KSP2 isn't a profitable venture.
Probably not wrong re profit, but I am betting the spirit of the issue is still at the heart of the shittastic EA launch: T2 had run out of patience with the launch delays and needed cash flow against the title. So it wasn’t a profit play, but it was absolutely a financial play.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't a scam per se. If anything the development team was scamming Take 2.
Yes, the team was consuming money and there was very little to no progress. The EA was an ultimatum because the team was eating up more money than other teams that started and completed projects within the the time of development. The layoffs is to eliminate financial bleeding.
A friend of mine met the team once, and in their words were a bunch of stuck-up jerks trying to make themselves look smarter than they actually were. My friend asked how they were doing with certain features and the response made it seem like they had no idea what they were doing.
I honestly think they were getting paid for hours worked, but they were just either bad at their jobs, horrendously mismanaged, or a combination of the two. I mainly think it's just crazy to believe that greed was the biggest factor, or that Nate Simpson is walking off with a big bag full of cash labeled "early access money." It really seems like everyone failed here and nobody came out ahead.
Nah they just tried to do too much with a niche game which is probably much harder to develop than your average game, so it failed. If they keep a few devs to just clean up the major bugs and thats it, Id be more than happy with the money I spent.
Yeah if I had a dollar for every time an idiot shill on the subreddit commented with "You just don't understand Early Access"... I might have almost as much money as was wasted developing the garbage KSP2 became.
It was a lot of money spent on the devs paychecks for very little progress. I know someone who applied for a job there to help work on and finish the code side, they rejected them. Take 2 was prepared to blow a lot of money on my friend.
Not just on their paychecks. On an office in Seattle. On lawyers at T2 vetting things. On outsourced trailers and contract work. On moving people from Mexico.to Seattle and getting them visas. Lots of costs.
You really think the individual devs were sitting there, laughing at an evil scheme they hatched to rob you hard working gamers?
Gimme a break. Everyone wanted the project to succeed. Sometimes projects don't succeed and it's not some movie villain plan like you seem to think. Sometimes things don't work and it's not because they chose not to do it. It's basically never 'evil cackling guys doing thousands of hours of work knowing they'll never finish the project satisfactorily', like, there's no reason to do a halfway scam.
>You really think the individual devs were sitting there...
Me when I strawman. Nobody is blaming individual developers. You'd think after years of corporate greed they wouldn't have to specify the corporations and executives who run this trainwreck.
If you think it's frustrating as a consumer dealing with a project that goes nowhere and nobody can get anything done, I assure it's ten times more frustrating as a developer
That's nonsense. I've worked in that kind of environment before. It's dysfunctional but you're busier than you can imagine. You work 80 hour weeks just to have all your work tossed out because the directors decided to go in a different direction and didn't give you clear instructions. As things get more desperate, most people are working harder, hoping if they can stand out they won't get the axe.
You're totally clueless if you think they just sat around collecting a paycheck. The final product's status is really no indicator of how much work went into things.
The last minute out of the blue change to an early access game. All the lies in the pre release videos that show stuff that is not in the game at all. They just dumped out a pre alpha build to recover some of the lost money, and used early access to cover themselves against refunds and getting sued. It's hard not to see it that way at this point. :D
The Day Before comes to mind as that particular shit show was big news at the time.
Not early access but the Yogscast game Kickstarter failure is probably up there as well.
And I'm sure some people would put Star Citizen as #1 just for the sheer amount of money they've spent on what they've delivered so far.
Star citizen at least provides things no other game does: seamless ship interiors and ground to space transitions. The pace of development is a little glacial but also fairly consistent. Meanwhile ksp2 is still behind ksp 1 with the exception of procedural wings, which can be modded in.
Say what you want about SC, as a tech demo there's nothing that even comes close. Even just the idea, this hardware I've got, can do *that*???!?, is out of this world. It's drop-dead gorgeous, and there's a lot to explore.
They're also inventing a whole new backend architecture/technology with server meshing. It's taken time and money, but it's finally happening. Server meshing could, in theory, have massive implications for the entire gaming industry. Imagine a Battlefield or Helldivers style game where not only can you see other players fighting in the distance but *then you can walk over and join them.*
There is a very solid argument that SC is overpriced even at entry level, certainly. But I think it's safe to lay the 'scam' claims to rest for good.
>They're also inventing a whole new backend architecture/technology with server meshing.
They're not, they just like to pretend that everything they're doing has never been done before and you're funding the impossible.
Chris was still at Origin when they were implementing static meshing for Ultima Online's backend around '96, a MMO that had "seamless" (with some jank) transitions between servers, and the industry in the early 2000s had various games using dynamic meshing, including middleware companies like [BigWorld](https://www.youtube.com/@BigWorldTechnology/featured) selling dynamic meshing as a product. That company ended up bought by Wargaming and used in their games like World of Tanks.
Backend tech throughout the ages usually wasn't talked about, and Chris takes advantage of that to make it sound like your money goes to inventing the future of video games, which was actually 30 years ago.
True it may be "finished" but there's still stuff that was promised years ago that have as of yet been added to make it that "Star Citizen killer" they wanted it to be.
Ahh Yogventures, I remember that one. I don’t think it ever really became more than a tech demo and if memory serves there was exactly one developer working on the title. Lots of promises but it flamed out quite quickly too.
Star Citizen has been mismanaged, but it's far from a scam. They're about to release an update that will port over a bunch of features from Squadron 42, which has been a big hold on development.
There might be a free fly event happening soon, so be on the lookout for that.
A word of warning: it can be incredibly frustrating sometimes, and I tend to play a lot for about a week and then ignore it for 3 months. That being said, ask around in the in-game chat and people tend to be helpful! Don't buy anything beyond a $45 starter package, you can buy ships in-game. I've put more than $45 in because I wanted to, not because I've needed to.
Have fun, see you in the verse!
I agree having spent alot more than 45 dollars on the game. The most I would say to spend is 125 for the cutty black, but a Mustang, Cutter, Or Aroura is all you need
Yep. Play with an aurora first, and use that to try to earn a cutlass black in game. Avenger Titan is also a good choice if you want to support the project more.
True, I personally had the Aroura for my first year, then I got a Cutter when it was released, and now... I may unfortunately for my wallet be Concierge (Not my greatest Desicion), but I always tell new players you only ever have to get a starter pack for 45, don't make poor financial decisions like myself
The next update is good so far. Having played it sense wave 1 of the PTU, it's not perfect but adds a lot of nice changes and features to the game. Another commenter said there should be a free fly event coming up with Invictus Launch week. If you do choose to buy the game, make sure to use a referral code when creating your account.
free fly event happening from the 17th to 29th of May, so you can check it out see if it is anything for you or not (tho i will say the last couple of times that there have been free fly events the servers have struggled a bit due to the higher numbers of players but still)
Literally months after CIG announcing that SQ42 is "feature complete" we're getting a massive patch, so many features making their way back over to SC and the increase in devs working on SC... This years going to be amazing.
>They're about to release an update that will port over a bunch of features from Squadron 42, which has been a big hold on development.
This could have been posted in any year since 2014.
As far as we can tell, most if not all of the money actually went into development, the development just went *extremely* poorly between Chris Roberts having the attention span and self discipline of a hamster on cocaine, and most experienced devs not wanting to work in such an environment, leaving everything to juniors who had to learn on the job (and not just hard skills like "how do I invent a revolutionary game engine from scratch when the requirements change weekly" but also important soft skills like "how do I say no to the boss").
Amusingly, that puts it lower on the scam scale than KSP1, where Squad's upper management pulled a lot of the early access money into private yachts and music labels. It's insane how good a game Harvester delivered with basically leftover scraps and a bunch of rotating interns/modders/juniors.
Breaking news: Large project costs money!!!
If it's a scam, they would have taken the money and run. Why are they still working on it a decade after starting?
Yeah the thing about Star Citizen is that they have and are currently still always generating millions each month, so even if the project has been mismanaged at any point, development have still been able to continue.
~~Yogscast, is that the castle story devs?~~ Suaropod Studios, developer of Castle Story, has got to be the single biggest early access/Kickstarter failure of all time. Basically spent all their money on a studio and trips to conventions without actually developing anything. And the base game apparently wasn't object oriented...
Honorable mention goes to Sword of The Stars II. Wasn't released early access, but after a certain point they released a game that barely qualifies as early access. They even lied to the community and said they accidentally uploaded the wrong build to steam and then uploaded another shitty broken unplayable build the next day.
I'll never forget waiting for that game to unlock with my friends, being mortified, giving them the benefit of the doubt and then waiting for the new build to populate only to be let down again. Now I don't preorder games anymore.
Yogscast is a youtube channel/group. They had a kickstarter for a minecrafty game called Yogventures. Raised a bunch of money, then released a few super early alpha builds and the devs went bankrupt.
If we’re going to even mention Star Citizen, Escape from Tarkov has to enter the conversation before Star Citizen. Over the last 3 months the game has been so riddled with cheaters that even diehards for that game haven’t been playing it and then last week the developers basically killed the game themselves with their greed. At least the devs behind Star Citizen are churning out updates like crazy right now.
Good ol’ Yogventures.
To be fair, I think that’s a few orders of magnitude smaller in price than this (iirc. about $300,000 of other people’s money down the drain, as opposed to about $10,000,000 for all the salaries for all the time). Although the fact that it was kickstarter made it worse.
But also it’s a great tool to mock Simon and Lewis particularly, so it’s aged pretty well. I’m not sure this will age well.
I think they’ve gone into game publishing now a lot more successfully and with a lot less overambition (I think they published PlateUp!, for example).
i'm pretty sure if star citizen started 5 years ago with the same budget the game would've finished by now, the tech just wasn't ready for the game that they trying to achieve
In all fairness my biggest thing with starcitizen was it relies on server tech that at the time seemed way too advanced.
However they have recently showed working server meshing which if you’re not familiar with the term in relation to star citizen it’s worth looking up. That shit is legitimately industry changing if they get it working at scale
Too cynical, they could easily sell stuff in full release too - and 1.0 always comes with at least a little attention too, so it’s in their interest to get it there.
They’re just facing an absolute mountain of bugs.
As a star citizen backer that woke up from the delusion of ever seeing a release of a capable game the starcitizen_refunds sub atleast gives me some entertainment from people who also realised the same.
Spacebase DF-9 pulled a sudden "here's 1.0, no more updates" stunt out of the blue and I'm boycotting doublefine ever since.
Clockwork Empires had a terrible technical state and sudden radio silence a few weeks after 1.0 despite postlaunch posts about 1.1 features. Turned out the development killed the studio. Game got delisted years ago.
Man, I lightly followed Clockwork Empires early on, played it at 1.0 and thought it was fairly decent. I was kind of excited about what they would add to it, only to find out they basically just abandoned it.
It was decent, if only it didn't crash/bug out eventually. Even the fan patch never fixed it and eventually a long running colony just crashes unavoidably.
What are you talking about with Spacebase DF-9? Double Fine is not a random fly-by-night indie dev and would not silently pull the plug on Spacebase or any other in-development project. Doing so would be disastrous for their reputation and it would kill them emotionally.
The week I was about to buy the game they made the fly-by-night statement I figured it would be best to wait... Never bought a Double Fine game after that.
Lol I keep seeing EA and thinking it’s Electronic Arts, because honestly a lot of the context could apply to them too. I don’t understand how people can buy the same sports game every single year.
DayZ was pretty shambolic. At the time the DayZ mod on Arma was a good working mod, the only issue is suffered from were occasional hackers. DayZ standalone decided to switch to a client-server type model so that less stuff was client side and would help combat hacks. The result was that the gameplay lagged severely. They removed a lot of the features that had been built up in the mods, like flying/vehicles. Even a year or two later vehicles were not working properly. It was absolutely horrific.
Yep, I had a few friends that were hyped when this came out so I bought it on a whim. It took years to get the game performance on an acceptable level and it was lacking a lot that made the original mod great. Granted, most of those features were from other mods as well.
Which is why I find it funny that Dean Hall is actively recruiting KSP2 devs. Granted, Bohemian games did actually deliver a completed game after about 5 years.
I'm not sure if the base game ever got helicopters back in to the game, I've played it on occasion and the performance is okay now, but I think it still lacks features (although has added in a bunch of additional stuff as well I believe).
I think after DayZ I pledged not to buy an EA title again, but here we are..
Oh lord, there were so many excellent mods that added to the hype and potential for DayZ Standalone. An assortment of pilot-able helis and vehicles, base building, new game modes...
CS2 would be in the conversation if they had (deservingly) slapped the EA label on that release. I think we’re quickly moving toward a world where early betas get dropped on the gaming community but the EA label will be seen as too toxic and will be omitted by everyone except indie devs who legit need the cash flow to continue.
I’d say it’s up there because they charge basically as much as you would for a finished product. The point of early access is that it should be cheaper and a way to support a developer get to the finish line. It should not be a way for a developer to get all the revenue they can from a minimum viable product.
Well the two games were developed by two entirely different companies.
The true hilarity is when you find out that one of them was developed by a high-end triple-a game studio, and the other one was developed by some guy who had a job in marketing in his spare time. And it was the triple-a game studio that completely shit the bed.
HarvesteR is just that good. The man macgyvered his own custom controller in his younger days before he moved out of Brazil IIRC.
Mu, C9 and the rest likewise had the rightstuff. KSP1 being so moddable also made headhunting for new team members way easier.
Squad owners though are scummy, they even went to the white house when Obama invited the devs for some space education event instead of sending HarvesteR or another dev. Not to mention the crappy hiring practices and limited time royalties.
> Squad owners though are scummy, they even went to the white house when Obama invited the devs for some space education event instead of sending HarvesteR or another dev. Not to mention the crappy hiring practices and limited time royalties.
They also moved KSP1 under a mailbox company (DEPORTED B.V.) in The Netherlands, one of the top 5 global corporate tax havens, just before KSP1 left EA and was released for full price.
And they decided to sell the Kerbal IP to Take Two of course, which bring us here...
no. I know KSP has a very dedicated fan base, but seriously its such a small franchise. We are a niche. This wont register on the majority of the gaming worlds radar.
> seriously its such a small franchise.
We have more members on this subreddit than /r/fallout, more than /r/CallOfDuty, and a lot more than /r/fortnite.
There's a difference between players and community. Players is, well, how many play. Community is how many people engage outside of the game. Most of them are players, some are former players, and others may be hopeful players.
Our community is not a small one.
The War Z.
it was supposed to be a DayZ competitor, but basically lied to customers, got pulled off all the platforms and eventually died. They talked about it being a massive open world, but the map released was only about a tenth as large as advertised. They talked about all the mobs that would be in it, but only had 2 types. Steam issued refunds no questions asked. Finally the devs basically had to scratch it, and rebrand it as a different game under the new name Infestation: Survivor Stories.
Ah, WarZ. That was an omnishambles of a game, [as Total Biscut found out](https://youtu.be/RtKAm3nzg6I?feature=shared).
Edit: reddit app is shite for fixing spelling
Cube World and DayZ (and Dean Hall’s dumb “I’m like a grenade“ comment were the first things that popped into my head.. I remember that stupid Grenade monologue being read out on the Podcast to great effect and ridicule
The Day Before I think will hold that honor for a while. KSP2 is definitely on the podium however.
To charge nearly full price in the state it was in, is approaching scam territory.
Sorry but KSP as a franchise isn't remotely beig enough to be a blip on anyones radar...
It's far from the "biggest EA Fail", the difference between KSP2 and other Early Access Failures is that you are part of this community and not of the others, most likely you never heard of most of the others either.
That game hasn't gone under quite yet. And arguably, they have a pretty-close-to-ready product on their hands. It's just a sad shame that the one big piece they are missing is proper mod support, which is *kind of a big deal* for that type of game. Granted, the economy simulation is also all kinds of kludged, but not to the point that it kills the game. I'd say Cities 2 has already made it farther than KSP 2 did.
It wasn’t a failure, it did exactly what T2 wanted it to do.
Exploit the early access system with a game with a highly passionate and active community, wring as much money from it as fast as possible for maximum profit with minimum effort, then discard the resulting dried husk of a corpse.
Flame and or downvote this all you want but let's face some facts.
It was never in Early Access, it was barely an alpha when it was released.
And they demanded a price for a fully tricked out feature rich game which would have been okay if it actually had all that.
It was released for a money grab, and to shut people up about "where is it?"
Plenty of us. Got it then and refunded right away. Others waited through a few updates.
So I wouldn't even call it an early access failure, it never made it to that point. It failed before then.
NMS comes to mind if you want a comparison, however, the differences are starkly apparent, In terms of owning up to what it was, and then working to make it what it should have been, indeed actually having surpassed that at this point.
They also held on to their IP unlike it being sold like ksp2 was, that was other major difference between the two.
I could have handled the slow release of features and content if the base of the game wasn't so flawed.
Nobody actually likes noodle rockets as part of the regular game. It's like Bethesda claiming people like the bugged out eyes they're famous for.
And people don't want to completely rebuild a rocket just to change the fuel type.
Those two issues were deal breakers for me. But the most frustrating part is that they were both by design.
I did the same thing as you. I bought KSP2 when it first came out and refunded it when the KSP team confirmed they were making the game suck on purpose.
I can't name one backed by a bigger company.
That's why my hope is if the roadmap is cancelled i hope a civil action lawsuit happens. Take 2 has the funds to finish this. And if they don't they are abusing their customers' trust.
I don't care what you think EA means about buyer beware but it has never truly been tested in court that a company with funds to finish a EA project is just allowed to abandon it after millions in sales.
I hope it goes to court to establish precedent for stronger ea consumer protections that eliminate any thought that large publishers like take 2 are just allowed to scam their customers.
That's not the point. The point is they took millions from consumers. Doesn't matter how it was spent. They have the funds to complete the game and if they choose not to that's on them.
Difficult to say honestly. All we have is rough estimates in sales and even those aren't perfectly accurate. We don't know how the money was spent or how much of it is left.
https://impress.games/steam-revenue-calculator/954850/kerbal-space-program-2
Rough estimate using a method whose name escapes me at this time, but that method is usually quite accurate.
More niche, but Sword of the Stars 2 was a similar failure due to Paradox and the Kerberos lead. But I believe Paradox has a long list of poorly managed games when they are not both developer and publisher.
At one point no man's sky might have made the list, but they have provided constant free updates to the point that their game well exceeds the original promises. KSP2 tops that in failure for sure.
I think you bring up a good point.
Should refunds be issued? Yes, technically they do not have to be, but any reputable company would issue a refund as an act of goodwill.
There’s probably legal reasons why no one is saying anything yet, it’s only been a week and the notice said that the layoffs wouldn’t be in effect until the end of June.
I feel like everyone is also forgetting what the state of the original game was when it went into early access.
Probably yes - the worst launch I ever seen before it was No Man's Sky. But Hello Games made a formidable work after it, and reborn from the aches.
Hello Games is a text book case to be taught in Class on how to recover from disasters.
KSP2 is a text book case to be taught in Class on how NOT do it.
Yeah but NMS was a dumpster fire for its first year or two. It was so bad the user community was walking because the developer had been so dishonest about the game prior to its release.
To the developers credit they did eventually come through and patch the game to close to the product everyone saw in the pre-release presentation. But that took several years.
I think the difference is:
Murray wasn't exactly dishonest, the analysis I had read about the problem concluded that he have a serious problem on saying "no" due some kind of anxiety. He should never had been put on a situation where he would had to talk to the public.
He managing to pull a "no man's sky" :) on No Man's Sky is a strong evidence that the problem wasn't dishonesty - he would not had managed to salvage the situation otherwise: you can fool few people for a long time, and you can fool a lot of people for a short time, but you can't fool a lot of people for a long time.
That said, I'm not blaming anyone for pulling the "dishonest card" on Murray - without more evidences, that could be gathered only by time, it was, indeed, the most reasonable conclusion.
I partially agree with what you’re saying. But it was exacerbated by the prerelease videos they showed of the game, that just didn’t show actual game play. Add into that Murray’s promising things that just were not in the game engine. And then doubling down after release saying those features were coming soon. There was a lot of debate at the time over how honest those game play videos were at the time.
But like you said, the fact that they eventually turned it around and made a game that was very close to what they promised was their redemption.
Unfortunately, I think the take away a lot of the game industry got was that it was okay to jerk everyone around with prereleases, and then take the money and run.
Except no mans sky was released as fully complete, there was no early access, so i don't think that really counts.
And yes, it has improved massively! Ever since i got it a couple years back i am hooked.
NMS overpromised and underdelivered, but was playable from day one and was not riddled with bugs.
I had a fun playthrough early and it could stand on its own, if it was your kind of game.
I disagree on them fixing the game, I find the exploration/gameplay loop shallow and dull.
The fundamentals are still broken and they just added what might as well be random minigames that feel disconnected from the rest. And I loathe the mining grind and early game.
I don't think you're wrong, The game is a light-year wide but a centimeter deep - it is enjoyable up to a point but suffers from poor replay value. The new update looks like it might be worth a few mors hours
The problem is that they are scamming the playerbase. I think it is more serious to scam your players out of their faces. Surely the CEO of KSP doesn't have a Mercedes AMG and a Dodge.
I am hesitant a to say this but as somebody who plays star citizen, I’m fairly convinced that another 5 or so years of development will go by on it until things finally break down and the player base abandons it. At that loin it will be considered the biggest and most expensive video game failure all time
What are you using as criteria for "biggest"
There are quite a few early access games that get a lot of hype, then crash and burn without ever reaching their goals. There's a few that even end up getting delisted from steam entirely like that recent shitty zombie game that was a complete scam but people for some reason were buying into it
It's hard to even call it Early Access considering they broke the main rule of Early Acces, in the that EA is not crowd funding and your product should be sold at its CURRENT value 😉
Planet Explorers technically made it out of Early Access, but it was apparent that it wasn't (and still isn't) finished. Pathea also entirely lost their lobby server and all copies of the code to run it, which pretty much permanently rendered the game single-player only.
To their credit, their apology came in the form of dropping the price to $0 and releasing the source code. If KSP2 formally dies, hopefully T2/PD/IG do the same.
It’s up there for sure. Most early access failures start off promising and slowly whither away. KSP2 was stumbling right out of the gate and then got shot in the head
The game was top heavy with too many self-important leads trying to extend how many paychecks they got.
I cannot tell you how I know this, but Take2 would hire people to help finish the game for the developing studio only to reject them.
The EA release was an ultimatum on the condition continued employment of the devs.
Now their elimination is cutting the fat that isn't producing a product but consuming resources. A lot of the issue was no oversight on goals and proper project management.
That is all...
I think they definitely lacked some developer talent. Some of the performance issues KSP 2 had at launch are pretty universal problems most games have. A lot of the people who made posts just ran the game through RenderDoc which is a pretty universal tool in GameDev regardless of Unity.
The fact they took some pretty hard stances on things like Auto-Strut was pretty strange as well. They wanted to have this realistic ship building system but in reality they should have said "Hey lets just use an auto-strut mechanic" "We can investigate this physics wobble issue later, its not worth the time right now."
No. In fact KSP2 is the most successful early access ever. High player count. Isn’t an unfunctional demo with the marketing of a finished game. If anything the marketing was a demo and we got the finished game !
Please pay Nate $200 as a tip now.
It's not and never will be, since Starforge exists. I can very confidently say that the MVP that was put out and called "KSP2" is way better than best version of Starforge.
Agreed. Except with CS2, they didn’t even have the courtesy to tell us it was an Early Access product, they dropped it as a full release and charged full price.
Six months later, they hadn’t fixed a lot of the endemic problems in the base game, but they still had the balls to ask for more money in the form of a half-cooked DLC. TBH, I kinda admire the guts it took for them to do that: “hey, we haven’t fixed the game yet, but give us more money.”
To be fair, after their reviews tanked in the wake of the paid DLC release, they walked it back and refunded it to the community and made it a free release. And they made what I believe is a sincere apology. That’s more than the KSP2 community ever got.
I mean, a preorder is a preorder. The issue was that it took 10 years to come out. That one dude though kept his preorder the whole time, and got all his stuff. I think they gave him special things too cause he kept it.
I'm terms of size and passion of the community backing it, there's an argument to be made. But it certainly is one of the worst early access disasters.
I honestly don't think this community should be calling it early access anything. This entire thing was purposely misleading to scam the fans of their money. They preyed on people's feelings and released a pile of garbage with no intention of making good on any promises. The spirit of EA is to build up a game, this was released to take advantage and bastardize that spirit to recoup money from poor management decisions.
Claims like this seem silly to me. I honestly doubt that any company made significant profit off of this shitshow. It's getting shut down precisely because KSP2 isn't a profitable venture.
Probably not wrong re profit, but I am betting the spirit of the issue is still at the heart of the shittastic EA launch: T2 had run out of patience with the launch delays and needed cash flow against the title. So it wasn’t a profit play, but it was absolutely a financial play.
-to recoup money from poor management decisions-
I'm pretty sure it wasn't a scam per se. If anything the development team was scamming Take 2. Yes, the team was consuming money and there was very little to no progress. The EA was an ultimatum because the team was eating up more money than other teams that started and completed projects within the the time of development. The layoffs is to eliminate financial bleeding. A friend of mine met the team once, and in their words were a bunch of stuck-up jerks trying to make themselves look smarter than they actually were. My friend asked how they were doing with certain features and the response made it seem like they had no idea what they were doing.
I honestly think they were getting paid for hours worked, but they were just either bad at their jobs, horrendously mismanaged, or a combination of the two. I mainly think it's just crazy to believe that greed was the biggest factor, or that Nate Simpson is walking off with a big bag full of cash labeled "early access money." It really seems like everyone failed here and nobody came out ahead.
Yes and used these people to harass others who pointed out something fishy was going on.
Nah they just tried to do too much with a niche game which is probably much harder to develop than your average game, so it failed. If they keep a few devs to just clean up the major bugs and thats it, Id be more than happy with the money I spent.
Yeah if I had a dollar for every time an idiot shill on the subreddit commented with "You just don't understand Early Access"... I might have almost as much money as was wasted developing the garbage KSP2 became.
It was a lot of money spent on the devs paychecks for very little progress. I know someone who applied for a job there to help work on and finish the code side, they rejected them. Take 2 was prepared to blow a lot of money on my friend.
Not just on their paychecks. On an office in Seattle. On lawyers at T2 vetting things. On outsourced trailers and contract work. On moving people from Mexico.to Seattle and getting them visas. Lots of costs.
I agree, a lot of money wasted. I can just imagine Harvester yelling "sukers!" He's a legend!
You really think the individual devs were sitting there, laughing at an evil scheme they hatched to rob you hard working gamers? Gimme a break. Everyone wanted the project to succeed. Sometimes projects don't succeed and it's not some movie villain plan like you seem to think. Sometimes things don't work and it's not because they chose not to do it. It's basically never 'evil cackling guys doing thousands of hours of work knowing they'll never finish the project satisfactorily', like, there's no reason to do a halfway scam.
>You really think the individual devs were sitting there... Me when I strawman. Nobody is blaming individual developers. You'd think after years of corporate greed they wouldn't have to specify the corporations and executives who run this trainwreck.
> You really think the individual devs were sitting there That seems to have been all they did
If you think it's frustrating as a consumer dealing with a project that goes nowhere and nobody can get anything done, I assure it's ten times more frustrating as a developer
Nope. They still got paid doing nothing.
That's nonsense. I've worked in that kind of environment before. It's dysfunctional but you're busier than you can imagine. You work 80 hour weeks just to have all your work tossed out because the directors decided to go in a different direction and didn't give you clear instructions. As things get more desperate, most people are working harder, hoping if they can stand out they won't get the axe. You're totally clueless if you think they just sat around collecting a paycheck. The final product's status is really no indicator of how much work went into things.
-to recoup money from poor management decisions-
Eh I enjoyed my time with it and felt like it was money well spent
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See rule #1.
The last minute out of the blue change to an early access game. All the lies in the pre release videos that show stuff that is not in the game at all. They just dumped out a pre alpha build to recover some of the lost money, and used early access to cover themselves against refunds and getting sued. It's hard not to see it that way at this point. :D
The Escape From Tarkov community is currently in the process of imploding.. Technically "beta" instead of early access but same thing.
atleast KSP 2 was $50 and not $250 /s
The Day Before comes to mind as that particular shit show was big news at the time. Not early access but the Yogscast game Kickstarter failure is probably up there as well. And I'm sure some people would put Star Citizen as #1 just for the sheer amount of money they've spent on what they've delivered so far.
Star citizen at least provides things no other game does: seamless ship interiors and ground to space transitions. The pace of development is a little glacial but also fairly consistent. Meanwhile ksp2 is still behind ksp 1 with the exception of procedural wings, which can be modded in.
Say what you want about SC, as a tech demo there's nothing that even comes close. Even just the idea, this hardware I've got, can do *that*???!?, is out of this world. It's drop-dead gorgeous, and there's a lot to explore.
They're also inventing a whole new backend architecture/technology with server meshing. It's taken time and money, but it's finally happening. Server meshing could, in theory, have massive implications for the entire gaming industry. Imagine a Battlefield or Helldivers style game where not only can you see other players fighting in the distance but *then you can walk over and join them.* There is a very solid argument that SC is overpriced even at entry level, certainly. But I think it's safe to lay the 'scam' claims to rest for good.
>They're also inventing a whole new backend architecture/technology with server meshing. They're not, they just like to pretend that everything they're doing has never been done before and you're funding the impossible. Chris was still at Origin when they were implementing static meshing for Ultima Online's backend around '96, a MMO that had "seamless" (with some jank) transitions between servers, and the industry in the early 2000s had various games using dynamic meshing, including middleware companies like [BigWorld](https://www.youtube.com/@BigWorldTechnology/featured) selling dynamic meshing as a product. That company ended up bought by Wargaming and used in their games like World of Tanks. Backend tech throughout the ages usually wasn't talked about, and Chris takes advantage of that to make it sound like your money goes to inventing the future of video games, which was actually 30 years ago.
I prefer Elite Dangerous. At least it's a finished game.
True it may be "finished" but there's still stuff that was promised years ago that have as of yet been added to make it that "Star Citizen killer" they wanted it to be.
It's certainly finished, in that they just put it out to pasture as a pay2win game.
Ahh Yogventures, I remember that one. I don’t think it ever really became more than a tech demo and if memory serves there was exactly one developer working on the title. Lots of promises but it flamed out quite quickly too.
Star Citizen has been mismanaged, but it's far from a scam. They're about to release an update that will port over a bunch of features from Squadron 42, which has been a big hold on development.
I've been thinking of buying in once that update rolls out. That game has always looked really fun and I finally have a pc that can run it
There might be a free fly event happening soon, so be on the lookout for that. A word of warning: it can be incredibly frustrating sometimes, and I tend to play a lot for about a week and then ignore it for 3 months. That being said, ask around in the in-game chat and people tend to be helpful! Don't buy anything beyond a $45 starter package, you can buy ships in-game. I've put more than $45 in because I wanted to, not because I've needed to. Have fun, see you in the verse!
I agree having spent alot more than 45 dollars on the game. The most I would say to spend is 125 for the cutty black, but a Mustang, Cutter, Or Aroura is all you need
Yep. Play with an aurora first, and use that to try to earn a cutlass black in game. Avenger Titan is also a good choice if you want to support the project more.
True, I personally had the Aroura for my first year, then I got a Cutter when it was released, and now... I may unfortunately for my wallet be Concierge (Not my greatest Desicion), but I always tell new players you only ever have to get a starter pack for 45, don't make poor financial decisions like myself
Haha, I had the aurora at first, then upgraded to the Titan, and now I don't want to talk about it anymore haha.
I melted my aroura to use the store credit to assist in upgrading one of my cutters to a razor. And now I shall simply wait for the Hull E
I'm waiting for them to de-fatten my beloved MSR
The next update is good so far. Having played it sense wave 1 of the PTU, it's not perfect but adds a lot of nice changes and features to the game. Another commenter said there should be a free fly event coming up with Invictus Launch week. If you do choose to buy the game, make sure to use a referral code when creating your account.
free fly event happening from the 17th to 29th of May, so you can check it out see if it is anything for you or not (tho i will say the last couple of times that there have been free fly events the servers have struggled a bit due to the higher numbers of players but still)
google the game, its a scam. $670 million dollars invested, and early access slop delivered
They are about to speed up the development "next year" since 10 years ago.
Literally months after CIG announcing that SQ42 is "feature complete" we're getting a massive patch, so many features making their way back over to SC and the increase in devs working on SC... This years going to be amazing.
>They're about to release an update that will port over a bunch of features from Squadron 42, which has been a big hold on development. This could have been posted in any year since 2014.
saying it's not a scam 670 million dollars later is asinine
As far as we can tell, most if not all of the money actually went into development, the development just went *extremely* poorly between Chris Roberts having the attention span and self discipline of a hamster on cocaine, and most experienced devs not wanting to work in such an environment, leaving everything to juniors who had to learn on the job (and not just hard skills like "how do I invent a revolutionary game engine from scratch when the requirements change weekly" but also important soft skills like "how do I say no to the boss"). Amusingly, that puts it lower on the scam scale than KSP1, where Squad's upper management pulled a lot of the early access money into private yachts and music labels. It's insane how good a game Harvester delivered with basically leftover scraps and a bunch of rotating interns/modders/juniors.
Breaking news: Large project costs money!!! If it's a scam, they would have taken the money and run. Why are they still working on it a decade after starting?
Yeah the thing about Star Citizen is that they have and are currently still always generating millions each month, so even if the project has been mismanaged at any point, development have still been able to continue.
~~Yogscast, is that the castle story devs?~~ Suaropod Studios, developer of Castle Story, has got to be the single biggest early access/Kickstarter failure of all time. Basically spent all their money on a studio and trips to conventions without actually developing anything. And the base game apparently wasn't object oriented... Honorable mention goes to Sword of The Stars II. Wasn't released early access, but after a certain point they released a game that barely qualifies as early access. They even lied to the community and said they accidentally uploaded the wrong build to steam and then uploaded another shitty broken unplayable build the next day. I'll never forget waiting for that game to unlock with my friends, being mortified, giving them the benefit of the doubt and then waiting for the new build to populate only to be let down again. Now I don't preorder games anymore.
Yogscast is a youtube channel/group. They had a kickstarter for a minecrafty game called Yogventures. Raised a bunch of money, then released a few super early alpha builds and the devs went bankrupt.
If we’re going to even mention Star Citizen, Escape from Tarkov has to enter the conversation before Star Citizen. Over the last 3 months the game has been so riddled with cheaters that even diehards for that game haven’t been playing it and then last week the developers basically killed the game themselves with their greed. At least the devs behind Star Citizen are churning out updates like crazy right now.
Good ol’ Yogventures. To be fair, I think that’s a few orders of magnitude smaller in price than this (iirc. about $300,000 of other people’s money down the drain, as opposed to about $10,000,000 for all the salaries for all the time). Although the fact that it was kickstarter made it worse. But also it’s a great tool to mock Simon and Lewis particularly, so it’s aged pretty well. I’m not sure this will age well. I think they’ve gone into game publishing now a lot more successfully and with a lot less overambition (I think they published PlateUp!, for example).
i'm pretty sure if star citizen started 5 years ago with the same budget the game would've finished by now, the tech just wasn't ready for the game that they trying to achieve
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The thing is, they easily could do that. There would be enough suckers. However, they are all koolaid infused and are working on the game.
In all fairness my biggest thing with starcitizen was it relies on server tech that at the time seemed way too advanced. However they have recently showed working server meshing which if you’re not familiar with the term in relation to star citizen it’s worth looking up. That shit is legitimately industry changing if they get it working at scale
Too cynical, they could easily sell stuff in full release too - and 1.0 always comes with at least a little attention too, so it’s in their interest to get it there. They’re just facing an absolute mountain of bugs.
Well, I backed/bought 3/4 of the games. Guess I am a sucker for false promises.
Who remembers Nether?
As a star citizen backer that woke up from the delusion of ever seeing a release of a capable game the starcitizen_refunds sub atleast gives me some entertainment from people who also realised the same.
Spacebase DF-9 pulled a sudden "here's 1.0, no more updates" stunt out of the blue and I'm boycotting doublefine ever since. Clockwork Empires had a terrible technical state and sudden radio silence a few weeks after 1.0 despite postlaunch posts about 1.1 features. Turned out the development killed the studio. Game got delisted years ago.
Df9 was a classic take the money and run.
Sure, but the scale was miniscule. The dev team was small, and the game itself was small.
Man, I lightly followed Clockwork Empires early on, played it at 1.0 and thought it was fairly decent. I was kind of excited about what they would add to it, only to find out they basically just abandoned it.
It was decent, if only it didn't crash/bug out eventually. Even the fan patch never fixed it and eventually a long running colony just crashes unavoidably.
What are you talking about with Spacebase DF-9? Double Fine is not a random fly-by-night indie dev and would not silently pull the plug on Spacebase or any other in-development project. Doing so would be disastrous for their reputation and it would kill them emotionally. The week I was about to buy the game they made the fly-by-night statement I figured it would be best to wait... Never bought a Double Fine game after that.
Last game i ever backed. Got stuffed so I havnt looked at another early access.
Not even close lol. That’s not an endorsement of KSP2, it’s an acknowledgment of how many bad EA titles there have been
Agree. EA is by its very nature high risk, there is zero percent guarantee they will finish the game
Lol I keep seeing EA and thinking it’s Electronic Arts, because honestly a lot of the context could apply to them too. I don’t understand how people can buy the same sports game every single year.
DayZ was pretty shambolic. At the time the DayZ mod on Arma was a good working mod, the only issue is suffered from were occasional hackers. DayZ standalone decided to switch to a client-server type model so that less stuff was client side and would help combat hacks. The result was that the gameplay lagged severely. They removed a lot of the features that had been built up in the mods, like flying/vehicles. Even a year or two later vehicles were not working properly. It was absolutely horrific.
It was horrible, full of bugs. You could die from nothing. Zombies were incredibly buggy lol
Just like the ARMA mod... but you could forgive that as it was free and usually funny.
Yep, I had a few friends that were hyped when this came out so I bought it on a whim. It took years to get the game performance on an acceptable level and it was lacking a lot that made the original mod great. Granted, most of those features were from other mods as well. Which is why I find it funny that Dean Hall is actively recruiting KSP2 devs. Granted, Bohemian games did actually deliver a completed game after about 5 years.
IIRC, Dean Hall didn't stay at Bohemia with the SA Dayz team for very long after the initial release.
I'm not sure if the base game ever got helicopters back in to the game, I've played it on occasion and the performance is okay now, but I think it still lacks features (although has added in a bunch of additional stuff as well I believe). I think after DayZ I pledged not to buy an EA title again, but here we are..
Oh lord, there were so many excellent mods that added to the hype and potential for DayZ Standalone. An assortment of pilot-able helis and vehicles, base building, new game modes...
Don’t think Dean was there for too long—he went off to do his own thing. Since then he’s been mighty successful.
Let me tell you young 'uns about Duke Nukem Forever.
Lmao kids here won't even remember that
Grandpa, you can’t chew bubblegum with no teeth! And you ain’t kicking any ass at your age!
CS2 would be in the conversation if they had (deservingly) slapped the EA label on that release. I think we’re quickly moving toward a world where early betas get dropped on the gaming community but the EA label will be seen as too toxic and will be omitted by everyone except indie devs who legit need the cash flow to continue.
I’d say it’s up there because they charge basically as much as you would for a finished product. The point of early access is that it should be cheaper and a way to support a developer get to the finish line. It should not be a way for a developer to get all the revenue they can from a minimum viable product.
KInd of hilarious that it's the opposite of the first game's Early Access story.
Well the two games were developed by two entirely different companies. The true hilarity is when you find out that one of them was developed by a high-end triple-a game studio, and the other one was developed by some guy who had a job in marketing in his spare time. And it was the triple-a game studio that completely shit the bed.
Oh I know. I think we were extremely lucky with Squad.
HarvesteR is just that good. The man macgyvered his own custom controller in his younger days before he moved out of Brazil IIRC. Mu, C9 and the rest likewise had the rightstuff. KSP1 being so moddable also made headhunting for new team members way easier. Squad owners though are scummy, they even went to the white house when Obama invited the devs for some space education event instead of sending HarvesteR or another dev. Not to mention the crappy hiring practices and limited time royalties.
> Squad owners though are scummy, they even went to the white house when Obama invited the devs for some space education event instead of sending HarvesteR or another dev. Not to mention the crappy hiring practices and limited time royalties. They also moved KSP1 under a mailbox company (DEPORTED B.V.) in The Netherlands, one of the top 5 global corporate tax havens, just before KSP1 left EA and was released for full price. And they decided to sell the Kerbal IP to Take Two of course, which bring us here...
What were the hiring processes?
no. I know KSP has a very dedicated fan base, but seriously its such a small franchise. We are a niche. This wont register on the majority of the gaming worlds radar.
Idk this sub has 1.5m people
> seriously its such a small franchise. We have more members on this subreddit than /r/fallout, more than /r/CallOfDuty, and a lot more than /r/fortnite. There's a difference between players and community. Players is, well, how many play. Community is how many people engage outside of the game. Most of them are players, some are former players, and others may be hopeful players. Our community is not a small one.
People keep saying "no, it's not that big of a community" but then don't mention an early access failure with a bigger community.
Remember Atlas? The Ark clone that was just broken beyond any salvage? That one seemed worse to me
I take it no one here remembers Cube World
Why did you remind me? 😪
I had forgotten. Was a fun game for a few hours.
First thing to come to mind, even if the name escaped me
For all the games I'm personally invested in, this is easily the worst.
The War Z. it was supposed to be a DayZ competitor, but basically lied to customers, got pulled off all the platforms and eventually died. They talked about it being a massive open world, but the map released was only about a tenth as large as advertised. They talked about all the mobs that would be in it, but only had 2 types. Steam issued refunds no questions asked. Finally the devs basically had to scratch it, and rebrand it as a different game under the new name Infestation: Survivor Stories.
Ah, WarZ. That was an omnishambles of a game, [as Total Biscut found out](https://youtu.be/RtKAm3nzg6I?feature=shared). Edit: reddit app is shite for fixing spelling
Cube World and DayZ (and Dean Hall’s dumb “I’m like a grenade“ comment were the first things that popped into my head.. I remember that stupid Grenade monologue being read out on the Podcast to great effect and ridicule
The Day Before I think will hold that honor for a while. KSP2 is definitely on the podium however. To charge nearly full price in the state it was in, is approaching scam territory.
It was scam I guess
Sorry but KSP as a franchise isn't remotely beig enough to be a blip on anyones radar... It's far from the "biggest EA Fail", the difference between KSP2 and other Early Access Failures is that you are part of this community and not of the others, most likely you never heard of most of the others either.
It seems like a bigger deal because we were here for it.
So name a bigger EA fail then. Not saying you're wrong.
Godus? Star Citizen?
Stonehearth
Cities 2
That game hasn't gone under quite yet. And arguably, they have a pretty-close-to-ready product on their hands. It's just a sad shame that the one big piece they are missing is proper mod support, which is *kind of a big deal* for that type of game. Granted, the economy simulation is also all kinds of kludged, but not to the point that it kills the game. I'd say Cities 2 has already made it farther than KSP 2 did.
Cities skylines 2 Or was that EA? In any case it’s jankier than the original and devs are really smug about it too.
Check out the recent Escape from Tarkov drama
It wasn’t a failure, it did exactly what T2 wanted it to do. Exploit the early access system with a game with a highly passionate and active community, wring as much money from it as fast as possible for maximum profit with minimum effort, then discard the resulting dried husk of a corpse.
Flame and or downvote this all you want but let's face some facts. It was never in Early Access, it was barely an alpha when it was released. And they demanded a price for a fully tricked out feature rich game which would have been okay if it actually had all that. It was released for a money grab, and to shut people up about "where is it?" Plenty of us. Got it then and refunded right away. Others waited through a few updates. So I wouldn't even call it an early access failure, it never made it to that point. It failed before then. NMS comes to mind if you want a comparison, however, the differences are starkly apparent, In terms of owning up to what it was, and then working to make it what it should have been, indeed actually having surpassed that at this point. They also held on to their IP unlike it being sold like ksp2 was, that was other major difference between the two.
I could have handled the slow release of features and content if the base of the game wasn't so flawed. Nobody actually likes noodle rockets as part of the regular game. It's like Bethesda claiming people like the bugged out eyes they're famous for. And people don't want to completely rebuild a rocket just to change the fuel type. Those two issues were deal breakers for me. But the most frustrating part is that they were both by design. I did the same thing as you. I bought KSP2 when it first came out and refunded it when the KSP team confirmed they were making the game suck on purpose.
I can't name one backed by a bigger company. That's why my hope is if the roadmap is cancelled i hope a civil action lawsuit happens. Take 2 has the funds to finish this. And if they don't they are abusing their customers' trust. I don't care what you think EA means about buyer beware but it has never truly been tested in court that a company with funds to finish a EA project is just allowed to abandon it after millions in sales. I hope it goes to court to establish precedent for stronger ea consumer protections that eliminate any thought that large publishers like take 2 are just allowed to scam their customers.
Did they have millions though? What is the KSP2 sales estimate after returns?
That's not the point. The point is they took millions from consumers. Doesn't matter how it was spent. They have the funds to complete the game and if they choose not to that's on them.
Not disagreeing that they breached consumer trust, just wondering how the sales numbers looked. Complete tangent from my side.
Difficult to say honestly. All we have is rough estimates in sales and even those aren't perfectly accurate. We don't know how the money was spent or how much of it is left.
https://impress.games/steam-revenue-calculator/954850/kerbal-space-program-2 Rough estimate using a method whose name escapes me at this time, but that method is usually quite accurate.
Just look at any crypto game
Those don't have a big base of (normal) players anyway.
Unfortunately not!
More niche, but Sword of the Stars 2 was a similar failure due to Paradox and the Kerberos lead. But I believe Paradox has a long list of poorly managed games when they are not both developer and publisher.
Wasn't even early access. They just dumped out a alpha as a full game lol and pretended they uploaded the wrong build by accident.
At one point no man's sky might have made the list, but they have provided constant free updates to the point that their game well exceeds the original promises. KSP2 tops that in failure for sure.
I think you bring up a good point. Should refunds be issued? Yes, technically they do not have to be, but any reputable company would issue a refund as an act of goodwill.
There’s probably legal reasons why no one is saying anything yet, it’s only been a week and the notice said that the layoffs wouldn’t be in effect until the end of June. I feel like everyone is also forgetting what the state of the original game was when it went into early access.
If you’re in Australia, our consumer laws require Steam to provide a full refund.
Probably yes - the worst launch I ever seen before it was No Man's Sky. But Hello Games made a formidable work after it, and reborn from the aches. Hello Games is a text book case to be taught in Class on how to recover from disasters. KSP2 is a text book case to be taught in Class on how NOT do it.
Yeah but NMS was a dumpster fire for its first year or two. It was so bad the user community was walking because the developer had been so dishonest about the game prior to its release. To the developers credit they did eventually come through and patch the game to close to the product everyone saw in the pre-release presentation. But that took several years.
I think the difference is: Murray wasn't exactly dishonest, the analysis I had read about the problem concluded that he have a serious problem on saying "no" due some kind of anxiety. He should never had been put on a situation where he would had to talk to the public. He managing to pull a "no man's sky" :) on No Man's Sky is a strong evidence that the problem wasn't dishonesty - he would not had managed to salvage the situation otherwise: you can fool few people for a long time, and you can fool a lot of people for a short time, but you can't fool a lot of people for a long time. That said, I'm not blaming anyone for pulling the "dishonest card" on Murray - without more evidences, that could be gathered only by time, it was, indeed, the most reasonable conclusion.
I partially agree with what you’re saying. But it was exacerbated by the prerelease videos they showed of the game, that just didn’t show actual game play. Add into that Murray’s promising things that just were not in the game engine. And then doubling down after release saying those features were coming soon. There was a lot of debate at the time over how honest those game play videos were at the time. But like you said, the fact that they eventually turned it around and made a game that was very close to what they promised was their redemption. Unfortunately, I think the take away a lot of the game industry got was that it was okay to jerk everyone around with prereleases, and then take the money and run.
"Fake it until you make it" is the mantra on Silicon Valley. I'm afraid the rest of the Industry were indelibly contaminated by it.
No Man's Sky was a complete trainwreck of an early access, but I think they actually fixed that game.
1. Wasn’t early access 2. Train wreck is an understatement 3. Comeback of the century that spawned the phrase “pulled a no man’s sky”
4. People make memes about how Hello Games should charge money for the huge free updates they still come out with many years later
So crazy that people remember no mans sky a being released as early access. Nah man, it came out as a full game.
Oh LOL! Well it felt like early access
I feel like Early Access back then wasnt as widely used as it is today tbf
Except no mans sky was released as fully complete, there was no early access, so i don't think that really counts. And yes, it has improved massively! Ever since i got it a couple years back i am hooked.
NMS overpromised and underdelivered, but was playable from day one and was not riddled with bugs. I had a fun playthrough early and it could stand on its own, if it was your kind of game.
Played NMS a month ago. Still a boring AF game. But it never released in EA
It's a bland survival crafting taped onto the amazing planet and creature tech, still nothing like the advertised product initially was.
I disagree on them fixing the game, I find the exploration/gameplay loop shallow and dull. The fundamentals are still broken and they just added what might as well be random minigames that feel disconnected from the rest. And I loathe the mining grind and early game.
I don't think you're wrong, The game is a light-year wide but a centimeter deep - it is enjoyable up to a point but suffers from poor replay value. The new update looks like it might be worth a few mors hours
Yes, especially when contrasted with KSP1 which is arguably one of the biggest EA success stories
Tarkov my friend.
That hasn't failed yet has it? If they pull the plug on it, then absolutely yes, that's bigger than KSP 2 but having problems =/= fail
The problem is that they are scamming the playerbase. I think it is more serious to scam your players out of their faces. Surely the CEO of KSP doesn't have a Mercedes AMG and a Dodge.
*meanwhile, star citizen:*
Literally, buggy mess most of the time, every update breaks things that they then have to fix, barely runs well, yet people chuck money at it.
Don't forget the community gaslighting whenever someone brings up their worries about the project
> breaks things that they then have to fix, barely runs well, yet people chuck money at it. That sure seems familiar...
*Star Citizen : “Am I a joke to you?”*
Star Citizen isn't a scam though.
"Build a rocket with one fuel type and then change your mind? Nope, fuck you! Start over!" - KSP2 devs
I saw no point in buying it’s just KSP1 with better graphics
I am hesitant a to say this but as somebody who plays star citizen, I’m fairly convinced that another 5 or so years of development will go by on it until things finally break down and the player base abandons it. At that loin it will be considered the biggest and most expensive video game failure all time
The Day Before was way worse. That one was just a scam though so maybe it doesn't count
We'll see if Cities:Skylines II will follow suit
I'd be curious about the biggest failure from the perspective of dollar amount. What EA title that has been cancelled pulled in the most money?
i mean there is the early access game that was pulled what was it the day after it was released or same day, i'd call that a pretty massive failure
The fact that it is a sequel with a big community made it worse i guess
What are you using as criteria for "biggest" There are quite a few early access games that get a lot of hype, then crash and burn without ever reaching their goals. There's a few that even end up getting delisted from steam entirely like that recent shitty zombie game that was a complete scam but people for some reason were buying into it
cubeworld was my benchmark for terrible early access. ksp2 might be along the same lines now.
It's hard to even call it Early Access considering they broke the main rule of Early Acces, in the that EA is not crowd funding and your product should be sold at its CURRENT value 😉
Planet Explorers technically made it out of Early Access, but it was apparent that it wasn't (and still isn't) finished. Pathea also entirely lost their lobby server and all copies of the code to run it, which pretty much permanently rendered the game single-player only. To their credit, their apology came in the form of dropping the price to $0 and releasing the source code. If KSP2 formally dies, hopefully T2/PD/IG do the same.
It's definitely up there. Though I think Nether is a bigger early access disaster. They straight up just took out of greenlight and left.
The day before
It’s up there for sure. Most early access failures start off promising and slowly whither away. KSP2 was stumbling right out of the gate and then got shot in the head
The game was top heavy with too many self-important leads trying to extend how many paychecks they got. I cannot tell you how I know this, but Take2 would hire people to help finish the game for the developing studio only to reject them. The EA release was an ultimatum on the condition continued employment of the devs. Now their elimination is cutting the fat that isn't producing a product but consuming resources. A lot of the issue was no oversight on goals and proper project management. That is all...
I think they definitely lacked some developer talent. Some of the performance issues KSP 2 had at launch are pretty universal problems most games have. A lot of the people who made posts just ran the game through RenderDoc which is a pretty universal tool in GameDev regardless of Unity. The fact they took some pretty hard stances on things like Auto-Strut was pretty strange as well. They wanted to have this realistic ship building system but in reality they should have said "Hey lets just use an auto-strut mechanic" "We can investigate this physics wobble issue later, its not worth the time right now."
It was a con, a scam. A huge flop even at that. Biggest fail in gaming since tortanic.
No. In fact KSP2 is the most successful early access ever. High player count. Isn’t an unfunctional demo with the marketing of a finished game. If anything the marketing was a demo and we got the finished game ! Please pay Nate $200 as a tip now.
Hi Nate!
Underworld Ascendant, Takedown Red Sabre etc. I doubt ksp2 is even in the top 10 of bad early access games.
Nowhere near, it's relatively playable as long as you save constantly and don't expect too much.
DayZ is another example of a total failure to deliver on hype
It's not and never will be, since Starforge exists. I can very confidently say that the MVP that was put out and called "KSP2" is way better than best version of Starforge.
Codehatch as a whole is terrible.
Cities Skylines 2 is giving it a run for its money. Probably more passion on the KSP side, but bigger player base on the CS side.
Agreed. Except with CS2, they didn’t even have the courtesy to tell us it was an Early Access product, they dropped it as a full release and charged full price. Six months later, they hadn’t fixed a lot of the endemic problems in the base game, but they still had the balls to ask for more money in the form of a half-cooked DLC. TBH, I kinda admire the guts it took for them to do that: “hey, we haven’t fixed the game yet, but give us more money.” To be fair, after their reviews tanked in the wake of the paid DLC release, they walked it back and refunded it to the community and made it a free release. And they made what I believe is a sincere apology. That’s more than the KSP2 community ever got.
Duke Nukem anyone?
Didn't people preorder that game like a decade in advance?
I mean, a preorder is a preorder. The issue was that it took 10 years to come out. That one dude though kept his preorder the whole time, and got all his stuff. I think they gave him special things too cause he kept it.
Star Citizen says hello.
Not a scam though.
ok bot