[ye-olde-sysrq]

KSP2 isn't an enshittification play, imo. It's literally just bad project management.

I'll list their sins from my armchair:

- remaking a beloved, established game that has a prodigious base of features and extremely extensive modding support. you have a HUGE hill to climb just to get to your "MVP" - you have to supplant the existing game plus its modding community, and this is already a niche audience of ["people who find orbital mechanics as a primary gameplay loop to be fun"]. They were always going to need to really fucking knock it out of the park on their first at-bat to make this work.

- doing so on a short time-frame

- trying to be all artsy about it too. not that that's a bad thing, but it does position you to take your time rather than going fast. and like I said, they already had a steep hill to climb.

- standard-issue development hell. it happens.

- special-issue development hell where TTWO did some fucky-wucky stuff where they hired away a ton of the staff from the studio they were contracting with, cancelled the contract, and brought it all in-house with the poached team. Hardly an encouraging sign.

- with all the delays adding up, I suspect they were given the ultimatum to either ship their current state into EA and start recouping money, or get scuttled. People have allegedly looked into the code and found extensive additional systems that were basically hastily commented or hacked out so they could ship some vaguely-functional core.

I was really, really looking forward to KSP2. KSP1 but with good graphics, a non-unity engine (it was always a miracle that squad had gotten such good large-scale physics out of unity), and promises of official support for non-kerbin bases and interstellar travel? Yes please, sign me up!

But honestly, my mental model for how this would be successful was "they'll reimplement the existing base game in a new engine. big task but doable for TTWO's money, it's not indie anymore, and they obviously already understand the product. Then, with the base game ported, people will be willing to buy in EA because they see the promise of 'KSP but more!!!'". And that last bit was going to be critical, they'd need people bought-in if they wanted TTWO to keep funding them / them keep funding themselves.

So when they launched this scrap heap into EA, I knew it was doomed. And look at the, what 8ish months between then and now? They've released a few quaint patches that ignored all the huge issues and done basically nothing else.

I fully expect them to now slowly wind the EA down with a skeleton crew and people will just forget it to an ignoble death. I mean, TTWO can hardly be keen on continuing to pour development funding into this EA, right?

[powercf]

From my armchair I'll add that throwing away the KSP1 engine and replacing it with, based upon the number of bugs, a new implementation of the same basic idea seems like a terrible idea. My understanding is that most of the original Squad team (i.e. the only people in the world with experience building a successful orbital mechanics game) weren't kept on for KSP2. Take Two should have done everything possible to keep them as core KSP2 developers.

All that said, I don't think the game will be left unfinished. All costs are sunk and Take Two has a (reportedly) somewhat functional, nicer looking copy of KSP1 with, presumably, at least base elements of interstellar travel and colony systems in place. It's probably worthwhile trying to get the project over the last few hurdles, as it's a potential goldmine if they can pull it off.

[lamontcg]

> KSP2 isn't an enshittification play, imo. It's literally just bad project management.

It is also MBA decisions (kicking the game out for full price as an early-access game that was nowhere near close to being ready for that).

The combination of PM and MBA decisions that have screwed it up are definitely enshittification-adjacent, although they may just lack enough competency.

[hoseja]

The first point is incorrect IMO. They just needed a really solid core of unjanky physics for an MVP, which was why a sequel was needed in the first place - KSP 1 engine limitations. Couldn't even deliver that.

[philwelch]

The root problem with KSP2 is that they needed to make the core of the game perform much better than KSP1 in order to pull off the scale of what they intended to achieve. And then the they shipped into EA with significantly worse performance than KSP1.