Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money buying it. Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?

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[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 83 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I was there with KSP from the early days. Squad was not in the video game business, they were a billboard advertisement company. The lead dev HarvesteR started it as a passion project. It found success with the alpha and full release in 2015.

Then in 2017 Take-Two bought the rights to the game. Squad kept working on the original, but development of the sequel was handed off to Star Theory with Private Division publishing. The game was delayed, then development was moved to a new studio, Intercept Games, which was owned by Take-Two. They also poached a third of Star Theory's personnel, which resulted in the studio's death. They fucked around for a few years, released the early access version, then sold Private Division, closed Intercept Games, and abandoned the game.

In short: corporate interests. KSP2's failure had nothing to do with KSP or its developers.

[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 16 points 23 hours ago

That's exactly right. They also had managers/publishers telling them to do shit like make the rockets even wobblier than KSP1 because it made for funny viral videos that would get more PR.

Nobody who actually played the game wanted wobblier rockets than KSP1. Nobody really wanted wobbly rockets at all. Sometimes a bug can actually be a feature, but in this case, it really was just a bug. The people in charge didn't ever care about the people who actually played the game, they just wanted sales, and they made decisions accordingly. That's why it looks nice, but plays like shit.

[–] Lupus@feddit.org 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was there with KSP from the early days

Same, I am still so mad about the whole ksp2 fiasco that I block all of take twos games on steam, they ain't getting any money from me. I am so glad I didn't buy it in EA although it looked promising.

[–] MysteryMeatbag@mander.xyz 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm with you. I was excited to learn the other day that some of the KSP developers are working on a game called Kitten Space Agency that might fill the void left by KSP2's demise.

[–] C8r9VwDUTeY3ZufQRYvq@sopuli.xyz 2 points 12 hours ago

Oh that's cool. Hopefully they can do it justice.