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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>Hopefully all the people who paid for the current in-development version are not left high and dry in terms of updates and bugfixes.

How long is a developer expected to keep improving a game? Maybe it is the old console gamer in me, but it wasn't that long ago that a game developer was done with a game when it was released. This game has been public for 6 years, been on Steam for 4 years, and been out of beta for 2 years. I don't get how customers can complain about a lack of commitment to the game especially considering the low price the game was usually offered at. I wouldn't blame Take-Two one bit for trying turn a bigger profit with more paid content or a complete sequel.

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It's an interesting balance. On one hand, games were historically 'dead' at release. On the other, they were at least theoretically done at release. That's no longer even a goal for many developers today - features get deferred, and players get used as a massive QA team.

KSP as it first hit Steam was fun, but obviously incomplete. KSP 1.0 was viable as a finished product, but had obvious, planned upgrades unfinished. After-release support was pretty obviously planned from the beginning.

As for how long, though, I don't know. I'm exceedingly happy with the KSP I got for my money, and unlike some games they could have quit support before now without upsetting me. So as long as Take-Two keeps a decent business model, I'll happily pay for further content.

> features get deferred

It's actually the opposite, bug fixes get deferred in favor of more features. Fixes make your player base happy, but they already paid and are therefore not worth any more money, new features drive sales.

Mojang is particularly aggravating about this. They spent like a year completely reworking The End and adding hang-gliders or whatever, and meanwhile furnace carts have been broken for like three years, and the fix is apparently like a dozen lines of code or something. In fact the entire mine cart and track system should be overhauled if they're really serious about improving the game - but instead they just keep adding more stupid shit nobody asked for.

Not to mention a lot of the good mods are still on like 1.6 or something because obviously no one is going to diligently update their mod over the course of ten years or however long Mojang wants to keep this up.

This is a big reason behind why I gave up on Minecraft years ago. I wanted to build big crazy rail systems that auto-returned the carts to me and it was just too glitchy and I had no interest in the new stuff they kept releasing.

> Not to mention a lot of the good mods are still on like 1.6 or something because obviously no one is going to diligently update their mod over the course of ten years or however long Mojang wants to keep this up.

I've never seen most of Minecraft's newer stuff for this exact reason. I played enough to get pretty deep into FTB and the other large mod packs, and pretty quickly realized modders put out both content and bugfixes faster than Mojang itself. At that point, you might as well just consider the 'real' game a particularly shoddy branch of mods.

KSP is in my top five videogames of all time. I'd suspect it's similar for many of the other game's diehard fans. Like Civilization, it's a game that scratches a unique itch, and if you have that itch, it's irresistible. So I and many others are absolutely willing to pay more money for improvements and more content. I'd love to start with first class improved graphics built into the base game itself. I run some graphical improvement mods, but they don't work 100% of the time, they're always getting broken by patches to the base game, and they're somewhat unstable.

To add to this: at some point I want a developer to stop development on a game. This is especially true for games with a lot of mod content, and it's especially true when developers start prioritizing new features over bug fixes (looking with great consternation in your general direction, Mojang). It gets very tedious when a game has been out for a while and yet all your mods still break twice a year because of updates, and you've got to roll back / wait for the mods to update (which doesn't always happen) / etc.

With the exception of perhaps some bug fixes if necessary, KSP 1.3 is done. Stick a fork in it and start work on something else.

Skyline: Cities seems to be taking a DLC approach (with the newest being Mass Transit) to continue to develop the game engine and content.

I like the approach that the Cities: Skylines devs are doing because it's actually MEANINGFUL DLC, not "buy an extra hat" or something similar. I'd buy the DLCs if I could afford to do so right now...

Yep, that's the key. Mass Transit is really a new experience and a lot of refinement, plus the price is low (~$13). They had a big sale right before the DLC that discounted a lot of their older stuff at 50% - 70%.

Im actually hoping that they don't make a sequel but continue the great style of continuously giving back to the community.

My personal guess for the future is that Kerbals will take off as a franchise, maybe even a movie, who knows. Lets face it, kerbals are just frickin cute :-)

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