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Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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