It’s a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success
Kerbal Space Program 2 still hurts me.
Hopefully Kitten Space Agency ends up being a true spiritual sequel.
Although Kerbal space program 2 had major issues from the dev team, only for the publisher to pull the plug because of how bad the progress was, and leave the game in permanent early access.
Uh, its more like a new publisher bought the IP, functionally fired almost all of the original dev team, and then hired a bunch of other people who had no idea how their insanely modified version of Unity worked…
And then the idiot in charge just started spamming out extremely grand and difficult to implement new core functionalities… with a team of mostly newbies who had no idea how anything worked.
So, basically, they started out where KSP started out… and would very obviously thus need years and years and years to get it out of Early Access / Alpha state… but it needed to make money NOW, and it didn’t, so everyone got laid off (other than the idiot in charge), and the game was functionally abandoned, but not totally abandoned, because MY IP MINE NO YOU CANT HAVE IT!!!
Or… maybe not? With regard to the IP rights?
Nobody seems to know who actually owns the KSP IP at this point.
https://techdriveplay.com/2025/01/03/kerbal-space-program-2-a-tale-of-corporate-neglect-and-failure/
Except ConcernedApe, apparently.
Individual devs seem to generally manage better I think :3. It’s once the companies expand is that stuff starts going awry
Coffee Stain’s another good example on the bigger end.
It does seem like there’s a danger zone behind a certain size threshold. It makes me worry for Warhorse (the KCD2 dev), which plans to expand beyond 250.
Or the Terraria team.
The three people were replaced with a guy who used to work at EA. And one of their first announcements was an unprompted “we wont put loot boxes in the game”…
I’m not going to burn your house down, rest easy knowing that. :)
Next week: Introducing new “reward containers”
And they want to add micro transactions
But they said they wouldn’t!
It’s Krafton. Just look at what became of PUBG. I mean it’s an OK game and a lot of QoL came to it after all these years, but there hasn’t been any major meta shift in 5 years or so. Only recently they’ve started looking into how broken certain semiauto snipers are.
Instead you are drowned in lootboxes and emotes
I am also boycotting Microsoft and every product from companies owned by them.
Sure, that doesn’t leave a lot of games I can buy, but hey, Indie games are often the best games. Also I have a backlog so huge there will probably be peace in the middle east before I’m through with it.
Besides if there is a game I really want to play, I hear there arrrrr still ways to do so without supporting genocide.
They did all this because they know that the vast majority of the playerbase will never hear about this, and many of those that do will either forget, or simply not care enough to boycott the game. We’re in an age of apathy across the board, with so much bad press that any given scandal just fades into the background noise.
Who’s the streamer that boosted the Don’t Kill Games petition? Get them on it.
Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?
Everyday up until it releases
I feel like I’m the only person on the planet who thought Subnautica was boring and tedious. It was definitely not for me
Nah, that’s valid. I loved it to bits, myself, but what made me love it was how adroitly I felt it curated feelings of dread and sincere awe as I explored deeper and deeper; and that’s highly subjective. I hope you’re finding as much joy in your own fave games as I did in Subnautica!
I also wasn’t a fan, mainly due to how often you need to resupply to stay alive. You get a very small window of opportunity to do actual exploration before you need to go find more food and water, on top of gathering a bunch of other materials.
I liked parts of it, but ultimately just got frustrated with the tedious parts and bailed.
That phase does end. The various vehicles allowed for exploration without returning to the surface, as do deep sea bases.
At the same time, I fully understand why you feel that way. The crunch is required for the fear to be meaningful, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea.
Natural Selection and then Natural Selection 2 - no games or communities like it. Before there time both of them and very much under appreciated. Felt like NS2 never really found it’s rhythm but Unknown World kept it going longer than most games.
Let me preface by saying NS/NS2 are my all-time favorite games
NS2 had a terrible launch.* It was unstable, terrible performance, limited to no tutorials, and no match matching system. The game has an intense learning curve, and players who had thousands of hours from NS1 / Early Access. It’s also a game where cooperative play was imperative, so the matches really stink for everyone when teams are unbalanced / one guy curbstomps the other team.
It did eventually address those things, but much of it came too late. I so desperately want NS3 to bring it new life… but that doesn’t ever seem to be coming. I want more games where I get to be the alien/creature/monster!
My desperation hit an all-time high when I started making a game in Godot… ;-;
*To be fair, they also needed to launch ASAP because they needed the money to stay afoat
I feel the same way - both take the top spot as my all-time best games.
I will say - It was a mistake building their own game engine for NS2. I realise options were limited but they bit off more than they could chew and that came out in the launch and first 3 years or so, as you say. Yeah the co-op and commander concept was both what made it awesome and contributed to its downfall. They tried to make it easier by making it so Gorges became a support role rather than critical to the alien comm but was too little, too late.
I would 100% back a crowdunded NS3, as I did with NS2. The eSports scene is far more mature now, it could work.
The whole ordeal with the game engine is so… ironic. They opt’d for it because they wanted the infestation to spread dynamically and it wouldnt work with existing engines… so one whole custom game engine later… the infestation feature they desperately wanted was scrapped anyways.
At least it benefited from being easy to mod… the modders are the real MVPs. Kept the game alive with everything from performance, to matchmaking, to balancing.
I’d absolutely support a crowdfunded "“NS3"”… but I don’t know if that’s feasible without the official company’s sign off? Like it couldn’t just copy the core gameloop/aliens because of copyright? I can’t imagine it feeling the same without Skulks, Gorges, Lerks, Fades, Onos. The way they traverse the map and fill a niche would be hard to beat.
Yeah, the modding community rallied around both versions. The NS community is really dedicated. I admit to stopping playing NS2 when they made the announcement, have they allowed the community to keep it going in any form?
Surely they would approve of some community crowdfunding? Perhaps the original creators but not the parent company is it is now, if the recent issues around Subnautica are to be believed. NS belongs to the community.
I haven’t played in ~a year, but afaik yes! The benefits of selfhosted servers. I think there were 3-4 servers going strong on the weekends. Unfortunately, a lot of those players were the… worst kind. Hyper competitive, 10k hours, surrender the second something goes wrong types. (Edit- this might have been because my own ELO was super high, so different levels might vary)
Still amazing to see any activity this long!
My understanding of the situation was one of the creators/founders/idk said they don’t want to do anything more with guns. Hence why subnautica has no “real” weapons and no NS3. This was a long time ago with some old tweet(?). I don’t know if a community-funded thing would get support from the original creators.
Im gonna need a fact check on that bonus number.
Yes you are going to need to, but as you asked so presumptively I have a couple of links from pretty good journalistic sources.
https://www.theverge.com/news/703373/krafton-delay-subnautica-2-250-million-bonus
The Bloomberg article they reference it’s paywalled to hell :D https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/krafton-delays-subnautica-2-game-ahead-of-250-million-payout?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc1MjA4MzgyNCwiZXhwIjoxNzUyNjg4NjI0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTWjU4SUFUMVVNMFcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.R0p1u8-Bar_mXzXyKWDJxsN-yaSdlIWVs2GZ5WCbpAM&leadSource=uverify+wall
Bloomberg article: https://archive.is/njpO8
