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?
May I ask you to elaborate on your last sentence, regarding the promise-breaking DLC? I’ve never played KSP but it looked like an interesting engineering interest-getter for future kids
They (KSP Devs) made the promise that if they were to ever release DLC it would be for actual new content and not stuff that should be in base game or was available as a mod. The first DLC was the Mission Builder, something that should exist. Along with branded ULA space parts which were great DLC. The problem was the first part, the mission builder should have been part of the game then for the DLC they should have added a few more parts to flesh it out. It was after this perceived broken promise DLC, after it was successful in the community, that the Take-Two acquisition was announced. Afterwards another DLC which was robotics parts was announced, which was literally a functional copy of a mod, another broken promise. I was there and I am adamant (cannot be certain) that the soft response to the first broken promise gave take2 the greenlight to exploit the community with mods as DLC and KSP2 being a cash grab.
If soul was put into the decision for KSP2 the developers of Kitten Space Agency would have gotten the contract for the game instead of some assholes pushing plushie merch in the pitch meeting. I blame the community enshitification because there was a few of us that actually said nah the first broken promise is bad but we got told it would be fine and to stfu cus we were assholes. And yea I am an asshole but look at the world around we should have all been assholes to the complacent more.