WASD editor camera control (link in comments)

Apparently not, but I'd like to shed some software dev and business perspective on such a thing. There are a bunch of factors:

  • Is it shipable or does it have every conceivable feature implemented? Shipable is important. Would you wait another month for this feature to be add, coded, and tested? What about everyone else's favorite mod features? Wait another year for 1.0? Two? Until people complain "This thing is never out of beta"? Kerbal Nukem Forever maybe?

  • If you want to encourage modding, don't step on your mod community. Absorbing the features of a mod ends that mod. It takes a favorite project away from members of your community - the creators and contributors of the mod. Nobody wants to get burned like that. You may be thinking "so hire them!" Well, that brings me to my next point...

  • Money is not unlimited. Building a game takes budgeting and planning. People need to get paid and survive. Everyone needs a place to work. Someplace has to be used for meetings. Renting offices require utilities. Computers need electricity. Servers need cooling. Websites need hosting. Everything adds up. It's not feasible to go on a hiring spree for an indy project. Even Unity itself gets expensive at a certain point (it's sold per-user per-platform and has distribution clauses - and if you need support...).

  • Popularity does not mean profitability. Expenses can be crippling in this day and age. Beyond wages are so many sundry tech costs that it would make anyone's head spin. Test equipment costs a lot for games. All those devs and artists need high-end machines to be truly productive. Bandwidth costs for serving all that stuff up is expensive and everything needs bandwidth - from hosting installers, to running websites, to the office everyone is in. Want a good example of tech cost eating all profits? See Twitter.

All in all as a consumer, I think Squad has done an outstanding job giving is a great game and a good platform for community. As a software developer, I have a huge amount of respect for what they've pulled off.

/r/KerbalSpaceProgram Thread Parent Link - gfycat.com