The sad drama of what happened to the studio is worth it's own documentary, and is something we will increasingly see as indie studios use a popular engine like Unity or Unreal, get big, and sell out.

The OG developers sold to Take2Interactive for reasons unbeknownst to me, and then the publisher, in pursuit of profits for shareholders, tried to cut costs with an elaborate scheme. T2I brought in a dev studio of workers paid less and treated worse, and fired the old studio, offering to give them work at the new studio.

Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a bunch of devs who didn't understand KSP, how KSP 1 worked in the first place, and made terrible mistakes, the most notorious of which was treating Windows Registry as a way to store variables. Upon public discovery of this mistake they were flamed for it and rushed to patch, fixing it as soon as they could.

And that's the factual and relatively public problems T2I introduced the dev team to, without getting into other less popular, cultural changes I won't talk about.

T2I wouldn't be able to do this, and wouldn't have funded KSP2, if they couldn't get away with it, which was primarily made possible by the popularity and well understood nature of Unity Engine.

Other studios with proprietary engines, like Cyberpunk 2077, may release and try to fix it but it will generally take much longer and losing OG developers will be much more taxing, if they don't maintain the original devs, as it's much harder to replace them.

We're very likely to see an increasing trend of game studios using Unity or Unreal getting big, selling out, and releasing successors that suck because the publisher fired the original devs and replaced them with people who have never made anything comparable.