Maybe it’s a coincidence and maybe it’s not, but as the Artemis 2 spacecraft comes rolling around the moon like Jimmy Kirk and co. heading off to save the whales, the aging reach-for-the-stars simulator Kerbal Space Program is seeing a major uptick in players on Steam—according to SteamDB, achieving the highest concurrent player count the game has seen since it launched into 1.0 more than a decade ago.
Kerbal Space Program debuted in April 2015 and has remained popular despite its age—you can still reliably find at least a few thousand people playing on Steam at any given moment. Over the past two weeks, though, that number has shot way up: Not enough to put it back among the top 100 most played games on Steam, but it’s awfully close.
The obvious question is, well, why? And the answer sure seems to be NASA’s Artemis 2, which after years of over-promised, under-delivering vanity projects from self-indulgent billionaires has managed to make space exploration cool again.
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In fact, a good number of recent posts on the KSP subreddit (via IGN) explicitly state that the Artemis mission is what brought them back to the game.
Artemis has definitely inspired me to return to this game after ~5 years from r/KerbalSpaceProgram
Is it possible to do an Artemis II style mission? from r/KerbalSpaceProgram
Fake Artemis tracker? Thought I was watching the NASA stream until the camera switched to show a group of weird frogs inside! from r/KerbalSpaceProgram
So happy to hear that Artemis II will be passing by the moon today… seriously, it couldn’t come at a better time from r/KerbalSpaceProgram
There was even some Kerbal representation at the Artemis 2 launch:
Legging down to see Artemis II, wish me luck! from r/KerbalSpaceProgram
“I was trying to explain the Artemis II mission to my gf, and eventually said ‘hold on, let me just show you’ and downloaded KSP to fly it lol,” reddit DJMixwell wrote. “Been a few years, but I still got it! Built my best KSP approximation of the ship (which is surprisingly accurate tbf), put er in orbit first try, found my mun intercept, wrapped around the back side, and back to Kerbin without issue… and then I realized I forgot parachutes.”
“Was watching the live stream of Artemis with my son, he looks at me and says “dad, this makes me want to play KSP!” bigmur72 added.
“My ‘comfort food’ the last week has been tracking Artemis, rewatching For All Mankind, while playing KSP,” MrTheDoctors wrote. “Oh and Project Hail Mary was great too. Space is so back baby.”
My guess is that those KSP numbers will tail off once Artemis 2 returns home, but for now it’s great to see the game enjoying a resurgence. And who knows? It sounds like an awful lot of newcomers are being introduced to the game, so maybe this will prove more durable than I expect.
For the record, Kerbal Space Program 2 also saw a notable bump in player numbers, although not nearly so dramatic, nor enough to turn its infamously flagging ship around: It hit a peak concurrent player count on Steam of 370 on April 5, up from a high of 118 a month earlier.
