I, despite having a "new" account, has been following the game even before the first early access was released back when the devblog about the SpaceX-inspired landing gears. Compare to then, the forum, and the game as a whole, just seem... quiet. Of course player activities is still relatively high and the game itself is becoming better and better. But for some reason, the interaction rate on the forum just seems lackluster.
I have several hypothesis for this:
- One, the KSP2 pulled a lot of people from this game, thinking KSP2 would just turned JN into a dead game, which it didn't. And now KSP2 just hang on to a decent proportion of fanbase "on halt" with no significant progression.
- Two, there were a trend a few years ago of creating "Space companies" that "sold" launches. People then turning the entire forum page into a massive advertisement cite. I remember being fed up of the influx of "ads" that i just quit visiting the forum page for a while.
- Three: language barrier. JN (SR2) has become quite popular with the Chinese community, and unfortunately, a decent portion of JN's conversation cannot reach the non-Chinese speaking part of the world, and vice versa.
Forums die down when summer is over and everyone goes back to school, so do post uploads. Happens every year