Space Engineers 2 - Steam Workshop Support

Space Engineers community,

I have good news to share: Space Engineers 2 will use Steam Workshop as its primary platform for user-generated content. This decision comes directly from listening to our community, particularly our content creators, who have expressed a strong preference for Steam Workshop.

Our initial plan to use Mod.io was driven by the goal of providing a unified backend for both PC and console platforms. However, your feedback made it clear that Steam Workshop's established ecosystem and features are crucial for our PC community. When our community speaks with such a clear voice, it's important for us to listen and adapt our plans accordingly.

Steam Workshop support will be added in our first major update (VS 1.1) after the Early Access launch on January 27. For our console players, we are evaluating the best approach to provide them with UGC access and will share more details as we progress.

Thank you for your passionate feedback. Your input continues to help shape Space Engineers 2's development.

Best regards, 

Marek Rosa 
CEO & Game Director
Keen Software House

My Review of 2024 & Plans and predictions for 2025

Today instead of my dev diary, I'm sharing my review of 2024 and our plans for 2025. 

I'm excited to share both our achievements and our vision for the future. 

Previous year is here: My review of 2023 & Plans and predictions for 2024

Main Events of 2024

2024 marked the beginning of a golden age for both Keen Software House and GoodAI. 

After 15 years of development and innovation in the gaming industry, Keen Software House has reached new heights, while GoodAI continues to expand its horizons. 

Our teams have cultivated a productive, results-oriented, and friendly yet meritocratic culture, where everyone is dedicated to delivering exceptional value to our players and customers.

Space Engineers 2 Announcement

Space Engineers 2 represents more than just a sequel – it's a complete reimagining of the space engineering experience that takes everything players love about Space Engineers and makes it ten times better. 

Building on over a decade of experience with the original Space Engineers, we're creating something truly extraordinary. 

Read more about the announcement. 

AI People Alpha Release

We successfully launched the alpha version of AI People, featuring AI NPCs that behave like living beings, revolutionizing gaming with truly intelligent artificial characters. Post-release updates have included local LLM integration, Long-Term Memory (LTM), voice input capabilities, new interactions, and additional characters. 

While we continue developing proper game loops, objectives, and challenges, we've observed that players who create their own scenarios and characters find particular enjoyment in the experience. 

Read more about the alpha release

GoodAI Strategic Evolution

2024 marked a significant transformation in GoodAI's mission. While we began as a fundamental research company focused on AGI development, the maturation of the AI ecosystem - with numerous companies now working on LLMs, foundational models, and AI infrastructure - has enabled us to transition to the second stage of our mission: applying AI to help humanity. 

This shift has materialized through two main initiatives: AI People, which creates simulated humans for gaming, and Groundstation, which enhances safety and security applications.

Space Engineers 1 Achievements

We continued updating and developing Space Engineers throughout 2024, and we are committed to supporting it even in 2025. Key highlights include:

• Update 205 (Contact) became the most successful update and DLC in Space Engineers history
• Update 204 (Signal) continued our tradition of meaningful content additions
• Celebrated our 11-year anniversary with the game still going strong at 16,000 concurrent players 
  
  

GoodAI Groundstation Milestones

• Secured Remote Drone Operations approval in South Africa (December 18, 2024), enabling single-pilot operation of multiple drones from a central control room 
• Established successful Community Safety Initiatives in Hout Bay, Cape Town, collaborating with Community Crime Prevention (CCP) for autonomous drone patrols, search and rescue missions, and emergency response operations
• Demonstrated exceptional system accessibility by allowing a 7-year-old to successfully operate a drone, highlighting our interface's intuitive design.
  
  

Research Achievement

Our paper on our LTM Benchmark got accepted to NeurIPS 2024

Plans for 2025

Space Engineers 2

• SE2 Early Access Alpha launch on January 27 - read more
• Release a sequence of vertical slices:
  • VS 1.1: UGC In-game Workshop
  • VS 1.2: Improved Mechanics and Interface Refinements
  • VS 1.5: Modding Support, VRAGE HUB, VRAGE Editor, and other tools
  • VS 2: Planets and Survival
  • VS 3: Water (most likely in 2026)
    
    

Space Engineers 1

Continue supporting our established player base with two major updates planned:

• Update 1.206
• Update 1.207

AI People

Our goal for 2025 is to transform AI People from an innovative tech demo into a fully-fledged game that players love. 

We will focus on achieving product-market fit by developing an engaging core gameplay loop that keeps players coming back. 

A major milestone will be the release of a version with completely local AI models - including LLM, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech capabilities - eliminating the need for subscriptions and making the game more accessible to all players. 

Throughout the year, we'll be measuring and improving player engagement and retention metrics to ensure we're creating an experience that truly resonates with our community.

Predictions for 2025

1. AI Evolution: A new generation of agentic LLMs will emerge, capable of planning and executing tasks that take hours - maintaining focus, avoiding loops, and self-correcting when needed.
2. AI Integration: More and more tasks will transition from humans to AI agents, with real-time AI assistants integrating with your computer screen - not just answering questions, but watching your work like a skilled colleague and proactively offering guidance before you even ask.
3. Technical Advancement: Inference speeds will continue to increase while costs decrease, making AI systems more accessible and efficient.
4. European Development: The changing global political landscape may catalyze stronger European strategic autonomy and a renewed recognition of Europe's foundational role in shaping the modern world. I would love to see a more unified and stronger Europe acting as one entity - economically, culturally, and in terms of defense and military capabilities. This unified approach would lead to increased pan-European cooperation in technology, culture, and human progress, allowing Europe to more effectively shape the future of civilization while drawing strength from both its rich heritage and continued leadership in innovation.
   
   

Thank you for following our journey through 2024. I want to express my deepest gratitude to our amazing teams at both Keen Software House and GoodAI. It's truly enjoyable working with such dedicated professionals who continue to grow both individually and collectively. What makes me particularly proud is how well-aligned everyone is with our mission and goals, and how seamlessly we collaborate across all projects. The level of dedication, mutual support, and innovative thinking I witness daily is extraordinary. I'm genuinely excited about what we'll achieve together in 2025.

Best regards,
Marek Rosa

CEO & Game Director, Keen Software House
CEO GoodAI

Marek's Dev Diary: 2025-01-02

Marek’s Dev Diary: January 2, 2025

What is this

Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we've been working on over the past few weeks. I'll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll share what piqued my interest.

Why am I doing it

I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I'm passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren't set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don't like spoilers, then don't read this.

Thursday 2.1.2025

AI People

This was my main priority during the Christmas period.

I was working on a new roadmap - we are now in a phase where the AI NPC technology works and we are turning it into a real game (player and NPCs need to have objectives, challenges, and reason to interact with their environment, to progress somewhere, etc).

It is increasingly clear to me that just AI NPC as a game mechanic is not enough - we need a fun game that just happens to have AI NPCs.

Space Engineers 2

This week was quiet. Everyone was on Christmas vacation.

I reviewed a design document for the Energy System in SE2 (Planets and survival). Nothing surprising has happened because I already went through that doc with designers before. Only one thing caught my attention: an idea to show energy consumption graphs in-game. I think we will leave it in the backlog, but it looked interesting.

I refreshed the PR plan for our January 27 release, making sure we don't forget about some key tasks. The main things are:

• Blog post

• Alpha release trailer (it will be less cinematic and more focused on the actual gameplay, showing what is possible in SE2)

• KPIs we are targeting

Tomorrow (on Friday) we will be recording our OST with the orchestra in Prague. It's mainly work for Karel Antonin (our music composer). Many people from our team plan to stop by and see how it works. Even my dad decided to travel to Prague to see it personally.

The OST will be available as part of the Pioneer Edition and you will be able to download it on January 27. Here are three tracks you can already listen to right now:

• 18. Welcome to the Almagest

• 08. To the Stars

• 31. Research Outpost

Games

Because Christmas was calm, no emails, no meetings, no urgencies, I had time to play games. It's nice to realize that I am still a gamer.

Here's what I played:

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - I am in the middle of the game (in Egypt). I love the location design in this game - copying reality and looking beautiful. The gameplay is also good - simple, straightforward, rewarding. And for all of us who love Indiana Jones, this is a true masterpiece we have been waiting for our entire lives!

Fallout 2 - I wanted some old-school RPG game to refresh my knowledge on the game mechanics. I never really played Fallout games. The turn-based combat surprised me. Good game.

Diablo IV - We are investigating better combat mechanics for AI People, so I decided to check how Diablo does it. The last time I played a Diablo game was probably 30 years ago, some DOS version. This new version looks beautiful, gameplay is fast-paced (which I like because I have zero patience in games).

Path of Exile 2 - A game similar to Diablo. Actually, it is very similar. But it looks amazing, plays well, it's a good experience. One thing that surprised me in a positive way was the selection of characters at the start: there was a scene where a few people were about to get hanged. I had to select one. So I picked, and then all of the others fell and died, and only my character ran away. This was a great moment: surprising and emotional.

Dead Space - This is a game that I played many years ago. It had its influence on Space Engineers aesthetics and our first GUI. I decided to replay it now because I met Glen Schofield at GDS conference in Prague. I got stuck quite early so I need to find some manual to see how to get over my current obstacle.

SpaceEngine - This is not really a game, but a space simulator. It has a database of all known planets, stars, galaxies, asteroids, and you can travel using WASD or fast travel via search. The graphics are really nice so you feel like you are traveling through our universe.