Lower your Expectations for ED
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
It's long past doom imo. It's lukewarm corpse.
Okay it would be just a little bit funny if frontier announced a new expansion on thursday with planets not visible in supercruise and the odd missions apparently not working.
chuckle
Well, Elite was a passion project for DBOBE.
A game like ED, confined in a space nerdy niche, with a long running life and no subscriptions and no pay-to-win model, is not attractive for any publisher - simply because a publisher wants a GameDev studio to keep churning out games with an ending in sight (50-100h of gameplay) so the publisher can make money selling game after game
So FDev never found a publisher for Elite and they had to use their own money (and the small part that was the kickstarter) to develop and self publish the game.
Which was successful enough to get them enough cash so they could start working out other games
So you cannot say they didnt reinvested in their success since ED success allowed them to release a lot of other games, while still keeping ED running.
But again, they're a business and when ED will not be able to pay for it's running costs, they will have to shutdown the servers.
Ah, but if it's not a lot of effort, then it doesn't even need Elite Dangerous to be sold. This other company which is interested in making Elite-like space MMOs could just build its own, and not be stuck with dealing with any of Frontier's previous missteps. It'd take them a few years to get started but they've had near ten since ED released to decide that's what they want to get into and do a better job of: very few of the criticisms ED gets today are ones it wasn't getting in - say - 2016 as well.
The IP of Elite Dangerous is nice for sentimental value, but the vast majority of players (and even more so potential new players) aren't buying it for the Cobra III, Lave and so on, and when it comes to actual gameplay sticking too closely to it can be a liability at times.
They essentially spent ED's entire surplus for three years on making Odyssey. If they hadn't had any other products that they'd "wasted time on", that would be "they spent the entire company's profits for three years on making Odyssey". Guess what happens when you spend all the company's money for three years on a commercial failure.
Frontier have spent more cash on Elite Dangerous operations and development than on Planet Zoo, Coaster and both JWs combined - for considerably less return (less pure income than Jurassic World 1 alone, in fact - and Planet Zoo and JW2 have both had better income at the same age than ED did). The park simulators are very much propping ED up, not the other way around, and if your advice to Frontier is "reinvest in the successful stuff" then that means "not the dubiously profitable niche space MMO with weaker reviews"
And, as above, if some other company thinks a single-minded focus on space MMOs is the best approach ... they've had plenty of time to come through with their ED-beating game. It's not like Frontier have some broad patent on "space trading and combat games" which stops anyone else trying.
That bit, at least, will likely take a while - it's not massively profitable in the sense of being able to pay for lots of extra development, but on an operations-only basis would need substantial further drops in player numbers to stop being profitable at all.
I had already lowered my expectations to an acceptable level of disappointment, and they missed that level....
I expect that it would not be profitable in any sense for Frontier to follow the disaster of the devopment of Odyssey. That is, perhaps Frontier could return to more accepted norms for releasing an expansion and release the next in a state that gives a chance for a decent return on the effort expended.
In short, if Frontier do the job properly, they'll be properly rewarded.
Subscription model to pay for hosting costs. The universe should have a cover charge to keep out the hoi polloi. 
Also, there are enough Devs in the community that if ED was in danger of being no longer economically viable, it could be open sourced and transition into a genuine community effort.
Also, there are enough Devs in the community that if ED was in danger of being no longer economically viable, it could be open sourced and transition into a genuine community effort.
Did you automate this reply for every new thread or are you still posting that manually?
O7
I'm very much a latecomer to this game, so I never got the opportunity to become all ginned up with Kickstarter promises about the future. My only expectations prior to playing this game were that I would be able to fly a starship, and that I would have fun while doing so. These particular expectations have been met.
As for the future, I'm going to take my cues from past performance. Maybe there'll be another paid DLC along the lines of Odyssey, with FDev taking lessons from the last time. I like Odyssey so personally I'd cough up the dough for another expansion. But I also wouldn't be surprised if they just concentrated on minor updates, while trying to fix stuff around the edges.
As for the future, I'm going to take my cues from past performance. Maybe there'll be another paid DLC along the lines of Odyssey, with FDev taking lessons from the last time. I like Odyssey so personally I'd cough up the dough for another expansion. But I also wouldn't be surprised if they just concentrated on minor updates, while trying to fix stuff around the edges.
That's what they're doing now, I think - smaller packagable updates like U13 and U14 which cost less to produce but have a chance to add more interest and get player numbers (and so income) moving back in the right direction in the long term. And if one of them does happen not to work out, a lot less loss on the investment, too.
As the starting post points out, we're not getting the big-name stuff that way, but it should at least keep things moving.
If ED is running so low on players that it's no longer economically viable, that's unlikely to be improved by changing from "paying the people who maintain the servers" to "hoping a bunch of people unfamiliar with the code can keep them running in their spare time". And if people in the ED community had both the spare time and talent to productively work on an open-source space game, there are at least two out there that they could already be putting that effort into which are not overflowing with developers already.
It's not really generating much of a buzz though. Odyssey created buzz, plenty of it and positive for the most part (until it was actually released of course).
Updates that can't be revealed or discussed, not so much. That may suit Frontier who are obviously trying to keep ED very low profile. Maybe Frontier feel it's not worth trying to take Starfield on, but want to wait until the excitement around that title has died down a little?
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"Until it was actually released" I think is the key point. If they're not making paid updates, there's no need to hype them up massively in advance, because they don't need to collect pre-orders before the reality becomes clear.
There was a substantial increase in player activity levels after U14 which still hasn't quite fully subsided to pre-U14 levels, which is rather better than most of their pre-hyped releases did. If it's actually good, then word-of-mouth will probably do enough to get people back into it. In terms of ED's long-term success, what it does to baseline player numbers is much more important than how big a release-week spike it gets, for which pre-advertising is almost irrelevant.
Using the dreaded Steam charts (which is the only semi-reliable source of player involvement publicly available) suggests that nothing post Odyssey has really had that much effect.
The patient is dangerously close to flatlining
I lowered my expectations right from the start by following that old saw about software development timelines: “Any estimate longer than a month should be increased by a minimum of 50%”. It probably explains why I’m pleasantly surprised by the pace of development, rather than disappointed.
My chief area of disappointment lies in how Frontier has responded to player complaints: by filling in depth of gameplay, leaving behind only grind. Removing existing gameplay, rather than expanding the number of options players have available to them. But after nearly ten years of this, I’ve come to expect this of them. So no problem there.
U14 seen the biggest surge of players post Odyssey, slightly bigger than Carrier Interiors release
Even before they started on Odyssey, ED had been talked about as a game that felt abandoned. Maybe not here, but on general gaming forums, the way I learned about ED was from people complaining it had been going nowhere for years and was an inch-deep ocean of grind covering for no content and a dev team that was shared with their other games. I don't think Frontier ever gave it a chance, they segued from kickstarter success to IPO with a multi-game strategy before ED had even released.
I just don't see it, there's been so little added, and their other games combined have trouble surpassing ED's numbers on steamcharts even in its temporarily embarrassed state. ED also has a lot of players not on Steam and on cons.. uhh, well, not on Steam. It's not exactly niche, it just gets treated that way. So while they're profiting on aggressive DLC on their other games with a smaller audience, they could have here if they actually released DLC. I'm not exactly fond of devs spamming skins and vending machine tier content like dinosaur packs, but that's their model and they didn't even seem to try here. That hazard ship kit is possibly the only substantial thing they've released in years.
It's a bad time for that kind of argument since pretty much every significant space game will be beating Frontier's multi-game strategy. They're running a 1% operating margin and will likely be in the red this year. I'm sure that even No Man's Sky is outperforming them despite being one of the biggest launch flops of all time, because they stuck with it and people really wanted a space game.