What would Braben do with the rights after retiring? He's thought of an exit and a continuation of the Frontier company. He's tossed it on the capital market. That will allow for a story beyond his own, maybe.
Lower your Expectations for ED
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
Note that the above is from 2014.
Indeed, DBOBE hasn't owned the rights to Elite for nearly a decade, Frontier have.
which has DBOBE as the main investor
If FDev really wants to tap our wallets, then it certainly doesn't seem like they're doing a good job of it. There's a bunch of things they could do to make cosmetics more lucrative, such as actually allowing us to buy them in the first place.
That's what Arx are for. And you'll notice that the one thing Frontier still gets "excited about" when it comes to Elite is announcing a new paint job. But when it comes to investing real effort into development, there's more money for Frontier in the next F1 Manager or Dinosaur game than there is for updates to Elite. Well, at least that's what I've been led to believe over the years.
There will be a time when he won't be main investor anymore.
Is that the one where you log into a forum and talk about the great space-sim you'd make?Hmm, i was re-reading their interim financial report for FY2023 and this got my attention
What that own-IP creative management simulation game would that be?
Planet Coaster 2? Planet Zoo 2?
Or Planet Elite?
Is that the one where you log into a forum and talk about the great space-sim you'd make?
is the one about their only 3 owned IPs (Elite, PC, PZ) which will see a release sometime between June 2024 and May 2025
What success?
It's not even mentioned in their latest Financial report.
Their strongest performers are PZ and JWE2, while F1M22 sold "over 600k copies to date" - which is not exactly bad for 3 months*, but probably less than expected.
*(not clear if its the date the report was published or the end of the first half of FY23, that is November 30th)
Like final pleas and open letters, that is so passé...
and how else do you fund an ongoing Live service game?
Subscriptions?
Hide certain functions behind a paywall? (Heck, would you pay extra to get round the Engineering grind?)
Go full Evil EA Mobile and have everything on a timer that you have to pay to speed up?
I'm quite happy with the ARX system for cosmetics (as long as you remember the exchange rate). The only time fdev has given away something that's behind a pay wall was the cobra Mk IV and look how that turned out (The only company that creates a ship that's Pay to Lose!
)
In theory, dlc like odyssey. Unfortunately, if you make it too buggy and performance weak, nobody will buy it.and how else do you fund an ongoing Live service game?
Subscriptions?
Hide certain functions behind a paywall? (Heck, would you pay extra to get round the Engineering grind?)
Go full Evil EA Mobile and have everything on a timer that you have to pay to speed up?
I'm quite happy with the ARX system for cosmetics (as long as you remember the exchange rate). The only time fdev has given away something that's behind a pay wall was the cobra Mk IV and look how that turned out (The only company that creates a ship that's Pay to Lose!
Look at aoe2. They're still going strong after 25 years, selling new civs and stuff.
You assume I'm not. I'm replying to the fellow who asks for the ability to purchase cosmetics. I have no problem with Arx or cosmetics. Heck, I'd like MORE cosmetics, like ship kits for the INSIDE of ships (a new bridge for the Anaconda, for example, where the wires are not falling out of the ceiling). I'd also like to see more quality paint jobs, like the flame jobs for Cobra, offered for other ships, rather than these kinda lame paint jobs that have flooded the livery in recent years.
That said, I'm standing by my point that if Frontier has to choose to allocate developers to an update for Elite or the new F1 Manager game, the latter is what's going to make them more money. (Now if Ian comes along and proves me wrong, as he annoyingly does with all his facts and figures LOL, then I'll tap the mat on this supposition). If Elite was still Braben's "baby" and true love, he might go ahead and eat the different and focus on Elite. However, I think Braben rather eat nice steak and will choose the money over the baby.
Oh wait, Braben isn't in charge anymore...
Well, Jonny or whoever is in charge probably prefers cash in hand over fan service, so I think my point still holds water.
Same here, currently still waiting for the next big thing. As Elite goes the game has hit The Sims issue where everyone is hanging around waiting to see whats next to be disappointed and then complain a bit then go back to waiting around again. This forum has more lurkers than the entire series of B5 lol
That's an interesting one, since their F1 game has been one of their least successful launches. I have no idea if that's true or not ... digs out spreadsheet ... I think you're right, except maybe for very specific definitions of "ED update".
F1 2022 looks like it cost them ~£24M to develop and got them ~£12M back in early sales plus presumably a bit more since.
They plan to make at least four games in the series, and think "being able to do an F1 game at all" represents 2/3 of the development costs of F1 2022.
That fits with their description of F1 2022 as being "in profit" (just!) if you allocate its share of the framework equally across all four.
So in that case, they might expect to spend £8M on the game-specific bits of F1 2023, and make back another >£12M.
In 2022, they spent about £4M on Elite Dangerous (operations+development of U10 to U14) and got about £6M back, which is essentially the same ratio. So if they could keep that ratio for a larger update - bearing in mind at this point the operational costs don't need paying twice - that could be a little bit better than F1. But I think that'd be quite tricky for them to do with either unpaid (slow) or paid (risky) updates.
However ... it's when the alternative is considered that the decision becomes clear: if they don't develop ED then they probably still get a decent profit over operational costs (though maybe not as much as they could have), at least in the short-term. If they don't develop F1 2023 they have to write off a loss even bigger than Odyssey on the "F1 games framework" development (not to mention any penalty clauses there might be with F1 for not releasing a 2023 game)
So if it's hypothetically one or the other, then definitely they do F1 2023 and keep ED on "slow". No choice there at all!
(Something like a new Planet Zoo expansion almost certainly has a much better expected margin than either, of course)
As per Interim report, they sold over 600k copies* - i would be surprised if they didnt make a profit out if that
*(not entirely sure if until 30 November - so in 3 months - which is end of period covered by the interim report, or till January - the date the report was published)