This is my main hope. FDEV! PLEASE! GIVE US 10 MORE YEARS!!
Lower your Expectations for ED
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
And people wonder why they sell franchise games. From all accounts that game was ordinary and I seem to remember some kerfuffle about them shutting it down recently. Even crap franchise titles make a mint.
Oh here's some fun articles.
Frontier share price plummets following F1 Manager 2022 flop
Planet Coaster developer Frontier has seen its share price drop by 40 percent after the studio admitted its recent rele…
www.eurogamer.net
F1 Manager 22's underwhelming sales force Frontier to reset FY2023 goals
After a record revenue year for 2022's fiscal year, Frontier Developments now finds itself having to readjust its expectations for the fiscal year of 2023.
Frontier lowers financial expectations after F1 Manager underperformance
Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox
www.gamesindustry.biz
Frontier is ending F1 Manager 2022 support after just two months | VGC
The next update will be the game’s last significant one…
www.videogameschronicle.com
Wow, if Ody had that kind of press the Doomers would be crawling all over it!
And people wonder why they sell franchise games. From all accounts that game was ordinary and I seem to remember some kerfuffle about them shutting it down recently. Even crap franchise titles make a mint.
Oh here's some fun articles.
Frontier share price plummets following F1 Manager 2022 flop
Planet Coaster developer Frontier has seen its share price drop by 40 percent after the studio admitted its recent rele…
F1 Manager 22's underwhelming sales force Frontier to reset FY2023 goals
After a record revenue year for 2022's fiscal year, Frontier Developments now finds itself having to readjust its expectations for the fiscal year of 2023.www.gamedeveloper.com
Frontier lowers financial expectations after F1 Manager underperformance
Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox
Frontier is ending F1 Manager 2022 support after just two months | VGC
The next update will be the game’s last significant one…
Wow, if Ody had that kind of press the Doomers would be crawling all over it!
Well to the topic, the long standing problem is frontier want to deliver far lower than any players expectations and still be a success.
From enjoying elite, you constantly begrudge them, but certainly when they went mainstream, into an environment with both competiton and standards, how could they not expect to get marked to exactly what they produce?
It was their mistake to believe the white knights. I'm sure there's countless examples of this throughout human history.. add another one to it.
So, I haven't read the whole thread, so this might have already been suggested.
Regardless, I know this is NOT a popular idea.
How about they go to a regular subscription-based MMO model similar to World of Warcraft? Generate regular revenue to pay for operation costs and then release expansions with prices that pay for the new content.
Regardless, I know this is NOT a popular idea.
How about they go to a regular subscription-based MMO model similar to World of Warcraft? Generate regular revenue to pay for operation costs and then release expansions with prices that pay for the new content.
Why lower your expectations with ED when you can....
Ironic since ED is also a medical term for... you knowWhy lower your expectations with ED when you can....
Weird enough, when people buy games from steam, they check the steam reviews, and F1M22 got 73% all reviews and 80% recent
While Odyssey got like 56% Recent and 37% All time.
Guess which one sold more copies?
Edit:
I'm not saying F1M22 was good or not.
I'm not interested in the genre at all and my interest in racing/car games is far from what it was when i was playing NFS games back then 20+ years ago.
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As the report says, in the red if you consider the franchise as a whole, in the black for F1 2022 on the reasonable assumption that the other three games are happening and will do at least similarly for sales. It was a Planet Coaster / Elite Dangerous level of early sales, rather than a Jurassic / Zoo one, but certainly successful enough.
They already get enough regular revenue from new game sales and ARX to cover operations - Elite made £6M in 2022, and operations + development cost £4M total. Covering operations is really not the problem: the game should be able to continue in this sort of "incremental updates" state for years to come, and maintain operations alone even if half the remaining players also vanished (which seems unlikely for now - there appears to be a fairly persistent "floor" that even the worst of the post-Odyssey slump didn't break through). No need for a subscription, and they probably wouldn't reliably get enough from the semi-active (which includes "plays for a couple of hours a month") players making up a substantial proportion of the player base if they did it that way.
As far as releasing expansions with prices which pay for their development, that's probably the tricky bit. Odyssey was too expensive to develop for the number of people interested in it ... but doubling the price to get it back into profit would of course have lost a lot of sales. And not being able to release to consoles cuts the market down too.
I think your analysis of potential Odyssey sales may be flawed. You seem to be suggesting that potential purchasers weren’t put off by the initial launch version and didn’t disappear never to return. I think it’s quite a big assumption that everyone who might have originally done so has now bought Odyssey, presumably on hearing it had been ’fixed’.
I’d consider that quite unlikely as Frontier put in a massive marketing campaign leading up to the release of Odyssey, but there has been no similar effort since it’s been ’fixed’. In fact there’s been ongoing bad news surrounding Odyssey, a year’s worth of fixes and the abandonment of plans to port it to consoles.
Considering Frontier did pretty much nothing right for the initial launch of Odyssey, squandering the considerable interest it had generated, I don’t really think you can use the figures generated since May 2021 unless you expect Frontier to make the same string of mistakes on the next expansion. On reflection, that’s impossible because there can’t be the wasted effort and time spent on a potential console port.
Odyssey is a worst case scenario that surely Frontier are unlikely to repeat.
TL;DR
Sorry, is this a doom thread, please?
Sorry, is this a doom thread, please?
I'd agree with all of that - though, of course, while they won't be wasting future effort on a console port it turns out can't work, they also can't include potential console sales in profitability projections, so until the account transfer process has had time to "mature" that's going to be affecting their planning a bit.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Yeah, that’s the tricky bit innit. I still think new specific DLC can command its own increased demand independent of the EDO situation. Things like i.e. player bases, new atmospheres, gas giants, EVA etc. These can single-handedly sell the value for money principle. Never mind ship interiors… the key for any of those, as discussed above, is quality. These could even be structured much like PZ or JWE DLC packs etc
The player base has proven much more resilient to the EDO debacle than many forecasted and I suspect the market demand will be there assuming decent quality, performance etc.
Any of these potential DLC will still have to compete with the rest of FDEV portfolio for resources and finance based on potential costs / returns, so not a given either way.
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Just look at how little is discussed; the threads often go uncommented and how few active people there are in the forums... The forums are DOOMED!
With quite a few sci-fi titles on the horizon (especially Starfield), the demand for good space games will probably rise to new highs in the forseeable future. ED could very much profit from this, as it still has vast amounts of untapped potential.
Denser atmospheres, feature reworks, engineering rebalances, new landable planets, player owned settlements... there is still a lot that could be added.
I am sure a lot of old and new players would be keen on that as well.
Denser atmospheres, feature reworks, engineering rebalances, new landable planets, player owned settlements... there is still a lot that could be added.
I am sure a lot of old and new players would be keen on that as well.
The Formula1 racing game wasnt very well received. And I doubt it helped that Frontier stopped working on it just a couple months later. That is actually worse than Odyssey, players still get updates. F1 players dont.
So why would they make another F1? They have a licence they paid money for and hopefully the general gaming audience forgot about the shameful display of the 1st game. Is what I suspect. There is a sucker every day buying anything on offer.
So why would they make another F1? They have a licence they paid money for and hopefully the general gaming audience forgot about the shameful display of the 1st game. Is what I suspect. There is a sucker every day buying anything on offer.
What updates do you want to a seasonal (yearly) game?
F1 '22 season is over, F1 '23 season is running
Because that's the deal with the F1 IP owners - they're supposed to release an F1 Manager game every year, one for each F1 season.
They got a multi year license and they have to make it happen
Like FIFA games
These things could happen, but they won't, because they never do. Frontier essentially doubled down on their approach to engineering with Odyssey. Player owned settlements sound interesting, but what would they do? And why the hell would I want some static settlement when I have a massive mobile space base full of ships? Just exist? Because settlement management imported from Fallout 4 will be present in Starfield?
Yeah, a lot of us are already kinda ticked off that Frontier have stopped developing the spaceship aspects of this spaceship game. This game has been out for a decade, and during all those years, nobody improved PP, nobody improved CQC, nobody made engineering less garbage, and nobody managed to even overhaul the interface in such a way that it isn't absolute trash. Frontier has a lot of ground to make up with "old players", and if the last 10 years has proven anything, it's that they really do not care.
It's not even a racing game. It is a race management game - you don't actually race yourself, as I understand it. I wonder if the allegedly poor reception or the "game's upderperformance", as Wikipedia puts it, was mostly formed by false expectations.
No, it was just an abysmal management game. For example, you can't even make your own team. People feel like Frontier was completely out of touch with what the *Manager audience wanted.