I guess I would be one of those whaling the interiors, if their price seems reasonable to me.Hehe
I can't think of any other 'low budget approach' to make interiors a possibility. Of course, I'd love to see them for all ships with full game play integrated but unless a random billionaire jumps in and funds that project (similar to Bezos with 'The Expanse') without expecting ROI, I don't see another way forward.
EDIT: missing bracket
ship interiors - will they happen
- Thread starter Woakes
- Start date
'reasonable' could mean a big range for a DLC
For myself I would spend up to 60€ for such an expansion (all the meaningful stuff included) but I am aware that this would be way over the price which most players would pay, I guess.
Let's do some guesswork how much a DLC needs to cost: I guess a sensible price for an 'Interiors DLC' would be around 30-35€. Let's multiply that with 5-8k early buyers, then you get the potential revenue as a basis to finance the project. The margin is probably a good 25% lower (optimistically). I do not know enough about the inner workings and cost structures for a dev studio in UK and can't say how many dev days, asset designers you can afford with that money... And that's why I arrived with the idea of developing the interiors only for a handful of the new ships plus game play because the game play needs to be the focus or it won't attract any further players than the first adopters.
I leave that up for discussion
35 euro times 8000 purchases at 25% overheads is about £250,000 in UK spending, which would probably pay for a team of four for one year (including equipment costs, non-cash compensation, etc). On the scale of ED's income and expenditure it's not quite a rounding error, but it's still pretty small (about equivalent to two week's ED income over the last year, so probably not that far off two week's expenditure either)
Odyssey - which was a massive failure financially, of course - raised about £7 million on the strength of pre-orders and early sales, looking at Frontier's investor presentations. They then wrote off a further £7 million loss on it a year later, so it must have cost at least £14 million and maybe a bit more to develop. (And these are in 2021 £s, so add a bit more on again for inflation to get 2025-equivalent costs)
So a DLC of Odyssey scale, sold at something like Odyssey's original £35 price, would need something like 400,000 sales to break even (and it got maybe half that in its first year, almost all in the first month). To get it to work with a mere 8,000 sales those 8,000 would then need to spend about £1,750 each on ARX extras for it.
Obviously there's room to decide that ship interiors would be a smaller expansion than Odyssey and so only cost e.g. half as much to develop, put the basic price up a bit to allow for inflation, guess sales numbers larger than 8,000 but smaller than 400,000 that require vaguely plausible ARX spends, etc. I'm sure those who want to hope can find a set of numbers which they can believe.
thanks for adding some numbers.
I consider myself being an optimist, albeit knowing that a massive Interiors DLC which contains a lot of gameplay (boarding in 0g) and assets isn't realistic.
What gives me hope is that a lot of the game engine mechanics (on foot) and (partially) the assets (bridges) do exist. The main work is the game play loops (and we need at least 3 or 4 like ship repairs, with or without EVA, shenanigans with cargo (e.g. loading/unloading, passengers), research lab, looting a stranded ship, meaningful use of our cabin, airlock to planetside) which are not immensely difficult but are time consuming to create a smooth experience.
As much as ED's revenue was used to cross-fund other FDev projects, it is about time to funnel money back from PlanCo and Jurassic Park to ED!
SHIP INTERIORS: Are we asking the wrong question?
The environment (aka interiors) for testing what ppl think about interiors already exist. Simply finish the bridge (aka cockpit) by adding the ability to get up out of the chair and do stuff that is available in that space. Its already modeled. Interact with the crew you hire that you call to the bridge. Disembark, jump in an SLF or SRV are available through the door or airlock that all ships have. There is game play opportunities there; the eyes simply need to open up wide.
I've always been intrigued by people who dislike ship interiors, when the truth is the possibilities are practically endless. Starfield has been very successful in taking the first step in motivating the community to create modifications for its own game. Perhaps Frontier doesn't need to leave everything in the hands of the players in the same way, but one economic strategy that can generate significant profits for players and money is to leave some aspects of the game in the hands of its own community. For example, the creation of player-run economies, factions, and guilds are some of the discoveries that MMORPGs have made over the years that seek to prolong their longevity.
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Watch the Buur video linked above. Buur certainly isn't against, or wouldn't welcome them, but makes some good points about if they might happen.
It is a very sensible video dealing with the topic.
Following his suggestion (but also what I and others said a few times above), we should go away from saying "Interiors" and ask for 'Interiors with meaningful gameplay".
That's what I'm doing now xD
Team of 2 maybe 3 if you go junior. It's usually fair to double the employees wage and consider that the total cost to the company per year when you consider taxes, administration and all the equipment, licenses, insurance and other boring things that go on top of the developer taking home 50k/yr. 50k isn't un unreasonable wage for a mid range software engineer. Even at a graduate wage you'd have used most of the 250k on 3 juniors if they got what google is calling an average graduate wage of around 38k and then you'd lose senior dev time training them up.
One thing Burr makes clear is most ships were not designed with consideration for interiors. Placement of SRV bay, cockpits with no room to move in them, scaling issues with doors and stairs, or in the case of the Corvette, a complete lack of entry point or an unreachable one in the case of the Asp.
Many (most? all?) ships would need to be reworked to accommodate interiors.
Many (most? all?) ships would need to be reworked to accommodate interiors.
Problem is, in some ships, there isn't the space to move.
I don't think ship interiors will make it in game as not a money or long term engagement spinner.... It's still a shame after all that only the Anaconda shows physical wear and tear on the ship exterior. If that modelling principle doesn't extend to other ships (presumably on basis of time and cost to develop) I don't think the even bigger task of ship interiors will make the light of day.
In the sense that in most organisations the direct salary bill is roughly half of total expenditure, yes, doubling isn't unreasonable. I was using a slightly different calculation since a lot of the rest of that expenditure is things like building maintenance or marketing placements or the AWS bill which don't really vary much by the number of employees - eventually you need a bigger building, sure, or you're doing so much at once you need to advertise more things simultaneously, but plus or minus three or four employees isn't going to touch them at Frontier's scale.
Estimates for the direct additional costs of employing extra people tend to be more in the 30-40% range (depending on how generous the non-salary compensation is), so £250k would get you about £180-190k of salary costs which should certainly get you three people and probably get to four if they're not all software engineers - for something like ship interiors but probably also true of a lot of other possible features you'd certainly need at least one game artist and you'd also need shares of the time of a bunch of other specialisms - most of which, despite their importance, tend to be paid less than developers overall, though I haven't looked what Frontier's salary scales are like.
Admittedly even then we're both still assuming that Frontier are willing to operate Elite Dangerous on a non-profit basis where merely covering the costs of development is the goal - if "and it actually brings in a comparable amount of revenue to putting those devs/artists/etc on another Planet Zoo pack instead" is required then the income expectation needs to significantly exceed expenditure, and you probably end up closer to just 1 FTE of staff time for the project split between various people for a projected £250k income.
While any recognition about the topic is most certainly welcome, Buurs video is (unsurprisingly) rather lackluster.
For once, he hasn't mentioned Ship Repair in his video once. But ok, let's begrudgingly forgive that,
yet then he is actually nitpicking on stuff like "you'd have to jUmP to access the ramp!" XD ... {Honestly makes me doubt his stance but let's still give him the benefit of the doubt.}
So to answer Buurs questions:
Ship Interiors Why? => Because they were clearly promised. Because they are desired AF. And because they would be a Gold-Mine.
Ship Interiors How? => Exactly as he sniffed out too. Via a loading-screen hidden as the elevevator-scene and not as "full" but partial Ship Interiors.
Ship Interiors When? => THAT! IS THE RIGHT QUESTION!
Furthermore, his imagination was also seemingly not sufficient for the idea of a ramp being neither 100% neccessary nor conditional.
We CAN have Corvette-Interiors even without such XD Why would a dedicated Warship need such? Just slap a retractable ladder close to the door.
And he honestly thought that old Ships would likely not get Ship Interiors because that would be economically unviable XD²
Man, guess he has obviously never played Warframe beacuse his entire prespective on what would and would not be economically viable is wrong the moment he
(and that goes for a lot of ppl) assumes that Interior-Decoration ALONE wouldn't already be a Gold-Mine XD Repeated e.g. Warframe
& To drive the nail in the coffin: If what one wants is economical viability one can do the logical thing and REUSE INTERIORS wherever viable XD
But no mention about that possibility either.
To provide a proper contrast;
ObsidianAnts most recent take on the topic is 10x better:
While of course not without its flaws either, this is an actually fair PoV, which I would wholeheartedly recommend ppl to watch.
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Nah, I blocked that one on youtube ages ago.
Anyone claiming to know what players want is a big fail on my part, streamers and fanatics both just seek attention.
Ah yes, blocking the clearest, biggest and most honest voice of the community,
and yet it is you that claims for others to wear "blinders".
"You should go hunting elsewhere, you won't catch anything here."
- CMDR T. Riker
I'm jumping up and down on top of a bridge, catching plenty, I think.