Popularity of Elite one month after release

Wow, that's a lot of mum's and aunties. ;)

Here is something all of you might find interesting--- this is a screenshot of the age distribution of viewers for one of the Facebook pages I manage. As you can see, with the women the age distribution is spread across all age groups between 18 and 54 fairly evenly while for the men it is weighted towards the younger men between 18 and 34...

Facebook Age Distribution.jpg
 
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Numbers are nothing without context and sentiment. Now how do your "Likes" stack up against how people feel...

https://m.facebook.com/EliteDangerousOfficial/posts/10155193977010564

Apparently quite well for many people---


https://www.facebook.com/EliteDangerousOfficial/posts/10155193977010564

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=112729

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=112826

Once again Devils Refugee, I have to ask you why you post so much to these forums when you have such a bad view of the game? If you dislike it sooooo much, just walk away...it's not like someone is holding a gun to your head saying 'play this game or else'
 
Personally, I'll not underestimate the impact of social media in the promotion of practically everything that is being sold these days. I suppose that if you had stats on the user base of the games I listed, you'd find a rough correlation between the number of page 'likes' on Facebook and the number of game buyers--- at a ratio of perhaps 3 to 5 users per 'like.' It is astounding what big data is able to figure out these days on the basis of things like facebook comments and twitter posts

Oh you suppose. That's good enough for me ;). Again, I repeat, how scientific...
 
Of all the things that ED must do, two of the most vital are to attract attention for itself in the gaming world, and more importantly, it must attract and keep users. As as rough metric for how well Elite Dangerous is doing on these fronts, I took a quick look at the stats on ED's Facebook page--- It currently has right around 101,500 'likes.' In comparison, Star Trek Online, a Sci-fi space game whose legacy practically everyone on the planet will recognize, has been around for years and has about 268,000 'likes.' The Facebook page for Star Citizen has attracted around 76,200 likes and Eve Online, another Sc-fi space game that has been around for quite some time has attracted around 251,000 'likes.' Judging by these metrics, I'd say that Elite probably isn't doing to shabby one month after release....
A system is only ever as good as the data fed into it... I'm afraid using Facebook likes as a measure of success of a product is not going to give you the answers you seek... Neither will Fdev... they will keep those values very close to their chest.... My personal view is that Fdev might right about this time start to be concerned over the future of ED.
 
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The Facebook page for Star Citizen has attracted around 76,200 likes and Eve Online, another Sc-fi space game that has been around for quite some time has attracted around 251,000 'likes.'
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Considering the clueless that use Facebook, I think Hilight has very informative numbers here- the more 'likes' the worse the game. Portends well for SC (acknowledgement: I am a Chris Roberts fanboy...). Personally, I like ED very much, and that is all that really matters to me, the only downside is that it was released in Alpha and marketed as 400 billion systems when 99.994% (my analysis based on a 150 ly radius real universe) is procedurally generated emptiness. But that is the nature of commercial gaming today that Roberts has been able to overcome with his purely user-funded concept. As a result, he should be able to publish a mature game while we all fun in the Alpha, instead of filling the forums with whining...

What I find interesting in this thread is the real analysis put forward by Aticus. Reading the article, http://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/rns/150109fdev7096b , I am amazed that Frontier considered putting it out at 10 pounds. I think that would have been a real dis of Braben and spacesims in general. I am glad they set their sites higher. I just hope that SC 1.0 will be a complete game, and not have to look forward to paying for updates and content as in Frontier's business plan. I doubt I will be buying any of those.
 

Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
Statistics can be bent anyway you want to bend them, lies damn lies and all that. Frontier are the only people who know how many people are actively playing and they aren't saying anything at the moment. Once thing for certain is that most people playing probably never look at the facebook page or indeed the forums.
 
You have to consider that people don't use Facebook as much as people used to when EVE created their page.

The Facebook user base has grown considerably since EVE was released...


the more 'likes' the worse the game. .

Don't fool yourself

Interestingly Frontier financials says http://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/rns/150109fdev7096b Stated they have over 300,000, so that a 3 to 1 ratio of likes to sale.

As knowles2 pointed out, these numbers bear out the what I said in my first post...
 
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Apparently, the naysayers and haters are getting more and more desperate now, because the game has gained excellent review scores and has sold already over 300k copies.
Deal with it that you are a fringe bitter minority, the majority of players loves ED!
 
Good afternoon Pop-pickers, I'm a <famous Radio 1 DJ from the 80's> and here's the latest chart run-down...

Be du du duh be du du duuh du du < bit of intro music for you.

Straight in at number #5 is Kylie Mingoue with "Spam-me-up!"
Down two places this week at number #4 is Shipman's Crab Paste.
New at number 3 is the concept of Facebook!
A non-mover at number #2... it's Elite Dangerous and the Brabens with "Be content with the content!"
And for the 9th year in a row it's "All about Eve" with "A playa owned my sTaTIoN".

<Cut to stage>
 
What is the likelihood that Frontier would risk promotional damage by buying likes?

Yes people do provide these services but it mostly small businesses that use them.

But when those services give those likes, in order for the fake accounts to not show up in Facebook's heuristics, they spread their likes about to other unrelated pages. Last I looked, the correlation between facebook likes and actual engagement wasn't good.

Might be why researchers go with posts rather than likes when doing analysis on Facebook data.

I'm suprised at how narrow minded many of the other posters are regarding the subject of meta-data collection from social media sites. One of my friends is a Grad student, doing research on such practices with twitter... (though in all honesty I think half the time he's paid he gets to roam around the internet doing nothing of merit (that's why I'm not mentioning the specific university though...)) The manner in which the OP made his observation was more than fair. Elite: Dangerous has made a good first impression and considering how many "likes" it's gotten is such a short time span it's very impressive... Though it would help to chart the rate in which these likes occurred after the release date, but that's not possible. When has soft-science ever seemed as "scientific" as physics or engineering (which have much narrower scopes typically)?

Twitter posts (actual posts, not mere retweets) are far more reliable as data than Facebook likes.

It's not that I don't think data collection from social media is useless. It's just that Facebook likes are one of the less reliable data you could ever collect. Too easy to fake out, too many people that will like anything without giving any consideration, many other ways in which they might not correspond to reality. As a rule of thumb, whenever having a high number of likes could have a financial benefit (as is the case in any page that promotes products) I completely disregard them and look for other indications of relevance.

Apparently, the naysayers and haters are getting more and more desperate now, because the game has gained excellent review scores and has sold already over 300k copies.
Deal with it that you are a fringe bitter minority, the majority of players loves ED!

On Metacritic, 80 Metascore and 7.3 Userscore. In other words, nothing to write home about; it's got a lower metascore than the extremely bugged Wasteland 2 and a merely average (yellow range) userscore.
 
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