General / Off-Topic FD- HALF YEAR REPORT

Tiamat

Tiamat
starman said:
The point is how many sales have been lost by not being on steam. Outside of UK and previous Elite players of yore how many Know Elite and Frontier as a brand and can find the website?
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Selling via Steam meant giving up 30% of their revenue to Valve who do exactly nothing for that free money. Exposure would be nice but is it 30% nice? That is a gamble they chose not to take.

There is also the fact that they have to contend with Steam's TOS which essentially says they can take your games away at any time for any reason and FD would have no real power to prevent that. Steam can change their TOS at any time, insert whatever wacky clause they like and your only choice is to agree or lose your entire game library. I can understand FD not wanting to be bound by a TOS agreement they have no power over and that can change to literally anything without them having any say in it.
 

Titus Balls

Titus Balls
Tiamat said:
Selling via Steam meant giving up 30% of their revenue to Valve who do exactly nothing for that free money. Exposure would be nice but is it 30% nice? That is a gamble they chose not to take.

There is also the fact that they have to contend with Steam's TOS which essentially says they can take your games away at any time for any reason and FD would have no real power to prevent that. Steam can change their TOS at any time, insert whatever wacky clause they like and your only choice is to agree or lose your entire game library. I can understand FD not wanting to be bound by a TOS agreement they have no power over and that can change to literally anything without them having any say in it.
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I wouldn't say they do nothing. By not aligning with Steam, Frontier are excluding themselves from the upcoming SteamVR and SteamMachine market:

http://www.pcgamer.com/valve-to-show-steamvr-hardware-system-at-gdc-next-week/

This is what the 30% gets you access too, and as we know ED is the perfect VR platform. By all accounts Valve have been working at VR for longer than Oculus and are about to become direct competition for gamers. Oculus seems to heavily going down the mobile route.

The worry is we might have a VHS vs Betamax situation coming up with this too - but in this case I think neither side will want to loose.
 
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affel

affel
Gogster said:
No dividend payment 2013, doesn't bode well when attracting investors.
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no connection. lots of companies - especially in the tech sector - do not pay dividends.
investors that look for steady cash flow from dividends pick other companies.
if you invest in frontier you are looking for a growth in company value, not dividends.

edit: or you invest because you are a fan of a game and make your financial choices based on anything but reason :)
 
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DarkWalker

D
Mad Mike said:
That is how steam works................. and a damn good reason for not going onto steam.......... yet............. I would not be surprised to see it there once its initial buy in price has dropped and sales dwindle but for now it makes sense to keep it in house and take all of the profit.
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Depends. Launching late on Steam means players will expect a discounted price, whereas being in Steam for launch would allow them to reach the Steam player base without that expectation. In other words, it's not as clear cut as you paint. Also, Steam provides services small studios can't always afford; I remember Castle Story developers saying that they were moving their alpha to Steam, despite it not being sold yet, simply because paying Valve to distribute the binaries was cheaper than paying for the servers themselves.

Frontier, with fairly good word of mouth publicity for their game prior to release and a distribution structure already in place, was in a good position to avoid Steam if they so desired. Even then, I can't be sure it was the right move; reaching a larger audience at launch, when players don't expect games to be discounted yet, might have been worth letting Steam take that cut.
 

Huita

Huita
starman said:
I buy all my games from steam..

Except ED because I backed it and you cant

The point is how many sales have been lost by not being on steam. Outside of UK and previous Elite players of yore how many Know Elite and Frontier as a brand and can find the website?

If you compare sales of Elite to COD or GTAV then its not really alot. They need to grow new audiences in other countries.

I saw a report that China Japan and south korea are the growth regions

This weekend COD AW was on free access.

The future First person expansion might capture that segment
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I'm not exactly sure we need people here who can't "find the website".
 

QziQza

QziQza
Han Yolo said:
to me it seems like they didn't think of a lot of stuff - before and during development even. So, they actually might have got this one wrong too.

Because we do it OUR way™

...just saying
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you must be seeing something in the report that im missing, please do tell..
 

Googol

Googol
Traceracing said:
Agreed, they did miss a few tricks, I recall in a dev Q&A back in the summer about Oolite... none of them had ever played it.. which is a pity as it has some good concepts which align to Elite lore
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There might be good reason for that: they may have been ordered not to.
-
From a business perspective any suggestion that ED drew upon an Open Source product during its development would be a PR nightmare. Before anyone chips in, I know FD own the rights to Elite and that nebulous things such as "concepts" can't be copyrighted, but I am thinking more of the sort of ill-informed debate in a games forum that starts with "IANAL but ..." and ends with some idiot writing an article for a tabloid that accuses FD of software piracy.
 

OriginalBadBoy

O
Sazon said:
likewise, selling the Cobra technology is not going to yield any benefits for the gamers. .
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How do you work that out? Its an engine for making games! Of course to sell the engine effectively (like Unreal, Cryengine and Unity currently do) they would need to make a lot more user friendly. Its probably not in a state currently where they could do that easily. (Of course I wuold love to be corrected on that one).
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
CaptainKremmen said:
I don't understand what you mean about "attracting investors". Please explain.


ie. Investors in what, specifically?

And a dividend's role in that...
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I think what they meant is that people won't buy FD shares because they would be thrown off by the company not paying dividends.

Ater 8 years of work in the stockbroking business (2nd largest execution only stockbroker in the UK) I am fairly confident that the lack of dividend shouldn't put people off from investing in FD shares... People do not invest for dividends :) Dividend is more of a little extra on a side.
 

embryo

embryo
Xzanron said:
Just some thoughts:

300,000 units of ED sold. 2/3 of those were pre-orders.

c.160,000 units at £8.4m is an average unit price of £52.50

Be interesting to see the year end units, if they provide them.
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The average unit price will be affected by many things, for example I cheaped out and got the Early £20 copy from the original Kickstarter campaign, I think there were quite a few of those available and levels that were around £30 were available too.
 

deusx_ophc

deusx_ophc
affel said:
no connection. lots of companies - especially in the tech sector - do not pay dividends.
investors that look for steady cash flow from dividends pick other companies.
if you invest in frontier you are looking for a growth in company value, not dividends.

edit: or you invest because you are a fan of a game and make your financial choices based on anything but reason :)
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or you invest because despite being a fan you have the financial nous to see FDEV being an attractive proposition at a certain price ^^


so any idea who cancelled their publishing project with FDEV for a cool GBP 0,4m?

also it would be great to get a breakdown of digital content sales, i.e. game vs ship skins (and hopefully more to come)

other than that as expected, fast forward to year end pls ^^
 

Polared

Polared
OriginalBadBoy said:
How do you work that out? Its an engine for making games! Of course to sell the engine effectively (like Unreal, Cryengine and Unity currently do) they would need to make a lot more user friendly. Its probably not in a state currently where they could do that easily. (Of course I wuold love to be corrected on that one).
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they'd also have to provide reliable support! oops! : )
 

bambam_ofc

bambam_ofc
Assuming our main interest is in the successful development of the ED franchise...

FD's 2014 revenue (to their year end May 30th 2014) was GBP 9.5 Million.

In that financial statement (for 1H 2015, i.e. Jun-Nov 2014) they predict 2015 revenue (i.e. year ending May 30th 2015) of GBP 19 Million (i.e. double).

FD has about GBP 10 Million in cash, and the stock market value of the company is about GBP 80 Million. (33.5 million shares at about GBP 2.50)

In 2012 & 2013 (i.e. May to May) FD made around GBP 1 Million in operating profit. In 2014 (May - May) they lost about GBP 2 Million.

(! WILD GUESS COMING !) their 2015 operating profit will be about GBP 2.5 million.*

In a nutshell FD have plenty of CASH in the bank for an operation their size so they shouldn't be vulnerable to unexpected upsets, REVENUE DOUBLING is normally good news for any company, they've eaten a load of SETUP COSTS IN 2014, and their self-publishing model should give a better profit margin than before. GBP 2.5 Million in profit isn't enough to sustain a GBP 80 million company value, but hey, that doesn't affect players of the game.

(* GBP 2.5 Million is the CMDR Bambam forecast of profit before tax for FDEV.L for their financial year ending May 30th 2015 - until the arrival of some 'real' published analyst forecasts this should be considered the official version, and I still bet mine is more accurate...)
 

Pibbles

P
Marcns007 said:
Just looking at share price and this was released today.

http://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/news/market-news/market-news-detail/12258941.html
good or bad?
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Neither. It is what was expected due to recent interim news FD released to stabilise, and sales figs that were readily available already.

No dividend will put some people off (ie I strategically buy and hold high yields only) but there is no profit to dividend from. So anyone bothering with this share is purely speculating anyway.

One thing that is amusing is FD declaring releases 1.1 and 1.2 as 'free expansions' rather than bug fixes and updates to bring in features that were always promised. That's rather disingenuous, and the comments re ground breaking network model, well..

The share price will probably drop a bit as any speculators leave on the back of predictable but mediocre results, but nothing to make it tumble.
 
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[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
Googol said:
There might be good reason for that: they may have been ordered not to.
-
From a business perspective any suggestion that ED drew upon an Open Source product during its development would be a PR nightmare. Before anyone chips in, I know FD own the rights to Elite and that nebulous things such as "concepts" can't be copyrighted, but I am thinking more of the sort of ill-informed debate in a games forum that starts with "IANAL but ..." and ends with some idiot writing an article for a tabloid that accuses FD of software piracy.
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That would be comedy gold if Frontier, when creating a new elite game which was going back to the core roots of the original game were accused of "stealing" ideas from oolite, a game which is almost a direct clone of the older elite games!.
 
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