I have to say that Frontier is probably missing out on a large chunk of cash.
I myself and a few friends of mine, all Elite fans back from the ZX Spectrum days, would each gladly fork over 200 pounds if it gave us at least some perks. Any perk, for that matter. It's purely a psychological thing: we need a justification for spending that much money on something that just went into the alpha testing stage.
The way it looks now, people have a possibility to participate in an alpha-test that would only last a month, and for that they have to lay out almost 250 euros. Basically these people pay developers to be able to help those very same developers. I have to say I find the concept slightly appalling. E.g., Star Citizen, even though it's already funded to the brim, still hands out perks.
I bought premium beta purely out of respect for the old Elite days, but I have to say I'm slightly put off by the current donation policy.
You pose an interesting question. It's true that Star Citizen has adopted a truly revolutionary approach to game funding and their marketing team is elite and dangerous.
They are funding the game by selling more than 250,000 Alpha slots with the cheapest one about $40, but do not be fooled, at that price the perks only amount to a free starter ship and an Alpha to release spot.
SC has opted for a very long and very large Alpha to retail model that is revolutionary and unique. Aside from the perk of getting your hands on development stage modular builds of the game, their are two types of perks in SC.
One is "free" and credits your account with small gifts for each month that you have been a backer until the pledge closes. Examples are one month you get a side arm for your avatar, next month a free engine upgrade etc.
The other perk, and the one that is bringing in millions and millions of $ in funding is the selling of all the ships in the game before you have even started to play. This is a very interesting perk. It is very tempting to be able to jump to end game content by simply buying up all the "Epic" gear in the game before it is even released with real world money rather than playing the game to earn in game money to buy the same.
Think of WOW offering nearly all end game epic dungeon gear to be bought before the game launches. This is a very interesting decision by the SC devs and should have a big impact on reducing RMT gold sellers in SC. RMT is a huge business in most MMOs and drains a lot of cash away fro the game producer's wallet. The SC approach should see a lot of that RMT cash go to them rather than the gold sellers.
One part of me would love to play with end game ships before I even start the game, in SC, such end game ships are offered for sale to Alpha members as "perks" at prices of $275 to $15,000 (currently the $15,000 ship packs have all sold out, but the next highest tear, the $10,000 packages are still available).
I have elected to resist the temptation to buy an end game ship for now. I am not sure if the ability to buy an end game ship pre retail for cash will give too much of a PVP advantage to those who buy them as part of SC's funding mechanism, it's way too early to tell. On the one hand SC has a single person game so my $45 spent so far will cover that part. If I do not pre purchase an end game ship pre retail and I find that my $45 "budget" Aurora keeps on getting one shot'ed by goons camping the game with fleets of corvettes and elite fighters then I will be disappoint and the goons will happily lap up my tears.
ED has adopted a totally different funding and development path, and while I do not doubt that ED could also sell end game ED ships for a lot of money, I am not sure if this would be a good thing or a bad thing for the game.
