I don't quite agree with you.
Player retention is important for ED, at least in the long run.
The revenue is coming from game sales and the cash shop.
People who don't play don't purchase merchandise, expansions, skins, etc.
It's not much of an issue right now, ED is still selling, and the XB1 version not even released yet.
But eventually, revenue from sales will diminish and the shop and expansions will have to carry ED.
We have no numbers. My impression is, the game is doing well enough, and i don't see an exodus.
But that's no guarantee that it's gonna stay that way, FD will be very keen to KEEP people playing the game.
ED also has the advantage of being the first of a number of new space based games to be released.
There WILL be competition, worth keeping in mind too.
There are 2 business models usually for such products: either you go free to play, or you have people pay for the game.
In the first case, revenue are coming from expansions and "sink" items; which are the ones that allow you to speed up your progression with a character. With this approach, companies spend time for the game, which is usually toned down to frustrate you to the point of forcing you to buy something to progress faster (unless you are occasional, which is a loss for them but they count that in too); and they want to keep you hooked up as long as they can.
With the second model, once you pay, you are done...if you play you are using their server, their electricity, their network, and this has a cost, which is paid by your upfront payment when you buy the game. They may get money from the store transactions, but 80% of the revenue is already there, so if you leave, they may not even notice; and the fact that you are not on the server anymore, is a reason less for it to break, slow down and such.
On the pay upfront case, most online games either tell you to pay for the game (ED, Elder scrolls online) and give free play time, or they make you pay the game and the subscription every month. With the F2P, you may pay a subscription if you like, to get some benefits.
Now, ED was paid basically twice: the first time we backers did support the game, the dream, blablabla; so the game was in fact completed, and people paid; on top of that, someone even made few bucks on top of it, to get a nice suit or a vacation. Then at release, the second wave of income arrived; where you have new players, and where sponsors start to chime in, because they see a real product with box and everything on a shelf, so it is something that they can exploit, and so the game company make allegiance and commercial partnership with other companies, which either bring more green, or reduce the green that they have to pay for something.
Player retention != new customers....that's where the money are coming in...that's why they go around showing the game; so more people will get sucked in this 400B universe; only to discover that there is nothing to do in it, and that the trailers are the biggest bunch of unicorns ever seen. Did you ask yourself why some games offer a demo and some doesn't? The first red light should go on right there.
As is, a player that shed 400 dollars, 200 or 59, has already given; nobody will miss him/her. If the plan is to generate problems, you may want to find someone that has absolutely nothing to do the whole day, that fire up the game and stay on 24/7. If everyone start to do that; the hardware has a defined life span, and the more the hardware crank numbers, the more energy it requires (physics says so...the more core you use, the higher they go with frequency, the higher the load and the more energy you need). In that case you are letting them at least pay for what you paid for, which is your right to play a game as long as you want.
This will also reduce the lifespan of the computer that run the game; but hey...it is your money, you do whatever you want with them.
BTW among all the space sim that are coming out now; it will be hard to do worst than ED. NMS seems to be the best of the bunch; considering that ED looks great but is empty, and that SC is a bit more than an idea for now; 3 maps, few game modes, which involve only dogfighting, and a FPS mode which has been in the works forever...with this competitors, NMS seems to be the one wiht the best chances to gain popularity.
Competition is good; too bad that it is hard to care about competition when you already had what you want. If ED had to make profit with the store; pretty much they will close by next year, but server are cheap nowadays, so even if 1% of the player base buy something at least once, they have got the expenses covered.
We have no numbers for the sale, but we have the backers numbers, so we know how many backers are (roughly). IF the game is still up, it is still profitable; there are investors that put money in this game, once KS was done, so in a way or another, the game goes on, because you can sell digital copies on steam and have to do nothing to get revenues...go ask people that put crappy products on the Apple store or Google store. Eventually the word goes around and people ditch the game, but in the meantime the guy simply made money doing nothing, keeping the game available for download. We don't need numbers in the end...if the game is still up, it means that they are not loosing money.
Test Drive unlimited 2 server is still up, people still buy the game for 4 bucks on steam....matrix online is not on steam and does not make moneyjust to give you something in context.
