Good news for ED from FD stock trade report as usual

[Arithon]

It looks like my original assumption that the Horizons delay was to defer income to the next financial year was about right.

Healthy revenue stream going forward, keeping income level over the year. Sound business sense.

Good news for Frontier and for us.

Not saying "I told you so" to the doom-sayers who predicted massive failure and server off-switch by now, but looks like you were using the Mayan Calendar.

 

[InlineSix]

@Arithon: There's doom-sayers and there's people warning about a direction in game that leads to a huge number of players.

It _is_ a pain to see that so many long time players have left.
It _is_ a pain to see what a huge dropout rate due to a lack of training and a surplus of pimpled idiots in large ships shooting at sidewinders the game has.
It _is_ a pain to bother about bugs and instabilities for months.

Elite:NotSoDangerous could be way bigger without this. There's a lot of bad reps of people being mislead by advertising, not realising what this game is all about and people just being frustrated for being ganked a dozen times in their first hour of game play. This is degrading the potential gamer base as I hear from other people on a regular basis: "Elite? It's boring, how come you play that?" just by their impressions on game forums and sites.

So: MUCH to improve. NOTHING to feel safe upon.

There won't be a major fail in the short term, but the game is far from what FDev writes about its brilliant reputation...

 

[SpitTheDog]

If the sky is falling in then I want FD to sort their act out and fix the Vive issues so I can see it fall in full VR glory!!!

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

I am sure Frontier dont want their accounts info flashed all over their forum.

It's public information (Ltd company) - not a lot FD can do to prevent it from being splashed about the place.

Sure, mods could close threads but what purpose would that serve ?

Let people speculate ... if the facts match the rumours then even better !

 

[Boomer Kay]

This is degrading the potential gamer base as I hear from other people on a regular basis: "Elite? It's boring, how come you play that?" just by their impressions on game forums and sites.

Well.. the reply is obvious:
"I learned about gravitational lenses and how black holes are supposed to look like on the forums. Not your cup of tea? Yea, Einstein isn't for everyone .. just fer teh Elite."

 

[Privata]

Doomsayers wrong again...

 

[Robert Maynard]

Doomsayers wrong again...

At some point the game will come to an end and the doomsayers will be right about that bit - as to when that will happen - that seems to be one of the bones of contention....

 

[Boomer Kay]

At some point the game will come to an end and the doomsayers will be right about that bit - as to when that will happen - that seems to be one of the bones of contention....

Likely but not entirely sure.
a) CERN might yet manage to create something terrible and get us all trapped in a temporal anomaly (that's why I try to mix as many missions as possible )
b) the universe as such might be caught in a expansion-collapse loop, which means that in a few billion years from now we'll all be playing ED again

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

To be fair that is still important the fact that nobody plays on steam is indicative of something even if its just that using steam isn't what anyone who plays ED wants lol.

Ha, is that not including the 73,000 players that have played in the last 2 weeks on steam.

I wish people would stop looking at concurrent daily players as steam stats for total daily players.

Meaning of concurrent: At the same time.

Yesterday there were roughly 3300 players playing at the same time on steam, this figure has nothing to do with the total amount of steam players in a day.

 

[Strangepork]

For a moment there, I thought this thread might be another announcement about a new delay to 2.1.

 

[cmdr_Havalok]

DOOOM!
DESPAIR!
...and agony on me!?

Oh wait! This is good news. Am I in the right forums?

 

[Yaffle]

DOOOM!
DESPAIR!
...and agony on me!?

Oh wait! This is good news. Am I in the right forums?

Indeed. Something smells fishy, and it's not Tj's socks.

 

[Barking_Mad]

There won't be a major fail in the short term, but the game is far from what FDev writes about its brilliant reputation...

Rome wasn't built in a day and Elite Dangerous isn't a garden shed.

 

[SpitTheDog]

Rome wasn't built in a day and Elite Dangerous isn't a garden shed.

That is very true. Since FD won't allow us to store cargo in stored ships it is a bloody useless shed and I am very angry that FD did not make that very clear in the marketing materials for the game.

 

[tarragon]

It looks like my original assumption that the Horizons delay was to defer income to the next financial year was about right.

Healthy revenue stream going forward, keeping income level over the year. Sound business sense.

Good news for Frontier and for us.

Not saying "I told you so" to the doom-sayers who predicted massive failure and server off-switch by now, but looks like you were using the Mayan Calendar.

It is always sound strategy to put customer second and financial statement first. After all, money is produced by accounting, customers are just troublesome support department metric.
I always admire that sharp money drive in my corporation. Especially one, where customer expectations and customer relations are really second class citizens, because they don't need any retention.

 

[Arithon]

@Arithon: There's doom-sayers and there's people warning about a direction in game that leads to a huge number of players.

You are entitled to your opinion, but remember it's just that.

The fact is Elite is expanding, not declining; Frontier's figure demonstrate that and the servers are still on, contrary to the doom-sayers. So the predictions of failure continue to be wrong.

There's a long way to go, as Elite is nether perfect or finished - something Frontier readily admit - but nobody sensibly expects ten years of development to be delivered in year one.

People leave the game and people also come back. There's no law to say everyone has to play Elite 24/7 without break. Many people play on and off, or come back and play after each update. That's just player habits, not some divine sign of failure.

I'm certain that I'll be here in another nine years replying to another doom sayer, telling us with great authority how Frontier got it wrong.

 

[Boomer Kay]

Especially one, where customer expectations and customer relations are really second class citizens, because they don't need any retention.

ED doesn't need retention. It's not a "carrot on the stick" game, where you keep pulling 10 bucks out of your customer's pocket for his right to whine day and night.
It's a "christmas sale"-multi-platform game. Their revenue (and new influx of players) looks pretty good, if they manage to expand to PS4 and are listed on Amazon now, not just Steam.
Yea. That's how you run a financially sustainable business. But .. it's most certainly not "a game for everyone", so yea, 70% of the steam buyers would not have stayed with it anyway (look at the profiles and their reviews .. hilarious .. 100+ games in the library and the only reason to get more seems to be the ability to write more negative reviews).
And (oh my god), I just started playing League of Legends again (which is a "game for everyone" according to it's 500lb gorilla numbers with 37mio players and 1billion+ annual revenue), after deleting all my accounts out of frustration, just to get a little PvP fix and this time without getting too serious about ranked and junk that pretty much killed my enjoyment of it in the first place). FD still likes me. No black helicopters, no "but you didn't log on today, are you game-cheating on us?" (<- some facebook games do that .. sheesh, annoying).

Customer Service of Frontier is just plain awesome btw., when it comes to fixing real issues. I had an account issue (some stupid clicks somewhere), reported and got it fixed on a sunday!
Try it. It's one of the best I've seen in the gaming industry since decades.
Can't please everyone, though.

 

[frostypaw]

At some point the game will come to an end and the doomsayers will be right about that bit

LALALALA not listening

See this is easily said but look at the life of original Elite.

 

[Marra Morgan]

I am sure Frontier dont want their accounts info flashed all over their forum. Its irrelevant to the game and nobody should care, I certainly dont give a hoot about financials.

As a Public Limited Company, Frontier Developments are legally obliged to make their accounts available to the public and to their investors.
The company's capability to progress with its development plan on ED very much depends on new investment and confidence of the current shareholders, so unless you can convince their staff to work for free, their finances are kinda relevant to the game and people should care.

I believe that some players are shareholders, which is a great way to support the company

 

[Varrag]

No idea. Cant find the numbers specifically on Horizons from the annual report..

Ah, yes, it's the famous Big Secret of Horizon™.

I know our devs are pretty shy - they seems to be quite hesitant about including live server stats, aka number of currently logged players in the main manu (or launcher); so them being super shy about numbers of sold Horizon copies doesn't strike me as surprise.

They weren't this secretive in months after releasing 1.0, though: numbers were flying all around. I wander why and what happened in the meantime. Humm...