On the other hand, if Elite could be shown to be ideal for all ages, accessible to the old, inform, very young, those fitted with wooden legs, the blind, the deaf, and the terminally stupid then you'd stand a fair chance of maximising your market share.
Except you're eventually end up with mostly just the "old, inform, very young, those fitted with wooden legs, the blind, the deaf, and the terminally stupid", as a game which amount of challenge is tuned to toddler level will make everyone else feel unchallenged and lose interest over time. And you'll get stuck with the toddlers and push away the normal players (not just the "pros"). If FD wants to maximize sales, they have to aim for the "middle range players", the "average", the "normal" playes, not for the "top pros", but most certainly not for the least common denominator.
A lot of my friends purchased this game shortly after me. I am the only one still playing, mostly because the real (mostly) galaxy appeals to my inner armchair astronomer. The rest of them got bored and bolted before even the powerlay update dropped.
If you look at all these whinging threads about the AI, and look at the way these people are losing their ships, people unable to run away with Cobras, people unable to survive and escape an interdiction while flying anacondas, people who don't manage pips, who run in straight lines, that carry chaff but don't even have a key binded to launch it, who can't even dock their ships themselves, who find being unable to out turn eagles in a corvette "a bug", people who don't know nor care to know 10% of the game mechanics.
Completely clueless about the game they are playing, and completely unable to overcome any kind of tiny obstacle, actually even worse, they consider any kind of obstacle "a game breaking bug that needs to be fixed". And mostly completely unwilling to try to improve, or change their ways in order to overcome obstacles, they prefer to boo-hoo until FD bends over and re-enables trained chimp difficulty again. You've certainly seen all these theads over the past couple weeks, no point in going on further.
Soon we'll see the game nerfed back again into toddler difficulty, so that people who can't be bothered to learn how to play the game can be appeased, and go back to "click on braindead, parked in front of weapons NPCs to make them pop" and play while semi-afk.
Is this what David Braben envisioned for ED to be known for in the future war of the space sims? As ED being The Least Common Denominator of the Space Sims? I don't think it is. And if it is, then it's sad.
