General / Off-Topic Either i'm very drunk or FD is very much in trouble

Darth Ender

D
This last month anyone who has been playing the game since release or before should have noticed a drastic increase in bugs and a drastic decrease in addressing them along with a massive absence of plot (mostly for the last year).


To me, this screams financial woes. Developers getting laid off, cheaper developers learning the ropes, reducing server costs etc.


I dont want ED to die. I would rather Frontier Development to offer a voluntary subscription service on a monthly basis to pay for quality developers and content creators.

I dont even care if it doesn't offer me anything in the game other than maybe a decal or paint job. I like playing this game. But the recent events have me thinking very strongly that this developer is very close to filing for bankruptcy and/or selling to whoever will buy them because I can't think of any other reason why things would fall apart and goto hell as hard as they have in the past couple months.

I would even go far as to suggest that FD adopt a kind of android software environment where they dual license the engine's source code so that the community can shoulder the brunt of bug fixes while the company FD can focus on simply adding content.
 

Mighty Dangerous

M
They will turn this around by xmass I reckon.
Horizons 33% off will replace the players who left so it's probably breaking even or dipping a little atm.
I think 2.4 is hype (Aliens?) that will push sales for next expansion.
For some reason I have a bad feeling about the game in 18 months time.
I think that's going to be a rough time for ED.
 

Ian Phillips

Volunteer Moderator
Ian Phillips
Moving to Off Topic as it pure speculaton about the companies finacial standing and not about the game Elite Dangerous.
 

Brimstone

Brimstone
I don't see this happening.

Though, just to entertain the idea, I think if Frontier were to implement a subscription fee like you said, it would drive away more players than it would attract them. If anything, they'd probably go with a Free To Play model. They already charge for cosmetics like paint jobs and bobble heads...

But I doubt that will happen.
 

m0nkeysensei

Banned
M
Read the Fdev finance reports. They currently have above 10mil in profit for 2015 and almost no debt. They also have a rollercoaster theme game coming out they say will be their next big franchise. Fdev bankrolled ED on kickstarter and through an interest-free loan they already paid off. They are not really paying for massive servers or bandwidth due to this being p2p at most their dev costs come from asset and content creation. But since people basically beg Fdev to put their fanfic lore into the game most of their minor storylines are written for free.

Brimstone said:
I If anything, they'd probably go with a Free To Play model. They already charge for cosmetics like paint jobs and bobble heads...
Click to expand...

F2P in a game somewhat based around politics would be a terrible idea. People could just mass account create to boost their own faction or ruin another faction with impunity. Also there is the hacking aspect. If someone were patient enough they could test the limits of the anti-hack system just by brute force.
 
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