+1 .. and don't confuse design goals with game architectural staging, either imo.
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News Elite Dangerous 2.4 - The Return
- Thread starter Edward Lewis
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+1 .. and don't confuse design goals with game architectural staging, either imo.
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LOL, half asleep I was thinking that's cheap, then I realised the maths was out by a few decimal points.
Programmers are an expensive lot, , but you need to add in the internal testers and the server ranglers, and the marketing lot who by experience spend cash like it's going to be made illegal to own.
Programmers are an expensive lot, , but you need to add in the internal testers and the server ranglers, and the marketing lot who by experience spend cash like it's going to be made illegal to own.
<in red pen> See me.
Its 5-8E per patch, or 25-40 per season pass. That is indeed 'AAA' cost, and I think we got AAA results. Civ6 got you a handful of new civs and a few maps. Deus Ex got you a handful of hours of new missions. We've got new ships, landable planets (!), SRV, massive new ship customization options, 'humanisation' (remember that S1 didn't have faction leaders, portraits, avatar creator which was at the time a primary complaint), new mission types, chained missions station types, all Thargoid stuff, NPC/multi-crew, SLF and about 200 pages of 'minor patch notes'.
If you think that is not enough, well, that is your problem.
![[VR] Frank_G](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/59/59394.jpg?1553527111){kind=avatar}
I doubt it. Let me grab my crystal ball:
2.4 will be disappointing to the people who are generally disappointed. 2.4 will be great fun to those who actually like ED. A bunch of people will claim this or that is make-or-break for them, yet you will find all of them still complaining no matter what happens afterwards. As with every patch, every time.
Your crystal ball might have told you, that you would have received more rep for this, but that i wasnt allowed to give it.
I think this mirrors the behavior of the community perfectly.
For me, Elite is still the best space sim ever made. Yes, i have wishes too, wishes that most of the time are not fulfilled, but sometimes they are. And playing this game in VR is like holidays delivered in small sessions, whenever i want... For almost 3 years, i play Elite exclusively, with small interruptions, where i either play Kerbal Space Program or Project CARS. Elite never became boring and each update adds something cool and new to the universe. I am really looking forward to 2.4 and beyond, and i am thrilled to see, what Frontier has in store for us at Frontier Expo.
Congratulations, you just found out the reason companies exist. To make money. Who knew?
Are you indirectly bragging that you host these forums? An AWS employee? ;-)
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Except they are out by a factor of 10 on their "Salary" based assumptions and not taking into account other employee overheads nor other operating costs.
On a per employee basis you can probably double individual salaries wrt the actual cost to company. Then you have to deduct taxation and other operating costs from the net turnover after workforce cost deductions.
Working out the net annual income for a company is not a simple maths equation and you need to factor in that any profit may actually be paying off any debt from initial development.... not necessarily a cheap activity.
In general, they have over simplified the issues in play.
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Seriously? 50 x 50k = 250k? If you go on a "they're in for the money not for altruism" rant, please get at least your numbers right. That's ridiculous.
Absolutely not - I'm in Scotland! The whining was so loud I could hear it from up here
Absolutely not - I'm in Scotland! The whining was so loud I could hear it from up here
Then it's not the forum you are hearing.
It's the collective wail of the aortas of people eating deep fried Mars bars.
Yet the game will be judged on what was promised vs what was delivered, not what you design goals were.
This is not true and happening mostly only in game software development.
If you are building a banking system for a bank, you promise specific feature set, and then you do everything except money transfer between accounts because "in any project things can change" or "subject to change in circumstances" - you can be 100% sure they will not pay for it.
I never said its not enough. Dont put your words into my mouth.
What I didnt agree on was 5-8E per patch thinking - which doesnt make sense, since :
a) I cannot buy them separately
b) they dont work separately - i.e. I cannot use 2.1 engineers without buying 2.0 planetary landing
Horizons is one package.
200 pages of new stuff in minor patch notes?
Big list of fixed problems/bugs is nothing to brag about. Customer should never pay for issue fixing.
That's in total. I bought ED+horizon last year, but that doesn't mean I buy it once a year. That's the total income over all time for the company for that game, while the cost continues as long as the servers and development continues.
That's the only extra income they can have unless they start charging for DLCs.
Rather 2,500,000.
50 * 50,000 = 5 * 500,000 = 2,500,000 not 250,000
Also, remember that it took many years to get to this "buggy" version, so the cost of the emps are 5 times the 2,5 mil. The cost is a lot higher than the game price. So 5 * 50 * 50,000 = 5 * 2,500,000 = 12,500,000 mil just in cheap labor costs. Now, programmers might actually cost a lot more than you estimate. More like 100,000 /year, I suspect.
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It was a response to the other post and not intended to be exact or accurate.
Also, your point is that only ED pays for all other development, which isn't true either, since the other games are also paid for by gamers.
The point is that it's expensive to develop games and the income isn't necessarily enough to pay for it, and that his point that 50 x 50,000 is the same as 250,000, which is obviously wrong with a factor of 10. FDev is not getting rich on the players. And I doubt there are 100,000 paying players (only 5-10,000 on Steam). I believe his point was wrong. That was my point. If you don't get it, it's not my problem.
He said, "Everyone is forgetting to add in the cash-cow that is the store. Let's run some maths and assumptions... (I know the saying).."
1. It's not a cash-cow
2. His assumptions are wrong
3. His math is wrong.
Ergo, his whole argument is wrong. And it had nothing to do with trying to justify any aspects of the game at all.
Put it this way, if he's making assumptions, then at least have some reasonable ones, or the whole argument is worthless. In this case, his argument is.
I can tell you that I have my own issues with ED, but I wouldn't consider it a cash-cow.
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