News Elite Dangerous 2.4 - The Return
- Thread starter Edward Lewis
- Start date
Aren't you forgetting something?
Advertisements?
Renting and running host servers?
Renting and running offices?
Not sure how it is in the UK, but in Norway an employer also has additional costs per employee ontop of just salary payments, e.g. for every employee there is insurances and taxes (which go towards government being able to support employees who may be unable to work in the future due to health, injuries etc).
And that's just scratching the surface. There's plenty of costs for a company outside of just salaries.
No matter how bad the goids are, they can't push us further than the Freewinder. We will prevail. Let them come. [yesnod]
I seriously doubt tomorrow we'll see any real and tangible thargoid action stuff.
Knowing Frontier they will drag and tease this war as long as possible.
I'm really hoping it's not anti-climactic in the same vein as the previous encounters that were either impossible to experience thanks to RNG, or so few and far between most players could only experience it via Youtube. There's only so much teasing you can take before you just walk away from the whole "winter is coming" dead-horse-flogging session of last year..
Considering they have stated, and it fits with established game design paradigms, that Thargoid's will be in their very own bubble outside the regular human bubble and so if a player so choose be completely avoided.
So in other anti-climactic news.
Less like an apocalyptic invasion and more like a minor traffic hazard :\
There are around 80,000 players on steam in the last two weeks. Not 5-10,000, that is concurrent numbers. And that doesn't include the non steam players mac or console players.
While Elite does make money and a reasonable amount, so does Planet Coaster, and so will the new IP when it gets released. Is ED a cash cow, probably not. If it sold the same as GTA5, then you could call it a cash cow, but it isn't doing too badly. I do expect them to release another paid for expansion though, some time in the future. Hopefully some more planets to land on.
Chaps, if you are really interested in Frontier's true position, public accounts are available - its not a bad business, but not a huge one either, its EBIDTA is ok and all it makes me think is its viable and so we can look forward to many years of development. I won't post a link, but look up frontier's info at companies house and search for accounts.
I for one will be interesed to see how the Thargoid thing plays out for solo players. The FD mini movie made even a fleet of ships easy prey for the Thargoid ship. How will a lone pilot cope with this?
Am I the only one that want(hope) to see some solid new gameplay mechanics with depth and variety tomorrow?Am i the only one that want(hope) to see the Bubble burn tomorrow?
Maybe you can hire a wing of NPC ships and then give them tactical commands what to do (attack this, defend that). Maybe you could even get a friend on board via multi-crew to specialise in this role as it offers enough tactical enjoyment/depth?
Or maybe not...
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Well it might offer an alternative for playing with friends to resorting to RES farming shoot fests. I would dearly love something none combat related that you can do with your pals tbh. Other than that though I do like to play alone but I can't see how that works with an enemy like the Thargoids as shown.
Really? I got my number from Steam charts. Do you have a link to your stats?
Besides, cash cow is a steady income. Elite is very erratic income from point sales like season passes every 1-2 years and paint jobs. World of warcraft was (is?) a cash cow. Elite just doesn't fit the definition, in my opinion. It might be profitable, but cash cow... nah.
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Sure. Here you go:
http://steamspy.com/app/359320
Steamchart are players playing at the same time. It doesn't say how many people have played in a day, a week or 2 weeks. Players in the last 2 weeks on steam spy is as close as you will get for player numbers on steam. It is not perfect, but a far better indicator then steamcharts.
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Hopefully it will be more meaningful and have more purpose to it than PP & Eng-Grind-Neers.
I just hope that it unites humanity and all the Engineers upgrades suddenly become available at every station for sale at premium in-game credit prices so everyone can immediately get tooled up for 'Goid-wars.
I just hope that it unites humanity and all the Engineers upgrades suddenly become available at every station for sale at premium in-game credit prices so everyone can immediately get tooled up for 'Goid-wars.
The daily Steam CCU for ED hangs around 6k pretty solidly. That's a pretty good take on the number of truly active users, given how this game is played. There may have had 80,000 touch it in the last two weeks, but I'd be willing to put the active users on Steam closer to 7-8k than 80k. With 2.4's release, it'll probably shoot upwards of 15K again, then decay back down to this core 6k number.
It's a total of the number of players per day. Not the unique players in a week.
I play 7 days a week, about. So then every full week an active gamer like me is counted as 7. Then, if the majority is active players (playing ab out every day), we can take the 80,000 and divide by 7 (or maybe 5 to be fair) to get a fair amount of active and unique players. And we end up around 10,000.
The thing is, active player to me is number of unique and active players in one day, not the total number times a single player has logged in and played the past 7 days. The number you see there of 80,000, is that truly unique players? I can't see that it says so. It's just a summed up total of the 7 days. To me, that doesn't constitute active players any more than to sum up the 10,000 for 30 days and call the 300,000 played times "active" players. Over a year, we'll have several million players, but there's only a million sold copies, so it would mean the total number active players during a year is more than the sold copies... That doesn't make sense. Active players should reflect more on the unique players. Like me. I'm active player, and should be counted once, and not each time or day I log in as separate. It's not like there are 365 Han Zulu's during the year. There's only one.
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Actually, if we go by those numbers:
Owners: 1,147,368 ± 31,467
Players in the last 2 weeks: 78,497 ± 8,240 (6.84%)
Players total: 1,071,133 ± 30,406 (93.36%)
There are over a million active players according to this.
Now, the question is for a "cash cow", do they pay every month or daily for the use? (Milk daily from the cash cow, i.e. residual income)
(Just to be clear, a "cash cow" to me is when you have a residual income with low to no effort to get it, like feeding a cow and milking it every day. Simple income. But FDev puts in a lot of effort and releases quite a large number of updates, which isn't little or no effort, and it's not a daily or monthly stable payout from it either.)
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