the negative community narrative and the confirmation bias effect.
- Thread starter Boff'in
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I'm pretty sure FD never promised that all proceeds of ED would only be spent on ED development.
If we want FD and ED to be viable for years to come, FD needs to be profitable. I'm OK with this. I don't see how the game is "dying"; FD just added PS4 support. That's a lot of new players.
Yes, development has been slow. What frustrates me the most is that FD keeps adding weak content, like CQC, engineers, multicrew, Power Play, etc., instead of making the core product better.
If we want FD and ED to be viable for years to come, FD needs to be profitable. I'm OK with this. I don't see how the game is "dying"; FD just added PS4 support. That's a lot of new players.
Yes, development has been slow. What frustrates me the most is that FD keeps adding weak content, like CQC, engineers, multicrew, Power Play, etc., instead of making the core product better.
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What, you mean the bit where I give them money, they give me a thing, then I go away until I’m ready to give them more money for another thing?
No, that's not what they said. They said that 51% of the development was contributing to future releases out of 2016. That can be work on any game.
PS
Actually it's pretty good news, thanks for sharing it. It means that people like Max Factor are right, they are working on future releases (Season 3, 4) rather than the stuff we see in game today.
PPS
And before someone draws the same wrong conclusions like you did, the part you quoted is from the general financial review, it's not about Planet Coaster like your selective quote suggests.
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Oh my days. Pretty standard practice chum. Nowhere does it say the ED dev team was taken off to work on planet coaster. That's just saying the some of the money ED made helped fund planet coaster. Totally normal behaviour. There is no citation there what so ever.
It's again the usual forum case of 2+2=500.
What I described was accurate. If you read their financials (also from the same report) you'll find that Planet Coaster revenue only funded a fraction of the actual development costs and the difference was made up from the revenue obtained from Elite. You can determine this from actually reading their report and looking their financial details.
I've already gone over their financials in detail over a year ago in the following thread:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-beta-access?p=4552891&viewfull=1#post4552891
There is no way to spin this. They collected revenue for Elite when they sold Horizons pre-orders but instead of developing Horizons properly they put a large part of the revenue into Planet Coaster. Now they will have two new IPs to develop over the next several years and you can readily predict what this will mean for Elite development.
So what? Funding a new project with profits from an existing one is perfectly normal. There's nothing sinister going on there. That's just business.
Just because they've used profits from Elite to help fund development on Planet Coaster doesn't means that the Elite dev area is a barren, tumbleweed strewn wasteland in which the pages of C++ Advanced Techniques manuals flap forlornly in the wind and NULL pointer exceptions circle overhead.
And the current costs of Elite development are funded with revenue from Planet Coaster. That's how publishing works.
BTW
It's also interesting that you completely ignored how I showed that the rest of your statement was wrong.
It doesn’t feel that FD care about developing ED any further now. As if they’ve done what they set out to do, they won’t fundamentally change anything, and why should they bother much now that they’ve made some money and the store monies keep rolling in regardless?
They tell us its development is still important to them but the evidence would say otherwise.
Just feels like a fancy cash-cow that they’ll occasionally update - as and when they can be bothered - just to keep them paintjobs selling.
They tell us its development is still important to them but the evidence would say otherwise.
Just feels like a fancy cash-cow that they’ll occasionally update - as and when they can be bothered - just to keep them paintjobs selling.
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What that an echo? Or did somebody say citation? Again?
Pax 2017 East Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhsH5U7tz4A
I've transcribed the relevant questions and answers:
Question (9:30): "Why was multicrew toned down from the deep and engaging experience described at EDX 2015 to the dreadnought-style gunner mode we have now?"
Answer: "That's I think a really good example of just a development process. Time, resources, priorities, unforeseen stuff. Having said that, it depends on how well multicrew is received and what other updates and things that we look at. There's no reason other than time and resources why it couldn't be expanded. But lets take it one step at a time. At the moment it's fulfilling a quite specific role to allow players to link up very quickly and have a fun shooting time together. But it could get further. We have concepts for taking it further but nothing else to announce at the moment."
Question (20:40): "How is the SRV integrated? And if not, will it be in the future?"
Answer: "So, it's not at the moment. The way that the SRV operates, the way that the captain actually goes into the SRV, doesn't use holo-me telepresence. That makes it technically very difficult to get it to work with it. There's lots of edge cases basically so there are no plans at the moment for that. Again in the future it's the kind of thing that maybe we can come back to but I don't know. I wouldn't want to promise anything. No ETAs, no guarantees."
This is literally FD telling us straight-up that they didn't have enough resources to implement their original plans for multicrew. We know from these statements that the dev team was not given the time and resources to develop Horizons properly. We also know from their annual reports that Elite revenue was used to subsidize Planet Coaster development. I've provided citations and references for both of those facts from information that was provided directly by FD. The sources I referenced completely confirm what myself and others have stated about Horizons development being underresourced and Elite revenue being used to subsidize Planet Coaster development.
If the Elite dev team did not have enough resources to develop multicrew and other Horizons expansions properly then the revenue generated by Elite should not have gone into another game. What FD did was not "totally normal behavior" for a game developer to sell one product in advance and then instead of developing that product properly, they take that pre-order revenue and use it to develop another product instead. That is why FD had to abandon the paid season model, they realized that after Horizons the playerbase is quite simply not going to pay them in advance for an expansion again. We've seen what FD has done with our money over the past two years and it was not used to properly support Elite development.
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There is a massive difference between revenue and profits. Revenue is the income that a product generates from sales. Profits are what you have left after you develop and deliver a product and have paid for all the associated development costs.
They did not use profits from Elite to fund Planet Coaster development. They used revenue that was generated from selling Horizons before all of the Horizons content was actually developed and delivered to customers. Horizons was not developed and delivered to an adequate standard at the time they were moving resources to Planet Coaster. What they did involved taking Elite revenue and putting it into Planet Coaster while leaving the Elite development team without the necessary resources to adequately develop the product they had already sold to players.
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Yes and no IMHO.
No in the sense they are seemingly piling a lot of effort into next year. ie: A fair amount of free enhancements, and importantly a paid expansion too?
Yes in the sense I still can't see how a 100+ people are working on this game, (a) given the size and speed of the past two years developments, and (b) for the past couple of years there seemingly haven't been teams sitting there developing significant season 3 content. Instead FD seem to be pretty hand to mouth with the game.
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I regard next year’s free updates as exercises in damage-limitation and, if they didn’t introduce such improvements to the basics, FD realise that those paintjob-buyers would finally drift away.
I am looking forward to the free updates and hope that they are more than damage limitation but that’s how they feel to me at the moment.
Sorry, but if you want to have an actual discussion on this topic you actually have to go back and read the references I cited. FD clearly stated that the majority of their revenue in 2016 came from Elite. Their financials for that year also showed a massive gap between Planet Coaster revenue and Planet Coaster development costs. That difference came out of Elite revenue because the revenue generated by Planet Coaster pre-orders was nowhere near sufficient to cover the actual development costs. This is why the Elite dev team was underresourced.
No, that's not what it means at all. The devs told us several months ago that they hadn't started work on Season 3 and didn't even know if it would be a season at all. We only very recently got any information about Beyond and that is just a roadmap. They currently have threads for player suggestions about Beyond development so we know they can't have done any substantial work on it yet because they haven't even decided on what changes to even make to the core game mechanics. We don't even have any improvements for the "minimum viable product" that was delivered for multicrew over 7 months ago so the dev team hasn't even managed to bring the bare-bones Horizons content up to a minimum quality standard yet.
I'm sorry but you really are going to have to actually do some reading here about the history of Horizons development and the current state of the game.
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Do you know why most of FD's revenue in 2016 came from ED, and not Planet Coaster - because you numpty Planet Coaster wasn't released world wide until 17 Nov 16 - guess you missed that little detail in your indepth analysis of the entire financial structure of the company!
There is not much sense discussing with you as long as all your "facts" are based on your opinion and deliberate misinterpretation.
Have a nice day.
Yes, of course they didn't have enough revenue from Planet Coaster to develop it entirely using the pre-order revenue during 2016. This is why they took a significant amount of revenue from Elite that year. That is exactly the problem I'm describing. In order to get Planet Coaster out faster they funnelled resources and revenue from Elite development but they did this before developing Horizons properly. As a result we had massive delays for Horizons content which took 2 years instead of 1 year and even then the features were delivered to a "minimum viable product" standard.
How is it still not clear that this is a problem? If they had done things properly we would have got Horizons completed on time within the expected 1 year schedule and we would have seen it developed to an adequate standard. Planet Coaster would have likely taken another year to develop instead because they would have had to wait to use whatever resources were left after they had properly developed Elite content. FD obviously wanted to turn a quick profit for their shareholders so instead of waiting they used Elite as a low-maintenance cash-cow during those 2 years of Horizons development. That is why Horizons ended up the way it did and why FD isn't trying to sell us another "season" of paid content. They know they will have to actually develop content first this time before we buy it and they have no intention of putting any more than minimal development resources into Elite at this point.
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I know I shouldn't, but...
"FD clearly stated that the majority of their revenue in 2016 came from Elite."
Yes, obviously. Planet Coaster was released in November 2016 IIRC..
"Their financials for that year also showed a massive gap between Planet Coaster revenue and Planet Coaster development costs."
Yes, obviously. Planet Coaster was released at the end of 2016...
"That difference came out of Elite revenue because the revenue generated by Planet Coaster pre-orders was nowhere near sufficient to cover the actual development costs."
Again, that's obvious. Did you know that the preorders and Kickstarter wasn't enough to fund the development costs of Elite either? That's how Publishers work. They make money after they sell something.
"This is why the Elite dev team was underresourced."
That doesn't make any sense. How do you jump from revenue to effort put in development?
"FD clearly stated that the majority of their revenue in 2016 came from Elite."
Yes, obviously. Planet Coaster was released in November 2016 IIRC..
"Their financials for that year also showed a massive gap between Planet Coaster revenue and Planet Coaster development costs."
Yes, obviously. Planet Coaster was released at the end of 2016...
"That difference came out of Elite revenue because the revenue generated by Planet Coaster pre-orders was nowhere near sufficient to cover the actual development costs."
Again, that's obvious. Did you know that the preorders and Kickstarter wasn't enough to fund the development costs of Elite either? That's how Publishers work. They make money after they sell something.
"This is why the Elite dev team was underresourced."
That doesn't make any sense. How do you jump from revenue to effort put in development?
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