Your examples are getting larger and larger to justify your bitterness, like a meme with 9 lines of text.
Do ED store proceeds go into Elite development?
- Thread starter Strangepork
- Start date
Your examples are getting larger and larger to justify your bitterness, like a meme with 9 lines of text.
And all the more convoluted to be exact.
So not being particularly happy after paying for something that was delivered a year late as a minimum viable product makes me "bitter"?
Looking at the various threads on these forums there must be a lot of "bitter" people out there.
Or maybe they're just customers who expect a certain minimum quality standard for the games they purchase.
Sorry if you couldn't follow the example. I couldn't find an appropriate meme for how badly FD has treated the Elite playerbase so I had to use actual words instead.
And this part is exactly the contentious part of the whole debate in question.
People disagree on this- and that's exactly why you're still "bitter".
Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
Now you're back - care to give me that reference?
Also - all of that is junk. All of it.
First, have a read at this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accounting-Non-Accounting-Students-John-Dyson/dp/0273722972 which is very simple and explains the difference between profit and cash, inter alia.
Next, I assume you are busy writing to Tim Cook to lambast him for putting money from iPhones into the iWatch? And Nadal for putting money from Office into Windows? How about Pfizer for putting cash from Sildenafil into Bavencio?
I assume as well that Rockstar is just as morally bankrupt, what with abandoning all of the GTA series to make Red Dead Redemption this year?
How would you suggest that (say) a HR person is funded, that deals with staff working on both PC and Elite?
How about a core Cobra coder, whose work goes to all FD's products?
Please understand the nature of businesses, and how they survive. I suggest that Dyson book as a good primer. Enjoy!
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I backed MWO. It didn't turn out like I expected, in part because my expectations were unrealistic, in part because their overcompany were literal criminals. However I didn't hang out on the forums for years afterwards being mad about it and trying to convince people still playing it to be as mad as me, because that's silly.
Multicrew is a buggy, unstable minimum viable product. FD have also failed to develop it over the past 8 months. You can "disagree" with this all you want but it doesn't change that reality for the players.
Suggesting that stating this makes someone "bitter" is ridiculous.
Support is support as far as I am concerned. I figure that any $$ I spend in the store will go to whatever FDev considers appropriate at that time.
Whether it be directly funneled to the ED team, or the crew in general, I don't really care. I buy a lot of these cosmetic add-ons because I want to show my support for the game's future. Supporting Frontier in any capacity ultimately contributes to a more stable financial future.
Whether it be directly funneled to the ED team, or the crew in general, I don't really care. I buy a lot of these cosmetic add-ons because I want to show my support for the game's future. Supporting Frontier in any capacity ultimately contributes to a more stable financial future.
If you've somehow missed all of the prior threads and discussion on this topic (and it has been quite extensive), then I've already suggested in my prior post that you start here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...siness-model?p=5536528&viewfull=1#post5536528
I also played MechWarrior Online, actually pre-ordered a "Founder's Pack" and purchased several other mechs. I finally left the game after more than a year when PG told us they hadn't actually been developing the core gameplay at all while they "negotiated" the IP licence renewal. Essentially they had completely lied about the work they were doing. I had zero faith that they would change their behavior so I cut my losses and left the game and haven't looked back since.
The difference with Elite is that I know that the devs can make a good game to an adequate quality standard if they are given the proper resources. They did a good job during the first year of game development and I would also consider planetary landings and SRV gameplay from 2.0 to be up to that same standard. Everything since 2.1 launched has been a minimum viable product however. The main reason I haven't left Elite is that I've invested a massive amount of time into the game (over 2000 hours at this point) and hope that someone at FD can turn the game around. My expectations for the game are quite low at this point but I hope that eventually even FD is going to realize that abandoning their flagship game is going to hurt their bottom line. Once Braben and the shareholders finally realize this it will probably be too late to really save the game but I'm willing to see what Beyond delivers. I'm really enjoying my Type 10 and at least the Chieftan looks promising although the Engineers reworks sounds terrible in terms of grind so it's already looking like Beyond is going to have a mixed reception.
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Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
Is not anywhere sourced from FD in any of your link, because they are from you. You cannot self reference while telling me it's from FD. That's not how referencing works.
To repeat - where does it isay Elite is not being Developed properly, as you allege.
Time really to work out how it is that it all works.
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What you've done is also not how reading works. If you actually read the thread I linked you'll find that all the references are there. I am not reposting everything I already typed just because you don't feel like going to that thread and actually reading it.
If you read my post you'll see that myself and others have already worked it out. It works very well for FD's sharedholders and very poorly for the Elite playerbase.
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That's a lot of hours, pilot. You could be experiencing mild to medium burnout. Doesn't sound terminal yet at least.
As an aside, PGI is cutting MechWarrior 5 for release this year. After they got out from under their criminal bosses they had more room to do game dev instead of selling $500 gold mechs. Maybe your faith and expectation allocations just need rebalancing.
From a business point of view, it makes no difference because revenue is revenue. What matters the most is the company continues to do well. When it does well, then all its franchises can benefit. If FD focused on ED exclusively, its likely that the company would do a lot worse. Its a bit of a niche game. Games like PC and JWE have a wider appeal. I think the main thing to do is not to suggest to the PC guys that the revenue they are putting in might be going to funding ED!
Hmmm... actually, i'm sure there are some people already there who are screaming how its bad that money for PC is going to the development of JWE and ED.... maybe we need to put those people into a deathmatch with the OP of this thread and see who wins!
(Not that the result matters, it might just shut them up for a bit)
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Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
So, humour me. Where, page and line, does it say in FD's accounts that ED is not being developed properly? You typed it, so it must be there.
Where does it say that 49% of man months is not enough? Other than 'the opinion of a person who is not in FD is that...' How does a man month relate to revenue?
If you read that book I have referenced it may become a bit clearer to you. But I am happy to indulge.
Businesses need funds to do what they do. They can get funds from different sources, principally those are funds from loans or funds from owners. In FD's case the owners are the shareholders.
Now, it is possible, and desirable to generate your own funds. To do this you make a thing (like a video game) and sell it. The problem is that to make the thing, you need funds.
Here's the difficult part. The things that you make have what is known as a lifecycle. That is over time they diminish. This is bad, because if you only have one thing and you can't sell it any more you have no further sources of funds and you go bust.
As a result businesses have come up with the cunning plan of a 'portfolio' of products or services. So as each one passes through its lifecycle it does not kill the company.
This lifecycle thing is quite difficult though. Products need funding to start with (this is given the term 'development' quite often) and once they are up and running they generate funds. But the amount of funds generated tends to decrease over time, so what companies do, and here's the clever bit, is have a whole other product! This product can then take in some of the excess funds from the existin product for its development, and then when it reaches the market it will generate funds. Here's the REALLY CLEVER BIT, those funds now come from two sources, so we have MORE FUNDS! This can be seen if, for example a business has a higher turnover. Now the funds we have can be used to keep the old product going, keep the newer product going, and wait for it, develop MORE PRODUCTS!
Wow.
It's amazing. So what we have is several product lines all generating cash to support those product lines. This way the whole company lasts longer, and can support its earlier products for longer.
Again, that Dyson book has that in.
More specifically - in 2016 you say that PC had 51% of person-hours. True. At this point PC wasn't released, ED was. By definition the unreleased game requires a bit more attention, as it's in development. You may state, in your opinion, that more hours should have been spent on Elite, but that is just your opinion. It is not a fact, it is an opinion. I would note however, that putting more ours into a project is not necessarily a good thing. To coin a phrase, 9 women can't make a baby in a month. Or, as I saw in a Dilber elsewhere on this forum 'this project takes 300 man days, there are 300 of you, so I expect it to be finished by 530 this evening'.
There is more to running a business, making a game, researching a drug, designing a building, than doing what a random of a forum thinks is best.
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Assuming that a "successful" company is making a good product is not necessarily the case. In fact what's good for a company's shareholders is often not good for the consumers. There are plenty of examples of this. The Volkswagen emissions scandal is a good one, so is the Apple phone slowdown issue. Using a company's profitability to justify their business decisions is not reasonable when the business practices in question are clearly disenfranchising their customers.
Although FD might not have done anything quite as bad as those examples they certainly haven't been delivering what they sold us either. Multicrew is probably the best example of this in terms of what they told us they were making vs. what they delivered. Their business practices are clearly focused on putting the shareholders ahead at the expense of the customers which is the core problem. Other companies are held to much higher standards than what we've been seeing from FD during Horizons and making excuses for FD or pointing to their business "success" isn't going to cut it here.
Until you can go through those threads and list the sources and pages I've referenced I'm not going to repeat all of it all over again.
Sorry all of the information is there, I've posted in multiple threads on this issue for over a year. You have to actually read it yourself.
Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
That's fine. It's a 'NO' then. FD never said that.
I've gone over FD's financials for 2017 and have yet to see any proof of your assertions and theories. Are you saying you're the only one who's right and everyone else is wrong?
Of course that is what he is saying! Nothing has changed.
It is always amusing to see quotes from folks that have been on my ignore list for ages. It always reaffirms that my decision to remove their inane ramblings from my forum feed was the correct one.