You know you’ve lost your player base when.....

OA has been "broadening the range" of his channel content (covering games other than Elite?) since the first month his channel began in 2014.

His voice seriously sends me to sleep. Within minutes my heads nodding. I have a similar problem with any audiobook narrated by Stephen Fry, but OA's videos are cheaper.
 
Fine for me. Maybe not so fine for Frontier.

Hand problems (my hands are 95% functional, I just have to be careful with them) led to me giving up console gaming in 2013. I didn't at that time have a computer powerful enough to play modern games. Then in 2016 I bought a grunty machine for photo-editing purposes, and PC gaming became a possibility again. And there was this old game, Elite, that I'd played back in the eighties, and there was a new version out, and I needed to distract myself from a (happily temporary) back problem....

I realised as soon as I bought it that I had to play it with HOTAS and VR. It took me two years to train myself to use the joystick carefully enough to to engage in combat without risking further injury to my hands, and while I tried other VR games frankly ED is the meta for seated VR (tried standing once, almost killed myself, didn't do it again). Except, of course, for racing games, which don't interest me, and flight sims, and I reckoned I already had one of those, which I had, with some difficulty, taught myself to safely play.

So I played ED more or less exclusively, and spent liberally in the Game Store to support the game's further development.

But here we are, almost four years after I started playing, and the fundamentals of the game I love are still as good as ever, but its development since Horizons has frankly been lacklustre, culminating in a two-year shutdown during which I rather hoped the game would be completely revamped, as opposed to say, gluing a First Person Shooter onto a game which is showing its age and calling it good. While dropping the single most compelling feature of the game (for me) for even that part of the new content which is vehicle-based.

So now here I am looking at alternatives, and it looks like FS 2020 is a good alternative, and I'll probably buy it.

Which doesn't mean I'll quit ED. I'll keep on playing, I'll even buy Odyssey, but it'll no longer be getting the lion's share of my gaming hours, and its rival will be a flight sim, a genre which is famously a money pit for add-ons. Microsoft has already announced an in-game store for such things.

Where am I going to be spending my spare cash in future? In the Game Store buying paintjobs, or in FS 2020, buying an occasional new plane to fly?

As I say, fine for me, maybe not so fine for Frontier.

Honestly? If I were FD and I saw your post I'd be thrilled. Someone with a, with all respect, niche background who is unhappy with development still plans on buying Odyssey? That's a win.

Not having space legs is the biggest criticism by far in general gaming communities. Losing a few sales from 'stubborn' current players is no issue to them to get a slice of that pie. But "mayve possible not buying some cosmetics but I'll definitely buy the dlc"? That's a bonus to them.
 
OA has been "broadening the range" of his channel content (covering games other than Elite?) since the first month his channel began in 2014.
Can we find some mug volunteer who'll count the videos posted in, say, 2016 and the last twelve months and see if the ratio of Elite to non-Elite posts has shifted at all? :)
 
Honestly? If I were FD and I saw your post I'd be thrilled. Someone with a, with all respect, niche background who is unhappy with development still plans on buying Odyssey? That's a win.
So far FD's had something like four times as much money from me in cosmetics purchases as they've had in game sales. I doubt they'll see losing that as a win.
 
Obsidian Ant has been broadening the range of his channel content for a goodly while now. As have other content creators who traditionally focused on Elite Dangerous. The long content drought has not been kind to them.

As for Microsoft FS 2020: yes, he's been paying a lot of attention to it lately. He's always been clear that the aspect of ED he loves most is exploration, and if you like flying round and looking at stuff then FS 2020 offers huge competition to ED.

I think FS 2020 is actually going to pull away a significant number of players from ED: I'm not even exploration focused, I mostly just like bummeling around the Bubble in a ship, and I can see wandering the earth in an aeroplane giving me the same sort of pleasure, especially if I'll soon be able do it in VR, and lose that capacity for new content in ED.

I'm this close to pulling the trigger on an FS 2020 purchase; only the need to upgrade my broadband package - the bandwidth requirements for FS 2020 are far greater than I've ever needed before - is giving me pause, but I'll probably end up doing it.

Well, I know that MFS will give me atmospheric planets (well, this one at least). ;)

I've spent more time watching MFS videos then I have playing ED lately, and when MFS is out for Xbox Series X, I'm all over that like ketchup on chips. It would take something special from Frontier to pull me back to ED at that point. And by special I don't mean a bolted-on FPS.
 
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So far FD's had something like four times as much money from me in cosmetics purchases as they've had in game sales. I doubt they'll see losing that as a win.

That's because you still think you are the target audience. You are not. Any cent you give them is a bonus. Nothing more, nothing less. If you or I stop buying paints it matters nothing. It's good to be aware of that.

Play what you want, buy what you think is worth the money. The rest is marketing for suckers.
 
I certainly don't think it's the end of the world that ED-centric content creators are playing other games, but this is the second week I've seen a SC mining video from those I consider among the top 3 ED content creators. I'm glad they can enjoy other things considered vomit-inducing by this base while FDev scrambles to get a grasp on mechanics that should've been stable by year 3, but is still a problem heading into year 7.
 
Most of the "IMMA QUIT AND NEVER COME BACK!" folks do too. People who truly quit just leave. Think about how many games you once played but no longer do. On how many forums for these games do you still post? Right. :)

Oh myself, I like to go through every game on my Steam list and complain at each developer...Sid Meier has FAILED to provide me with updates to Railway Tycoon for about twenty flippin' years and I bought that on the Amiga.. no updates, no new content, nothing..,no VR support...so naturally I wrote him an open letter and quit. He only cares about civ now.

Also.. as I posted on the Civ forum.. you know they've lost the player base because people are making videos about FSX which is 100% proof civ is doomed
 
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