I've always accounted for the fact that elite is still operating in a market with absolutely zero competition, combined with players growing interest in the space genre and acceptance of simulator complexity games in general. All of frontiers games pretty much have zero competition, strategically as a company they pick their battles very well.
I think that gives frontier a free pass with all the issues that we plainly and passionately see, and also explain the objective successes frontier achieve.
If elite wasn't a space simulator, how would mainstream (say reddit) reception be to the existing issues? If a competing mid tier publisher released an elite clone without the issues.. would we even be playing elite?
Yeah, i would more account what you mentioned to the brilliant strategic direction of david braben more than a measure of the quality of elite's content?
What you describe as "having zero competion" can also be viewed as "brilliant enough to pull off something so detailed, appealing and engrossing that no one else has been able to get close enough".
Not saying that literally is the case but just so to point out that not having competition is simply another way to express the fact something is among best in class to start with.
Otherwise having zero competition in an market segment that is easy to enter or compete with usually ends fast, with other competitors joining the fray soon enough. Alas, according to you in the last 6 years since ED launched that does not seem to have been the case.
Now, having said that I actually think ED has had and has tons of competition.
Warning wall of text!
Granted, if you define competition as in "any other games that do what Elite does, or close" then you will be hard pressed to find many games that compete. The only option left as of today would be pretty much to clone Elite. But I personally think that would be narrowing the scope of the definition so dramatically that it would render the discussion a bit moot and useless. Successful games tipically and often tend to be succesful precisely because they manage to differentiate themselves well enough from others, weather it is in actual innovative game features, or improved quality of old proven ones, or great graphics, or great social features, or great marketing or... etc. And that is hard, it requires good planning and execution.
More critically and to the point here you also seem to think, and correct me if I am wrong, that a lack other games in this very specific and narrow niche would prevent FDEV from being motivated to improve or do better. And this is the part where I think you may be missing a new angle, so let me put a different spin on what you may consider competition.
EVE, the X series, Space Engineers etc or SC even if not released yet, so to get some examples.
All those other space games may do things better than Elite in certain areas. And that is precisley what competition means because at one point or another some players that may be considering spending time or money in Elite may decide to spend that time and money with any of those other games instead because in their view they may do some of those things better.
In other words, you do not need another game or games that fall squarely into Elite´s niche to generate that competion. Games compete every day on the basis of partial overlap of feature sets that players of every walk of life may find attractive.
FDEV probably knows this very well, and follows relatively closely the development of games that share some of the themes or features that Elite has. Games like EVE, NMS, Space Engineers, Kerbal, Astroneer, Evochron, Hellion. Even non game software like Space Engine or projects of games in development such as Star Citizen are
already competing with Elite for some of the same players time and money (almost 350 million dollars there suggest as much). Now some of us may be able to spend both time and money in more than one of these, but that does not detract an atom from the fact that the competition is very real and the developers of each of those are in competition either in most or some of the features of their games and projects.
This competition, has been there since day 1. For example, the Star Citizen kickstarter was about the same time as Elite´s and I would bet that FDEV´s project execution plan was somewhat influenced (even if it was just so to decide the Elite´s launch date and some elements of the scope that would go into it) by the public views and plan for SC coming from Chris Roberts. And viceversa.
All those represent
very real competition that makes a dev team to try and stretch and strive to deliver better and/or faster, or all of the above, than others. The results obviously are for each of us to judge, these may be better at times, not so good at others (competition alone does not guarantee good results), but that is by the by, the incentive for FDEV to stretch and improve Elite is there thanks to all that competition since day 1.
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