I was going to bring this up, at least in the lave radio thread, but couldn't string an argument together. To me its complicated because why would you actually want frontier?
- They focus only on niche genre games. While this is a strength of no competition and all the benefits that come with, they'll also never be mainstream.
- They have a headcount of 750 and are based in the UK. Is this expensive relative to competition?
- They have a proven disability to deliver what players expect (surely a real but significant rift between management / marketing vs customers, only permitted / required by niche genres).
- Phobia levels of avoidance of any sort of narrative into any of their games. The closest they've come to trying is jwe and that wasn't even close. Frontier have zero experience and ability for any "cinematic" content, if that's required today.
If i was armchairing frontier, the main value would be the planet XX ip and the future contracts. You'd want to redo the ops fundamentally, at least to get them to the point they can look like all the others to mainstream gamers. Frontiers current approach of harsh mvp in genres with no competition and publishing... well its something i guess.
I still feel like in SOME cases, the instant gratification bug has impacted what people think should be in the game. Having said that, the one big reason above all others I would like to see frontier keep it is this:
David Braben - To him, this is more than just a game that is(/is not) producing numbers. While not everything he envisions has come to be (and honestly a few things just can't), this game is a dream to him. I feel that as long as his hand is in it, and there's anyway possible, the game will eventually find its way to a semblance of the original concept. You remove him, and anyone else that might feel similarly within fdev, and its just numbers. The last thing I would want for this game is to see it die out half finished. If it moves, its just numbers.
I've said this before and I will say it again. I think that a lot of what we have been wishing, dreaming, and crying about in this game that hasn't come to fruition despite promises and dreams, will start to show up over the next few years. The foundation for the east wing so to speak is finally done with Odyssey. If the game is allowed to follow this path I think we will finally be seeing things we have been promised for so long. We've all waited (though not all that patiently lol) for what's coming. There's no way, if I had a choice, I would hand it over to a new guy with his own vision that may or may not have anything remotely related what the original hope for this game was, much less hand it to someone who only saw numbers and didn't have skin in the game.