Hi,
This is another topic on thoughtful things I've realized playing this game. I play a lot of different games. The top of my list would be Dark Age of Camelot, Subnautica, EVE Online, this, and Black Desert Online... in that order. More recently this has flipped; the inverse being true. I've also played Guild Wars 2, 1, and WoW. I usually migrate to games as my friends and family do. In recent years games have really made it hard to do this. Elite isn't one of those and I won't be talking about that. However, what comes to mind and the reason I'm posting is that the last decade has been kind of anomalous for the gaming industry. This monster of a game emerged in the early 2000s which really threw the gaming world askew. I want to talk about this because I think that era is ending, but our perspectives (that word again) from it haven't changed much.
From the 90s to as late as 2005 MMOs and gaming was really a niche thing. You might do it, your friends might do it, but if you peaked your head out of the room everyone was stinking up everyone else saw it as sort of a DnD club. It was just to be a fling due to age or whatever. Maybe a sort of short lived trend from technology overload. In any case, the important thing for this post is that these early MMOs maxed out at a player population of just 500,000 people. This was also the era where everyone had to have Smash Bros. available somewhere.
In 2004 the anomaly appeared. World of Warcraft. It showed up, grabbed up 2,000,000 subscribers and hung around for a decade and some. By now it's starting to die, but the gaming industry and many gamers are in a panic. Sales just aren't what they were for ...World of Warcraft. Everyone wanted that instant 2,000,000 subscribers and just can't figure out what happened. What happened was that WoW could be played on a computer monitor with its screen smashed in, a fire lit inside, and shadow puppets held ahead of it for your avatar. That's why it sold. Anyone could play it because any computer could run it. It was that simple.
But things like this have a way of gaining momentum, "Snowballing" is wrong phrase, or "bubble" if you want to be all toxic black business-like. For a decade this game that really just stole everything it ever came up with from Warhammer and earlier MMOs (but done less well) just kept growing. And that's not a bash on WoW. Look up "Ogre" and "Warhammer" sometime. Every other mechanic was just a copy-past from older games like Everquest. But here's the big important point... WoW had 13,000,000 subscribers at one point. There are games in China right now that blow this number out of the water, but the PRC is so inconsistent you'll never hear about them because that market isn't really accessible. So, for the rest of the WoW has been the sort of example and measure of success everyone jumps at.
Capitalist economies that we are it made sense to think, "Well if they can do it so can we," but... it never happened. NCSoft comically makes game after game after game ever more like WoW while competing against itself. And year after year its games just fall over dead for no apparent reason save that they each inevitably become a Cash Shop. WoW itself is dying as it treats its population like cattle penned for some psychological test to see how long you can keep a population confident "soon, soon, it will be good again". < Whatever that means... And many successful stable franchises have been ignored: like Dark Age of Camelot.
But this year Black Desert Online came out and when people heard its population was just 500,000 they panicked. 500,000, oh no?! The game must have failed!
In actuality this is a number very consistent with practically all MMOs NOT World of Warcraft... which is why I took so much time to talk about it.
Right now Elite: Dangerous is in a content drought of sorts. Like everyone else I know I'm waiting for a sale on Horizons to buy it because Season Passes are a stupid idea. "I promise to make you stuff," is the statement of a Season Pass. And if you ask, "What stuff," no matter what the answer is you can't know until you get it. This creates a problem for developers that persists. Players tend to buy a game for one thing. Sure there may be other flavors that all over to be there for that one thing to work, but that one thing is what's really got them playing. During a development phase people tend to notice something that always makes gamers nervous, "The devs have stopped talking," and when asked, "What's going on," silence is most often the reply. This in turn creates a panic. Their 'one thing' is suspected to be under assault and they get salty about it. There's also the bail-train phenomenon that I'm sure is linked with people who believe in planet Nibiru. "Oh *#&%, the game's dead! Bail! Bail now! The world is over!" It always goes something like this. And this another reason why I hate the Season Pass model because the Development Phase IS the Season. Only retrospectively can we say, "Oh ya, actually that was a pretty good year," unless the initial stuff released provides enough content to provide for the whole season.
Since it seems like the big concern with Elite right now is, "This Season Pass stuff is starting to look pretty sketchy... what the hell is this silence all about... [enter world ending panic phase soon]...," I just want to point out this is a good clue that the devs are probably not at the beach at the moment. More likely they are scratching their head with 3Ds Max going, "How the *&#^% does an object rotated 45 degrees here end up 47 degrees when we duplicate and rotate it placed there?" Followed by, "Can we just ignore it?" and, "Do you want all orbitals to look like that?" True facts, I had to get my uncle whose an architect to figure out for me why just such a thing was happening once in a CAD program. It took him three weeks. At first he hated me for even asking for his help, but the problem was so obviously a problem he actually took my computer and left to figure it out. It turned out to be a calculus issue within the problem that CAD cannot, cannot, detect. In other words, I would never have solved the problem had I not given up on my faith the computer couldn't be wrong as the program was $6000 and nothing that expensive could have such a critical flaw. But ya, it did and there was no fixing it except to go to a cranky old uncle and say, "Please take me seriously and tell me why this isn't working?" And to make this more clear he is so old he doesn't know CAD. He realized the solution from something he'd encountered while building round rooms with square doors. It took a person outside the field I was trying to work in (game design) to use real physical life experience and go, "Ya. I've seen this before. Here's the solution," to work the problem. So, I tend to think that content droughts are a good thing because it shows the developers are hard at work on something.
And things like that you can't get people to listen about or sympathize with. Had I told my profession, "This is broken because...," he'd have been like, "Pfft, here's your D. Now get out." Instead I got an A by trying everything I could think of and then assuming the textbook was wrong, class was wrong, the professor was wrong, I was wrong, and some old scrooge had the answers because don't they always?
But ya... you can't give screenshots of stuff like this usually. Maybe with Elite: Dangerous' demand of players to be able to register on an IQ chart to play the game you could... but human nature is a fickle thing so better safe than sorry.
Summary:
Lower than 12 million players in a game (closer to 500,000) is good money and management
Trying to get above 500,000 players of anything is wishes, dreams, and moon beams in a jar
Long silences all of a sudden from the devs = a development phase has commenced
Just some thoughts
This is another topic on thoughtful things I've realized playing this game. I play a lot of different games. The top of my list would be Dark Age of Camelot, Subnautica, EVE Online, this, and Black Desert Online... in that order. More recently this has flipped; the inverse being true. I've also played Guild Wars 2, 1, and WoW. I usually migrate to games as my friends and family do. In recent years games have really made it hard to do this. Elite isn't one of those and I won't be talking about that. However, what comes to mind and the reason I'm posting is that the last decade has been kind of anomalous for the gaming industry. This monster of a game emerged in the early 2000s which really threw the gaming world askew. I want to talk about this because I think that era is ending, but our perspectives (that word again) from it haven't changed much.
From the 90s to as late as 2005 MMOs and gaming was really a niche thing. You might do it, your friends might do it, but if you peaked your head out of the room everyone was stinking up everyone else saw it as sort of a DnD club. It was just to be a fling due to age or whatever. Maybe a sort of short lived trend from technology overload. In any case, the important thing for this post is that these early MMOs maxed out at a player population of just 500,000 people. This was also the era where everyone had to have Smash Bros. available somewhere.
In 2004 the anomaly appeared. World of Warcraft. It showed up, grabbed up 2,000,000 subscribers and hung around for a decade and some. By now it's starting to die, but the gaming industry and many gamers are in a panic. Sales just aren't what they were for ...World of Warcraft. Everyone wanted that instant 2,000,000 subscribers and just can't figure out what happened. What happened was that WoW could be played on a computer monitor with its screen smashed in, a fire lit inside, and shadow puppets held ahead of it for your avatar. That's why it sold. Anyone could play it because any computer could run it. It was that simple.
But things like this have a way of gaining momentum, "Snowballing" is wrong phrase, or "bubble" if you want to be all toxic black business-like. For a decade this game that really just stole everything it ever came up with from Warhammer and earlier MMOs (but done less well) just kept growing. And that's not a bash on WoW. Look up "Ogre" and "Warhammer" sometime. Every other mechanic was just a copy-past from older games like Everquest. But here's the big important point... WoW had 13,000,000 subscribers at one point. There are games in China right now that blow this number out of the water, but the PRC is so inconsistent you'll never hear about them because that market isn't really accessible. So, for the rest of the WoW has been the sort of example and measure of success everyone jumps at.
Capitalist economies that we are it made sense to think, "Well if they can do it so can we," but... it never happened. NCSoft comically makes game after game after game ever more like WoW while competing against itself. And year after year its games just fall over dead for no apparent reason save that they each inevitably become a Cash Shop. WoW itself is dying as it treats its population like cattle penned for some psychological test to see how long you can keep a population confident "soon, soon, it will be good again". < Whatever that means... And many successful stable franchises have been ignored: like Dark Age of Camelot.
But this year Black Desert Online came out and when people heard its population was just 500,000 they panicked. 500,000, oh no?! The game must have failed!
In actuality this is a number very consistent with practically all MMOs NOT World of Warcraft... which is why I took so much time to talk about it.
Right now Elite: Dangerous is in a content drought of sorts. Like everyone else I know I'm waiting for a sale on Horizons to buy it because Season Passes are a stupid idea. "I promise to make you stuff," is the statement of a Season Pass. And if you ask, "What stuff," no matter what the answer is you can't know until you get it. This creates a problem for developers that persists. Players tend to buy a game for one thing. Sure there may be other flavors that all over to be there for that one thing to work, but that one thing is what's really got them playing. During a development phase people tend to notice something that always makes gamers nervous, "The devs have stopped talking," and when asked, "What's going on," silence is most often the reply. This in turn creates a panic. Their 'one thing' is suspected to be under assault and they get salty about it. There's also the bail-train phenomenon that I'm sure is linked with people who believe in planet Nibiru. "Oh *#&%, the game's dead! Bail! Bail now! The world is over!" It always goes something like this. And this another reason why I hate the Season Pass model because the Development Phase IS the Season. Only retrospectively can we say, "Oh ya, actually that was a pretty good year," unless the initial stuff released provides enough content to provide for the whole season.
Since it seems like the big concern with Elite right now is, "This Season Pass stuff is starting to look pretty sketchy... what the hell is this silence all about... [enter world ending panic phase soon]...," I just want to point out this is a good clue that the devs are probably not at the beach at the moment. More likely they are scratching their head with 3Ds Max going, "How the *&#^% does an object rotated 45 degrees here end up 47 degrees when we duplicate and rotate it placed there?" Followed by, "Can we just ignore it?" and, "Do you want all orbitals to look like that?" True facts, I had to get my uncle whose an architect to figure out for me why just such a thing was happening once in a CAD program. It took him three weeks. At first he hated me for even asking for his help, but the problem was so obviously a problem he actually took my computer and left to figure it out. It turned out to be a calculus issue within the problem that CAD cannot, cannot, detect. In other words, I would never have solved the problem had I not given up on my faith the computer couldn't be wrong as the program was $6000 and nothing that expensive could have such a critical flaw. But ya, it did and there was no fixing it except to go to a cranky old uncle and say, "Please take me seriously and tell me why this isn't working?" And to make this more clear he is so old he doesn't know CAD. He realized the solution from something he'd encountered while building round rooms with square doors. It took a person outside the field I was trying to work in (game design) to use real physical life experience and go, "Ya. I've seen this before. Here's the solution," to work the problem. So, I tend to think that content droughts are a good thing because it shows the developers are hard at work on something.
And things like that you can't get people to listen about or sympathize with. Had I told my profession, "This is broken because...," he'd have been like, "Pfft, here's your D. Now get out." Instead I got an A by trying everything I could think of and then assuming the textbook was wrong, class was wrong, the professor was wrong, I was wrong, and some old scrooge had the answers because don't they always?
But ya... you can't give screenshots of stuff like this usually. Maybe with Elite: Dangerous' demand of players to be able to register on an IQ chart to play the game you could... but human nature is a fickle thing so better safe than sorry.
Summary:
Lower than 12 million players in a game (closer to 500,000) is good money and management
Trying to get above 500,000 players of anything is wishes, dreams, and moon beams in a jar
Long silences all of a sudden from the devs = a development phase has commenced
Just some thoughts
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