Never said it was trivial, but it's certainly not some Titanic impossible to replicate feat either. It has been 10 years since elite released, and the base technology was available then, and is certainly available now. So it's more just an interesting observation on the lack of direct competition.
ED has next 2 Years of Content Mapped Out
- Thread starter Cosmo
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Not saying there aren't other successful, probably more successful space games out there. Never played the X series, so I can't comment on that. NMS is basically space minecraft with an esoteric story and very unrealistic galaxy, and "flying" is more or less non existent. SC is it's own mess, and Starfield wasn't going to be the Elite killer people hoped either, which was clear to everyone who had played a Bethesda RPG before. All good games in their own right, maybe (for their intended audidence).
Space games are popular amongst a certain demographic, but pull nowhere near the audience of the "really popular" games (not saying this is bad). In the grand scheme, space games are niché, especially when they are real space games and not space themed <insert other genre>. Starfield wasn't hyped because it was a space game. It was hyped because is was supposed to be "Skyrim in space". In reality, it could have been "Skyrim in anything", being space themed wasn't exactly the drawing factor in my view.
Looking really good, indeed. But I don't get the impression that we can actually pilot those ships. Insofar: yes, there's demand for sci-fi and space games but what FDev achieved with Elite Dangerous's ships has no match, so far which is my reason to hope that ED has many years ahead.
EDIT: What Helmut said
I would argue there is a big difference between sci-fi and space games. Space themed games will probably always be popular, space games like I would classify ED to be probably never really - maybe it's the flight sim-ish nature of it. Just the orgy you have to go through to set up and undertstand your controls alone pretty much disqualifies it for the masses.
People were waiting for this feature with the coming of Odyssey, just go and look at not only reddit threads, but also youtube comments of people speaking of their disappointment and still existing desire to have it.
It certainly worked out for No Mans Sky, in it fulfilling the players' wishes and expanding the game with free content updates that people were originally hyped for in 2016.
No Mans Sky had a complete revival of interest and I'm certain that would apply for Elite Dangerous as well- the updates since 2024 shows that people are willing to come back and play when there's more stuff added.
Adding ship paints ad infinitum won't interest players forever, but I expect it'll still be a good low risk thing for FDev for now.
Edit: I would also like to add that most of the playerbase plays in Solo to avoid multiplayer shenanigans or plays in private with groups to enjoy the game on their own accord. In my opinion, ED could really use a rework of Crime and Punishment versus other players especially- Many others seem to agree on that.
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Not arguing against that. There are the run-of-the-mill stories which can play in (almost) any time and setting (medieval, fantasy, futuristic, WWII, apocalyptic, zombie and any random combination of them) and then there are games where the setting itself is more important than the story line.
ED is indeed more of a space ship simulator than any other released game on the market. Therefore, a niche but a survivable niche for the time being. And as long as FDev keeps working on ED, I don't have to worry what to play, instead
At least they seem to have a strategy how to keep it not only alive but create revenue from it. I keep fingers crossed that some of the upcoming content will interest me and I also hope that they will dare to create a bit of large(r) paid DLC such as interiors, atmo planets.
I'm not saying there's anything theoretically impossible about accurately scoping and estimating IT projects, I'm saying that we shouldn't be predicting that Frontier will at any point do that for Elite Dangerous.
There's reasons for that.
- Setting a game in space introduces a whole bunch of technical and gameplay challenges which there isn't a massive genre of experience of solving. Making it multiplayer makes them even more complex. You pretty much need a custom-built engine, which is an added expense most developers can't afford.
- You're not going to get huge sales - sure, you could probably beat ED or X4 with the right combination of marketing and technical quality, and it'll probably make some sort of return on investment if done reasonably well, but you'll have to put in a lot of money to get there. So you really have to want to do a spaceship-flying game.
- Because there are so few modern spaceship-flying games, "similar" gets stretched quite a bit. KSP and X4 and ED and NMS are barely in the same genre and still leave huge gaps between and outside them where there's no game at all.
Egosoft will do X5 at some point; it'll be good at what it does but still be singleplayer and still be set in a relatively small environment for "space" with no planetary exploration, because the basic X series concept wouldn't work as huge-environment multiplayer [1].
There have been a few attempts at similar(ish) multiplayer spaceship-game projects since ED's release - Starbase or Dual Universe, for example - but they've failed to get anywhere in terms of players or working products. KSP 2 ran into a development death spiral too when it "should" have worked on paper. It's not that no-one is trying, it's that no-one else is succeeding. Maybe the next one will, of course.
[1] It's debatable whether the basic Elite series concept does, for that matter, but it's certainly a better fit.
By money spent, yes, but by total player count Elite Dangerous is significantly ahead. SC has a completely different business model involving selling a relatively small amount of copies to people willing to pay a lot for them (which is why they then reinvest heavily into further marketing)
Hopefully not just the devs are elite fans and we also have the people telling them what to do, are fans as well. Fans that actively play the game.
Empty galaxy.....empty planets...static 'exo biological life' ...stellar phoenomena that you barely interact with, and tons of synthetic time sinks and repetitive gameplayless loops.... Limited game mechanics.... These are all things that could be focus points that would improve the game for all.
it would be nice to see some of the above get some love. Or for fdev to embrace mods and such so the players can do it. I'm not holding onto much hope we'll see any of that change though.
Empty galaxy.....empty planets...static 'exo biological life' ...stellar phoenomena that you barely interact with, and tons of synthetic time sinks and repetitive gameplayless loops.... Limited game mechanics.... These are all things that could be focus points that would improve the game for all.
it would be nice to see some of the above get some love. Or for fdev to embrace mods and such so the players can do it. I'm not holding onto much hope we'll see any of that change though.
The point of measuring NMS to Elite Dangerous is to see how it fulfilled its promises to the backers and even created tech that people would say is "impossible" to create for ED today.
Despite its many setbacks, NMS lived up to the customers' expectations.
ED has a good foundation and leaves no solid answer as to whether it can still happen...
They also have a ton of entry-level customers who paid 40-60 dollars to try out the game, and who will likely come to test it when it releases (or sue the game company if it never gets a full release).
My friend seemed to give up on our exobiology run for that reason. There's not much exciting happening besides finding Stratum Tect.
About modding: I am willing to bet if the source code or modding API was released to the players, we would have fixes to most bugs and have ship interiors and base building in less than a year's time.
ED has less concurrent players than SC. For example on Twitch there are currently 2300 Viewers of Star Citizen and a total of 635K Followers. Elite Dangerous has only
245 Viewers and a total of 308K Followers. So ED has around 1/9th concurrent viewers and less than 1/2nd Followers on Twitch.
ED is better on paper (more features, much bigger playable area, better gameplay mechanics). However, Star Citizen has much higher graphical fidelity, level of detail, better lighting, ship interiors and Earth-like worlds. ED looks like a last-gen game and the learning curve is steeper. Despite years of bargain discount sales of ED the player retention is too low. If ED gets a major graphics upgrade with (optional) global illumination + ship interiors then ED could once again have similar concurrent viewers.
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I said "total", not "concurrent". Last SC released figures (in 2022) it had 1.7 million copies sold. ED at the same sort of time had just over 5 million copies sold. I doubt SC has tripled its previous decade's worth of account sales in the last three years and ED won't have stood completely still in that time either.
High-detail graphics are basically the most expensive component of modern games by a large margin. That's part of why SC has cost well over 10x ED's development budget and why a lot of AAA games have similarly-out-of-Frontier's-reach >£100M budgets.
There's certainly not the budget to make ED prettier to that extent; there's a good case that with the benefit of hindsight Frontier should have made it slightly less pretty than they did so that assets were 2-3 times quicker to produce - lack of variety and heavy reuse of what they have has I feel been a bigger problem in practice for Elite Dangerous than the individual models looking slightly dated has been.
SC Oct 2022: "Today there are just over four million accounts with 1.7 million accounts of them having purchased the game,".
ED Sep 2022: by September 2022, over 4.8 million base game units were sold.
ED wins with total units sold, but drastically loses with player retention and total cosmetic sales.
Graphics upgrades can be expensive, but it's necessary to keep an online game up-to-date with the times. Eve Online has routinely received major free graphics upgrades and it looks gorgeous. For starters upgrading the lighting to ray-traced, global illumination or path tracing would do wonders. SC has been losing steam due to abysmal development progress, but it still makes (much) more revenue per year. EVE Online blows ED out of the water with annual revenue and concurrent players. Eve Online player stats: currently online on Tranquility: 27,530. Max (24h): 32,348 (2025-06-15 19:29:11). The developer CCP is transparent with server statistics while Fdev hides the stats.
CPUs, GPUs, RAM are much more powerful now. The last major graphics upgrade came with Odyssey in 2021. Upgrading the overall level of detail and lighting is long overdue and sorely needed. Some people care naught about graphics, but others find it crucial for a game's appeal and immersion.
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Space games, no.
Always online massively multiplayer persistent world first-person space flight simulators in a 1:1 scale Milky Way...that's pretty niche.
A comparison of concurrent players and the number of viewers of ED vs SC pretty much answers the question. There's a big gap on Twitch and YouTube.
That's true.
I wonder if that much higher annual revenue might explain why they have the money to fund graphics upgrades and Frontier doesn't. "Wouldn't Elite Dangerous be better if it had N times the budget?" is obviously true but also completely useless, since they don't.
In the meantime, spending their limited budget on making the existing stuff look a little shinier, rather than producing new assets to the existing standard, seems extremely wasteful.
(Given that their current graphics budget appears to be limited to "the squadron carrier is literally two fleet carriers bolted together", even "producing new assets to the existing standard" is probably optimistic)
Yes. But the polygons per day that a graphic artist can model, texture, animate, etc. are much more constant (sure, there have been some tooling improvements too, but not on the scale of the hardware advancements)
3-D graphics is nowhere near my expertise, but a 90s-era space game like FE2 I could make a new ship for that, and have it matching-quality with the rest of the game, in less than a day.
A 00s-era space game like KSP or Oolite it'd take me quite a while to match the quality (at least at level of detail, if not artistic sense) but I could do it given sufficient time.
A 10s-era space game like Elite Dangerous or X4 or NMS is well outside my capabilities to match no matter how much time I had.
A hypothetical 20s-era space game would be even more excessive in terms of cost per model.
And doesn't that say something about how much upgrading the graphics affects sales...
We don't know the concurrent player counts for SC. At all.
And the number of twitch streamers and viewers also tells us ... the number of twitch streamers and viewers.
(SC is watched, ED is played)
Fdev has been re-investing ED revenue into other game projects too. Particularly in the early years. No Man's Sky has a much smaller development team yet Hello Games has delivered many free updates + numerous graphics upgrades. NMS has lots of rich interactive biomes with procedural fauna. Meanwhile planets in ED are still mostly empty dust balls. It puts ED to shame.
We do have the Steam stats + viewer numbers on Twitch and YouTube. The number of followers is less than half for ED on Twitch. Across the board interest for ED is significantly lower. ED has better gameplay and features, but old, outdated graphics.
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Is SC even listed on Steam? Also people watching socials does not equal people playing the game.
The concurrent players on Twitch (people who stream the game) is also higher for SC than ED. There are currently 60 live SC streamers versus 23 ED streamers.
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