Elite Dangerous developer Frontier sanctions hiring freeze, spending cuts, and layoffs

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Old Duck

Old Duck
fennster said:
Don't shoot the messenger. This caught my eye and feel it is relevant to the forum. That is my sole purpose for sharing.

Link contained within article also...

Organisational review and trading update 17th October 2023
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I personally appreciate it. I have no commentary on it one way or the other (still have to read the article), but I find the business side of Frontier (especially when it comes to Elite) to be interesting for a variety of reasons, and I wouldn't have known about this article if you hadn't shared it.
 

fennster

fennster
I have used the title provided by the article. It does continue with...

"The company said it must "create a sustainable foundation for the future.""
 

Shadowsnog

Shadowsnog
fdev isnt just elite... their other titles werent doing well. and underperforming in this economy? it was to be expected. ed is still their best performing product (afaik) so hopefully them making plans for the future will be strengthening their best title. maybe after aftermath we will get elite dangerous: foundations :p
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
fennster said:
I have used the title provided by the article. It does continue with...

"The company said it must "create a sustainable foundation for the future.""
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I just read the article, and it also makes clear that the entire gaming industry is suffering at this time. I think it does a good job at focusing on the facts, which are mostly quotes from Frontier itself.

I have some thoughts about this (gaming in general), but I'm going to let those thoughts cook for a little longer before pulling them out of the oven.
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
I do find it not unnatural that FD would undergo a cycle where progress slows generally down. You make a couple big games and then you might have staff you just have nothing to work at because there just isn't the same demand anymore.
 

Christopher Roberto

C
Shadowsnog said:
ed is still their best performing product (afaik) so hopefully them making plans for the future will be strengthening their best title.
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Depends how you define best performing. Total revenue is high because it's been around so long and the community didn't abandon it. But their dinosaur games were faster producers. Unfortunately that has led fdev to chase these kinds of "management" games, leading to the disaster that was F1 Manager, and I think they have two others in the works rather than focus on ED. Their business strategy since the kickstarter has been scratching lottery tickets rather than grow their community and they didn't have a lucky penny.
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
EUS said:
Is it normal in the industry to require such a huge headcount? 800 people seem excessive for a few videogames.
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For big projects, yes. FD has had multiple projects simulaneously. And recently they opened the publishing branch which I heard would be discontinued. If that is true you have a couple layoffs right there.
 

marx

marx
Meanwhile, FDEV share price has been going up after this (so far).
I'm not making any judgements either way, I just thought this would be worth mentioning here for some extra information. Maybe it'll be worth pointing back to whenever its movement will try to be used as evidence next time.

EUS said:
Is it normal in the industry to require such a huge headcount? 800 people seem excessive for a few videogames.
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There are some pretty huge numbers in the industry, yeah. Epic Games recently laid off 800 people, which was a fifth of their workforce. Or let's see, Star Citizen apparently had 1,100 employees in July this year, plus third-party partners.
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
marx said:
Meanwhile, FDEV share price has been going up after this (so far).
I'm not making any judgements either way, I just thought this would be worth mentioning here for some extra information. Maybe it'll be worth pointing back to whenever its movement will try to be used as evidence next time.


There are some pretty huge numbers in the industry, yeah. Epic Games recently laid off 800 people, which was a fifth of their workforce. Or let's see, Star Citizen apparently had 1,100 employees in July this year, plus third-party partners.
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You know why it goes up? Because the market expects cost cuts to have a positive impact on the bottom line - and since you value share on profit / share price that share becomes more attractive to buy.
Yeah, Star Citisn't allegedly has a thousand. Almost unbelievable how little progress they make with so many staff.
 

Marvin the Martian

Marvin the Martian
A completely misleading title. Fact is, the tech industry has been hammered with layoffs over the last year. In fact, from that article is this:

To call those the tip of the iceberg would be an understatement. Over the past few months, workers at studios including Blizzard, Roblox, Team 17, Naughty Dog, Keywords, Harebrained Schemes, Striking Distance, Ascendant Studios, Visual Concepts, Blackbird Interactive, and many, many more have all been impacted by an ongoing spate of layoffs that have sent shockwaves cascading throughout the industry.​
​
And that's not counting Amazon, NVidia, AMD and others who have laid off 10's of thousands of workers over the last year.

The problem with technology is that about half the time they are working on a way to automate your job. AI is going to kill a great many tech jobs. It has already. It will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
 

fennster

fennster
Marvin the Martian said:
A completely misleading title. Fact is, the tech industry has been hammered with layoffs over the last year. In fact, from that article is this:

To call those the tip of the iceberg would be an understatement. Over the past few months, workers at studios including Blizzard, Roblox, Team 17, Naughty Dog, Keywords, Harebrained Schemes, Striking Distance, Ascendant Studios, Visual Concepts, Blackbird Interactive, and many, many more have all been impacted by an ongoing spate of layoffs that have sent shockwaves cascading throughout the industry.​
​
And that's not counting Amazon, NVidia, AMD and others who have laid off 10's of thousands of workers over the last year.

The problem with technology is that about half the time they are working on a way to automate your job. AI is going to kill a great many tech jobs. It has already. It will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
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Which bit of the title is misleading?
 

Phoenix_Dfire

Phoenix_Dfire
Its a pity about the F1 game, the 2023 version is an improvement on its predecessor and I'm quiet enjoying it, but when you look at what's happened with the share price and lack of profits, you are reminded that it's not a Games Business, its a Business that makes games (i.e. the priority is on the Business). It's a horrible thing to happen to the staff. Personally, I've been on the receiving end of this a couple of times and its never pleasant. In most cases I've been able to get a better paying job within a couple of weeks (The benefits of working in IT). However when you have to leave a job you actually loved doing, it is a real kick in the privates.

No doubt, this will lead to a whole new round of DOOM (tm) speculation. :rolleyes:
 

yianniv

yianniv
Phoenix_Dfire said:
Its a pity about the F1 game, the 2023 version is an improvement on its predecessor and I'm quiet enjoying it
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I've not bought neither F1 game, but I happened to read in their forums that they wouldn't support the first one anymore in order to focus their development of the second one. Maybe they succeeded, but it's not a motive to support a company that abandons their projects soon after release.
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
[mod hat on]

I am only going to post this once.

Having been made redundant myself earlier this year, this is going to be a very difficult time for some of the people at FDEV. Many of them will undoubtedly read this thread.

Please be senstive about what you post and your choice of words.
 

Marvin the Martian

Marvin the Martian
fennster said:
Which bit of the title is misleading?
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It makes it seem as if Frontier is the only one doing it. And all of the talk in this thread until I posted was pretty much exactly that: acting as though something was up at Frontier when the fact is it's the entire tech industry that is changing, and not for the better if you're a tech employee.

A more fair and disclosing headline would have been: FRONTIER JOINS RANKS OF TECH COMPANIES LAYING OFF WORKERS.
 
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