Elite Dangerous has sold 3m copies, Horizons 1.3m (43% of basegame owners)

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Old Duck said:
After the NMS fiasco, I'm pretty sure that was a one-off.

I just researched another niche game that I recently bought, Nier: Automata, and it "only" has 3.5 million sales so far, yet is considered a huge success. There are a couple of differences between Nier and Elite - first, Nier is rarely on sale, and even when it is, it's still not "cheap". Second, AFAIK Nier does not have to support a vast server infrastructure like ED's BGS requires. That said, I guess 3 million is still a worthy accomplishment after all.
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Well, yeah. Nier-automata has been a hit, topped the charts at launch, received plenty awards etc. Its been a massive success with 3.5 million sales. :)
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
I can't find super recent info, but it seems that a 43% attach rate for the DLC might actually be quite decent. (Especially when you consider that it was launched with full game pricing...)

DLC attach rates are rising (2013)

17 per cent of Call of Duty players paid GameStop for Elite [EDIT: Oh well now that's just confusing], for example, and 30 per cent paid for Mass Effect 3's From Ashes.
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Indies like Crypt of the Necrodancer are looking at more like ~6% take up, with a few others in the vid seeing 10% to 15%.
 
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biot

biot
Interesting figures. By a very rough calculation of multiplying units sold by $, the final amount isn't far away from the amount raised by that other pre-alpha game that shall not be named.
 

Blackcompany

Banned
B
Ian Doncaster said:
That 3M can still also go up as well, though, as can the 1.3M.

Poking around some older figures that have been released.
Dec 2014: initial release, okay there were some pre-orders but let's round it to 0.0M
Dec 2015: 1.4M (just starting to include Horizons, XBox release Oct 2015)
Jul 2016: 1.7M
Dec 2016: 2.1M
Aug 2017: 2.75M (PS4 release June 2017)
Jan 2018: 3.25M
Jan 2019: 4.3M

Drawing a rough line through it that looks like pretty consistent ~1M/year sales of franchise units - and slightly more sold in the last two years than in the first two years.
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Which means the vast majority of copies sold, did so at far less than the starting price of $60.
 

Vedmo

Vedmo
Targeted release of next title, June 2019 to May 2020.

Surprised there's been no leaks, with it potentially being half a year out.
 

Jools

Jools
GonzoTheMalificent said:
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
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this is so not true... why do people repeat this silliness over and over
statistics don`t lie, statistics are just that, statistics... it`s the people (usually "journalists") who then take those statistics out of context without reading anything about the sample base or the methodology used to gather the data, and follow up with wrong conclusions and assumptions

statistics are very useful, and rarely wrong, it`s the subsequent analysis that fails
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
biot said:
Interesting figures. By a very rough calculation of multiplying units sold by $, the final amount isn't far away from the amount raised by that other pre-alpha game that shall not be named.
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And excludes cosmetics. Said it before: FD is financially bigger than CIG by a wide margin. Difference is that CIG loves to brag whereas FD loves to ptetend to be indie.
 

biot

biot
Ian Skippy said:
And excludes cosmetics. Said it before: FD is financially bigger than CIG by a wide margin. Difference is that CIG loves to brag whereas FD loves to ptetend to be indie.
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That's a good point. Even if all sales are counted at the discount price of $30 (which of course is not the case) it still grosses at near the $100m mark. Add in cosmetics ... really not a bad place for FD to be in at all. I've probably spent as much on those as the base game and I'm a stingy old git.
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
biot said:
That's a good point. Even if all sales are counted at the discount price of $30 (which of course is not the case) it still grosses at near the $100m mark. Add in cosmetics ... really not a bad place for FD to be in at all. I've probably spent as much on those as the base game and I'm a stingy old git.
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Dont forget JWE got a million sales, topping Steam, in the first two weeks or so, and PC has been doing stellar too. :p
 
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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
biot said:
That's a good point. Even if all sales are counted at the discount price of $30 (which of course is not the case) it still grosses at near the $100m mark. Add in cosmetics ... really not a bad place for FD to be in at all. I've probably spent as much on those as the base game and I'm a stingy old git.
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Yeah without knowing how much cosmetics bring in we're a bit in the dark. (Plus yeah, it's hard to estimate what unit sales brought due to sale pricing etc).

Would be interesting to know though. It seems that guys like EA, Activision and Blizzard make around 40% of their revenue from 'recurrent spending' IE 'digital item sales, DLC, season passes, and subscriptions'.

I'd imagine FDev will be pitching for similar territory. (If thankfully not via P2W lootboxes / top tier gear and all that game-design-tilting tat).
 

lysan

lysan
Kaltern said:
Yes but ME:A was an awful game, ruined by amateur developers, terribly project leads and a story that was attempting to include as many minority groups as they could fit in....which looked awful.

At least ED, regardless of its...many...flaws, is still selling, and growing in player base. And while the original ME trilogy was, more or less pretty good, it doesn't have the replayability that Elite does.

Besides, Frontier are so rich now they don't need to worry so much about ED sales rocketing.. and I suspect they are putting a LOT of effort into the next expansion... that really could make a big difference to the game's interest level I think.
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ME:A was horrible, I could live with the ugly graphics, now corrected, but the game play was and still is pretty bad.

Regarding ED they are getting there, slowly, but to sell more millions copies they need something to get the casuals into the game. ED is an open world game, and to bring in huge amount of players is not easy. Spacelegs with some good gameplay attached to it could bring maybe 1 or 2 million new players, however it really need to be connected to atmospheric worlds and some serious game mechanics around it.

A single play game using the ED galaxy with a good narrative would most likely sell a lot more, due to the fact that a lot of people still like to play single player games with a story attached to it.
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
lysan said:
A single play game using the ED galaxy with a good narrative would most likely sell a lot more, due to the fact that a lot of people still like to play single player games with a story attached to it.
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So, you're suggestion .. Elite : Squadron 42?

I heard DBOBE has Mark Hamill on speed dial ;)
 
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biot

biot
Out of curiosity I checked my store account, and it turns out that I have spent twice as much on cosmetics as I have on the base game + horizons. I also noticed that I am 2 days away from it being 4 years since I purchased ED :)
 

StuartGT

StuartGT
Golgot said:
Yeah without knowing how much cosmetics bring in we're a bit in the dark. (Plus yeah, it's hard to estimate what unit sales brought due to sale pricing etc).

Would be interesting to know though. It seems that guys like EA, Activision and Blizzard make around 40% of their revenue from 'recurrent spending' IE 'digital item sales, DLC, season passes, and subscriptions'.

I'd imagine FDev will be pitching for similar territory. (If thankfully not via P2W lootboxes / top tier gear and all that game-design-tilting tat).
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During the last financial year Elite Dangerous earned FDev £22m, with £4m of that coming from cosmetics sales:

[video=youtube_share;KT0O-xoBvs0]https://youtu.be/KT0O-xoBvs0[/video]
 
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