Although to be honest I am not really playing Elite much lately I'd like to spitball a few considerations about the game and the community after the first year, having followed the evolution of the game on PS4 pretty closely.
1) All reasonably-helpful indicators suggest that we are the smallest Elite community among the 3 platforms. The comparison with the other console, the Xbox1 is most interesting (PC is and will always be the first community). The numbers cannot be compared quite this straightforwardly (because the game has been out for much longer on Xbox), and should be taken with a pinch of salt, but consider:
The proportion varies, but it's always the case that the PS4 group is always at least 30% smaller than the Xbox one. The new improvements in Q4 will surely bring new players, to both consoles (and PC of course), but at this point I don't see this trend changing over time.
(I should mention that there's one case where this is different:
Xbox Mobius Members: 1700 (roughly)
PS4 Mobius Members: 1800 (roughly)
Why? No idea...)
I would also add a reflection on Wings/Groups. The Exodus Coalition (EXO) was founded pretty early in Xbox history (September 2015) and it is still today, almost 3 years later a very large, active and well-structured wing. As of today, nothing comparable exists on PS4, and most likely never will. We have a number of platform-specific wings, but none really on the scale of EXO, with over 1000 registered members. Even those groups that started out very strong (Crossbone Vanguard for ex.) and had the potential for growing into large and influential wings, failed to achieve a significant dominance. Again, there is no reason to suppose that PS4 players are on average any less committed gamers than Xbox ones, so this is very likely due to the smaller playerbase on PS4, never reaching a critical mass capable of giving rise to as vibrant an ecosystem of factions as the Xbox one. This is not to say that there aren't very active PS4 factions, but their size is -- on average -- almost always smaller than Xbox ones.
Why is this? The total number of PS4s and Xbox1s world-wide is, roughly, 75 millions vs 36 millions. There is no significant difference in "typical PS4/xbox owner" to justify a difference in taste in videogames, so why is it that the same game has a much smaller community on a console that sold over twice as many units then the other?
Two plausible/possible reasons:
Either way, it's disappointing that a console with such a wide install base did so poorly when it comes to Elite. (Some people have proposed the "The PS4 community had the NMS burn so they were less receptive to another space game" -- I think that's nonsense. If anything, they should've been happy to have another one. The opposite argument could actually be used: NMS has grown so much in the last few months that it's becoming a much more credible alternative to Elite...)
2) How many of the players who started on day one are still playing today? This is a very hard question to answer, because we don't have any reliable figure and because those who are regularly on the Forum, Reddit, or Discord are but a small fraction of the total players, so nothing very significant can be inferred from social media trends. We do have certainly observed a fragmentation of the community: people who still play regularly are now much more likely to be part of a group (exploration wing, PvP group, or anything else) than solitary players. I think that this general trend vindicates the assumption (common among all Elite players) that after the honeymoon period (which can vary in length) the game becomes a bit sterile unless one finds an out-of-game purpose to do things.
3) Frontier's support: we've been reassured many times that they are as committed to the PS4 game as any of the other platforms. But would they say anything different? Nope. Do we have a few PS4-specific lingering bugs/missing features that haven't really been addressed in the last 6 months or more? Yup. Not a complaint, just an observation.
Here's to another year, hoping that Q4 will liven things up!
1) All reasonably-helpful indicators suggest that we are the smallest Elite community among the 3 platforms. The comparison with the other console, the Xbox1 is most interesting (PC is and will always be the first community). The numbers cannot be compared quite this straightforwardly (because the game has been out for much longer on Xbox), and should be taken with a pinch of salt, but consider:
EliteOne subreddit: 9K subscribers
ElitePS subreddit: 4K subscribers
EliteOne Discord server: 1700 members
ElitePS4 Discord server: 800 members
Xbox registered FuelRats Members: 1008
PS4 registered FuelRats Members: 700
Xbox-tagged people on the Canonn Discord: 90
PS4-tagged people on the Canonn Discord: 45
ElitePS subreddit: 4K subscribers
EliteOne Discord server: 1700 members
ElitePS4 Discord server: 800 members
Xbox registered FuelRats Members: 1008
PS4 registered FuelRats Members: 700
Xbox-tagged people on the Canonn Discord: 90
PS4-tagged people on the Canonn Discord: 45
The proportion varies, but it's always the case that the PS4 group is always at least 30% smaller than the Xbox one. The new improvements in Q4 will surely bring new players, to both consoles (and PC of course), but at this point I don't see this trend changing over time.
(I should mention that there's one case where this is different:
Xbox Mobius Members: 1700 (roughly)
PS4 Mobius Members: 1800 (roughly)
Why? No idea...)
I would also add a reflection on Wings/Groups. The Exodus Coalition (EXO) was founded pretty early in Xbox history (September 2015) and it is still today, almost 3 years later a very large, active and well-structured wing. As of today, nothing comparable exists on PS4, and most likely never will. We have a number of platform-specific wings, but none really on the scale of EXO, with over 1000 registered members. Even those groups that started out very strong (Crossbone Vanguard for ex.) and had the potential for growing into large and influential wings, failed to achieve a significant dominance. Again, there is no reason to suppose that PS4 players are on average any less committed gamers than Xbox ones, so this is very likely due to the smaller playerbase on PS4, never reaching a critical mass capable of giving rise to as vibrant an ecosystem of factions as the Xbox one. This is not to say that there aren't very active PS4 factions, but their size is -- on average -- almost always smaller than Xbox ones.
Why is this? The total number of PS4s and Xbox1s world-wide is, roughly, 75 millions vs 36 millions. There is no significant difference in "typical PS4/xbox owner" to justify a difference in taste in videogames, so why is it that the same game has a much smaller community on a console that sold over twice as many units then the other?
Two plausible/possible reasons:
a) Elite came out on PS4 much later than on Xbox. So there was less hype for the game, and/or some people who own both consoles already bought the game (or maybe bought an Xbox only to play Elite). Also, there was already a much higher level of cynicism towards the game when it came out for PS4, while when it launched on Xbox everything was still new and exciting, so it might be that some potential PS4 buyers were turned off by reviews and stuff like Reddit posts complaining about the game.
b) Frontier did a really poor job promoting the game. I'm sorry to bash FDev, I don't particularly enjoy it, but this is undeniably true. The game came out on PS4 with little or no resonance on the gaming media (admittedly, it was an "older game", but still), and even for an "indie" game it got very little exposure. Almost all of my real-life PS4-owning friends had never heard of Elite before I mentioned it to them, or at least didn't know it was on PS4, and I heard similar stories from many others. Still today a large number of people on this very forum (not this section, obviously) and on Reddit still don't know that Elite is on PS4 as well as Xbox. We got a featured page on the PS Store for maybe 10 days, and after that the game fell into oblivion. There are probably economic reasons for this: minimal expense on advertising from FDev because the PS4 port was a "let's try and see how much more we can sell on this other platform, but let's not spend too much resources/money on the port" kind of thing.
b) Frontier did a really poor job promoting the game. I'm sorry to bash FDev, I don't particularly enjoy it, but this is undeniably true. The game came out on PS4 with little or no resonance on the gaming media (admittedly, it was an "older game", but still), and even for an "indie" game it got very little exposure. Almost all of my real-life PS4-owning friends had never heard of Elite before I mentioned it to them, or at least didn't know it was on PS4, and I heard similar stories from many others. Still today a large number of people on this very forum (not this section, obviously) and on Reddit still don't know that Elite is on PS4 as well as Xbox. We got a featured page on the PS Store for maybe 10 days, and after that the game fell into oblivion. There are probably economic reasons for this: minimal expense on advertising from FDev because the PS4 port was a "let's try and see how much more we can sell on this other platform, but let's not spend too much resources/money on the port" kind of thing.
Either way, it's disappointing that a console with such a wide install base did so poorly when it comes to Elite. (Some people have proposed the "The PS4 community had the NMS burn so they were less receptive to another space game" -- I think that's nonsense. If anything, they should've been happy to have another one. The opposite argument could actually be used: NMS has grown so much in the last few months that it's becoming a much more credible alternative to Elite...)
2) How many of the players who started on day one are still playing today? This is a very hard question to answer, because we don't have any reliable figure and because those who are regularly on the Forum, Reddit, or Discord are but a small fraction of the total players, so nothing very significant can be inferred from social media trends. We do have certainly observed a fragmentation of the community: people who still play regularly are now much more likely to be part of a group (exploration wing, PvP group, or anything else) than solitary players. I think that this general trend vindicates the assumption (common among all Elite players) that after the honeymoon period (which can vary in length) the game becomes a bit sterile unless one finds an out-of-game purpose to do things.
3) Frontier's support: we've been reassured many times that they are as committed to the PS4 game as any of the other platforms. But would they say anything different? Nope. Do we have a few PS4-specific lingering bugs/missing features that haven't really been addressed in the last 6 months or more? Yup. Not a complaint, just an observation.
Here's to another year, hoping that Q4 will liven things up!
