Frontier's Annual Results have been published (June 2018 to May 2019), showing a record year and Elite passing 3 million basegame sales

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
CMDR CPT. Boris said:
To be honest i sank i big chunk of money into ED with the cosmetics (more than 500£). I won't pay for other updates since i have the lifetime pass.
we should have atmospherics by now, the dev pace is utterly slow and secretive so it's just speculation really.

I never said there will be 1 big expansion per year (seasons), FD did.

Thankfully they were not.
if you are referring to multi-crew, arena, powerplay, camera suite, holo-me, night vision, codex, FSS, the new mining update... most of them should have been in the game since the very beginning and they are for the most part QOL

I would called them "cool update but not the update we are all waiting for"
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Ah, you belong to the school of thought that says devs should have done everything at once, before release.

Okaaaaaay....
 

hems303

hems303
NeilF said:
Excellent! Maybe they can afford to move some of those people back onto ED now? ;)
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Won't be happening (with the exception of the 2020 update): If you carefully delve into the double speak of the OP last paragraph, it pretty much says that Frontier have changed their policy (financial/accounting/actual) of ''capitalising'' the free updates of the published games.
The ''high'' previous expenditure or ''capitalisation'' on these ''free updates'' was due to the then large deployment of staff on these activities. This has now, going forward, changed to focusing on ''chargeable products'' i.e. redeploying the bulk of staff and ''capitalisation'' onto new products that make the most money going forward. As I read it; this means that Fdev have no intention of significant ''capitalisation'' on Elite Dangerous/Horizons in the future. We know a ''skeleton'' crew are now working on the base game to ''continue to support existing players''. Whilst a ''capitalisation'' crew are beavering away at the EDH 2020 ''Update''; and I extrapolate that with the change of ''policy'' once this new EDH ''PDLC'' is published in 2020 the ''capitalisation'' will again move on to fresh new products that make the most money going forward, leaving a minimal ''maintenance'' skeleton crew to ''continue to support existing players''.

Final thoughts:

(1) Major bug fixes that have been needed from time in memorial, surely require considerable input from the original game coders and I guess THEY are working away at new ''capitalisation'' or optimum money making projects..... leaving our much asked for myriad of bug fixes languishing in their wake (Unless of course, the 2020 ''PDLC'' revamps the whole EDH ''canvas'' giving us a fresh bug-free EDH picture????)
(2) We sort of knew of this state of affairs from circumstantial evidence but here in black and white is FDev's stated intention and policy going forward into their ''new'' financial and publishing territory. We have to remember that first and foremost Frontier are a business with responsibilities to their shareholders and not in the business of addressing our every wish and desire as the users of their products.

o7
''Capitalisation of development costs on franchise assets and other game related intangibles accounted for £14.8 million in the period (FY18: £13.4 million). As a consequence the percentage of gross research and development costs which were capitalised reduced to 70% compared to 85% for the last financial year. This reduction resulted mainly from the interaction of two factors. Firstly, the Company refined the application of its capitalisation accounting policy with effect from 1 June 2018, such that only development activity associated with new chargeable products would be capitalised (subject to the usual criteria set out under accounting standard IAS 38). Secondly, during the first six months of the financial year a substantial number of Frontier's development team were engaged on the Beyond series of free updates for Elite Dangerous (which concluded in December 2018) and a number of free updates for Jurassic World Evolution and Planet Coaster. Whilst costs for those activities were not capitalised during the period as they were developments of existing released products rather than new products, Frontier believes that investment in free updates is an important part of its strategy in supporting and nurturing games after launch. A higher percentage of costs were capitalised in the second half of the financial year and to date in the current financial year as a greater proportion of staff have been working on development activity associated with new chargeable products, including paid downloadable content (PDLC) for existing game franchises. ''
 
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obliterator

O
CMDR CPT. Boris said:
if you are referring to multi-crew, arena, powerplay, camera suite, holo-me, night vision, codex, FSS, the new mining update... most of them should have been in the game since the very beginning and they are for the most part QOL
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This kind of reasoning is the very reason why Star Citizen is failing to release. It's more efficient to release a "lean" product and then to improve upon it with user feedback, than to try to make everything perfect right at the start and take forever to deliver (and sell ships for real money to support its development since they don't make money from sales).
 

Ezren

Ezren
obliterator said:
This kind of reasoning is the very reason why Star Citizen is failing to release. It's more efficient to release a "lean" product and then to improve upon it with user feedback, than to try to make everything perfect right at the start and take forever to deliver (and sell ships for real money to support its development since they don't make money from sales).
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When you're building a house, step 1 is not "build a whole entire house".

People wanting everything, immediately, have a bad grasp of development and how integrating features one at a time allows for tuning. Like, the scope of some changes is huge.

Space Legs is a whole huge thing, there's got to be a full character model for every NPC, space for commanders to traverse, an integrated reason to use it, mechanics to go along with space legs to make it meaningful, activities to complete, controls that are responsive but not too jumpy, instancing for on-foot commanders in areas could create challenges, what about interactions are they going to be through a menu, will it be first-person, have to make sure it works with VR too, people with HOTAS will have to control a person with a flight stick so GOOD LUCK, don't forget the consoles will need controls mapped as well, don't forget new textures for interiors, plotting out interiors of the ships individually, is there going to be collision detection with other commanders, better make sure it's not possible to block up doors if there's collision.

That's all without any Space Legs combat.
 

Garbarrage

Garbarrage
StuartGT said:
Not entirely accurate; they'll let NDA'd people know.
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I doubt it. NDAs are very hard to make stick. There's a bunch of ways around them. If there's something that's particularly sensitive commercially, such as in this case, I reckon there's a handful of people who know that number.

I'm delighted that Frontier are doing well. But as far as Elite is concerned, a lot still hinges on the next big update. It's in a natural ebb at the moment. Looking at the Mobius PG the last time I was on a week or two ago. 20k players all offline. That would be concerning despite the financial report.

No doubt Frontier will continue to thrive, but the level of development depends on the demand for a title.
 

CMDR CPT. Boris

CMDR CPT. Boris
Agony_Aunt said:
Ah, you belong to the school of thought that says devs should have done everything at once, before release.

Okaaaaaay....
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of course not, but they "sacrified" new content over QOL, which again, is not a bad thing if the dev wasn't that slow.

But in 5 years, with all the money flowing like a casino, they fleshed out mining, a bit of exploration with the FSS, it took 3 years to have ship naming, (3 YEARS !!!).
We still have bugs older than most commander's kids, CQC is dead, multicrew is dead, should i start talking about ARX, engineers maybe ?

no mans sky did a great job, i never played it but i followed the updates and new content, it looks like another game since lunch.
on the other hand we have star citizen, no need to explain.
so elite is more or less in between i would say.

it's just incredibly slow, where are the new icy planets ? if i remember correctly it was supposed to come with fleet carriers in the end of 2018 ?

my point : They certainly could have push a bit more instead of just doing (almost) QOL updates.

it's been 5 years folks...
 

I.M.StarStuff

I.M.StarStuff
can we have a meet where all 3 mill login for just a short time? On some special day well organized? Is it possible? Comon we can doit! At least 2.8mil login at once? Please...

the last hype they could drum together about 14k for the dw2 ,and we all remember what happened there

hell, gimme at least 2.8k login at once ;)
 
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