How does Elite Dangerous stay afloat?

aRJay

aRJay
calistan said:
Not a troll post - I genuinely love this game, although I haven't played for a while, but I logged onto the launcher today and saw the last update was in April. Based on previous experience that seems a long time ago. I assume it's still in active development, the forum is busy, but it's mostly experienced hardcore players. How on earth are they funding it?

I also occasionally play a flight sim, P3D, and I read that one of the major third-party add-on companies is about to launch a career mode module for it that seems similar to Elite's trading / missions thing. They'll have an in-game economy, you can accept jobs, move cargo and so on. Interesting, I thought, but then I saw that it's going to cost something like $15 per month. In other words, to keep the servers running and maintain the service for a niche market, they require a subscription that costs about as much as Netflix or Adobe CC.

I bought into Elite at one of the alpha or beta stages, and other than a few cheap cosmetic items I've contributed little towards the upkeep of the game over the years. I'm out of the loop, so I have no idea if there has been an announcement about a new Horizons-style paid upgrade or whatever, but long term, it is really feasible to keep an MMO going for X years on that initial startup cash?
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Remember that the forum is a subset of current and former players of the game and no indication of the numbers and make up of the actual player base.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
ithinkiam said:
Interesting stuff!
This bit is pertinent:

Elite was launched in 2014 so will be here until 2022-2024 :cool:(y)
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This is mainly an accounting thing so that profit and loss is measured correctly for tax purposes. (This being an accounting document, not a game design one)

Basically they're saying "we're almost certain we can get eight years of sales" so the accounting uses that, but the other bit "useful lives of over ten years" (and note the "over") is basically saying that so long as it's profitable it could go on indefinitely.
 

ithinkiam

ithinkiam
Ian Doncaster said:
This is mainly an accounting thing so that profit and loss is measured correctly for tax purposes. (This being an accounting document, not a game design one)

Basically they're saying "we're almost certain we can get eight years of sales" so the accounting uses that, but the other bit "useful lives of over ten years" (and note the "over") is basically saying that so long as it's profitable it could go on indefinitely.
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Agree. If we do our bit by buying upgrades and ship kits, then we'll keep the accountants happy.
 

calistan

C
Interesting replies, thank you. And apologies for the late resurrection of this thread.

So Frontier is doing well from other games, and Elite has sold more than I assumed. There can't be many other games with an centrally managed online component where you can buy once and play indefinitely, so props to Frontier for finding a way to make it work.

I hope if it ever does become a burden that they release the server code or throw out an offline patch or something like that, but I guess that's a long time in the future.
 
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