Yep, JWE sold 1m copies in the first five weeks after its release, at £45+ per copy. Well worth the £11-12m it cost to develop. More money for EliteAlready ?
Don't be absurd. You paid for it with horizons. What unsettles me with these kinds of posts is that FD are already behaving as if their baby is so valuable it warrants every cosmetic being something you must pay for at some pretty high rates.
Could you imagine if GTA made every customisation and major update in their game PAID content. Sure they're a large company. But besides the shark cards which aren't necessary, they could easily have milked the extra content in that game.
FD should not be further encouraged to the extent they are.
I dont think it was a mistake asking to pay upfront, I just think that the time taken to complete Horizons was more than expected. 1 year would have been great, 2 years people started to question all sorts of things, fairly or unfairly.
I do agree they have done exactly the right thing with Beyond (not just Q4) being free - bringing the game up to a very high standard before the next expansion which will be paid content.
I think the game is in a good place.
I'm out after mining. Squadrons have no real use to me, so I'll probably skip that part of the live stream and just glance at the recap. But the mining portion, now that looks like it'll be interesting for sure. Definitely more than the BGS stuff last time. Radio chatter is great though, as are the S&R signal sources. Beyond that though... I probably won't touch the rest outside of the beta.
Mate, if you're favouring GTA's P2W credit purchasing over micro-transactions for cosmetics, something has gone terribly wrong with your assessment. (Reckon you'd feel different if people were buying A class Condas on their first day + rebuys to burn).
FDev added an unroadmapped bonus year of support for Horizons, haven't dumped the game into maintenance mode (paid expansion coming too etc), and all off the back of cosmetics and existing sales. Really not some terrible demon of player exploitation that needs extensive reigning in.
If you don't want to encourage heinous activity like the above, don't buy any cosmetics
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I bought a bunch of paint jobs in the last few days for a couple accounts.
would gladly see some figures. my speculation is that this year they had bigger fish to fry, with the company change and dinos and all that. temporarily shifting focus from elite and having the game not generating revenue for a while would be acceptable because it had already done fairly well on sales and a future release is likely to do well too whenever it happens, year sooner year later, times 3 platforms. so this is sort of a filler year and all that's needed is a "free update" to keep it alive for a while. i have no idea what they make from the shop, it could be a fortune, but i don't think it would be critical for the project at all, it's already well covered by sales.
More money for Elite
Hope because there is another game in preparation I believe.
It's impossible to parse everything that's going on behind the scenes with FDev, but it does seem that dev continued in earnest on ED right through JWE's dev. IE 3.1 had running prototypes in Oct 2017 by Expo time, they have been working on 3.3 for 10 months, right through the peak JWE run up to launch in June etc.
There are doubtless co-dependencies with their other franchises, and if it turns out that full production on the DLC started post June that would be interesting. It's clear that your past argument that resources were diverted wholesale from ED due to JWE doesn't stand up though. They're still plugging in comparable dev to the Horizons Season, as a baseline. (And with the DLC running in parallel I'd argue more potentially).
On cosmetics, they've said in the past that resulting income justifies keeping a large team on the game & off-sets costs for running the servers, the databases, and keeping us employed to continue development of Elite Dangerous. So they shouldn't be underestimated. (PS4 launch was doubtless the biggest shot in the arm for the last financial year though).
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There are three games in various stages of development. Elite Dangerous has the largest devteam of all of FDev's games (ED, PC, JWE, 3x unknowns)
I'm eager to find out what the next expansion phase of ED is all about.
Come the new year im hoping for at least some news or an announcement. I know Fdev said that the next update will be a significant amount of time after Beyind finishes, but knowing what to look forward to is important.
Come the new year im hoping for at least some news or an announcement. I know Fdev said that the next update will be a significant amount of time after Beyind finishes, but knowing what to look forward to is important.
They'll tell us "4.0 is planned to take 18 months. It will give <drum roll> finite probes!"
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
Mate, if you're favouring GTA's P2W credit purchasing over micro-transactions for cosmetics, something has gone terribly wrong with your assessment. (Reckon you'd feel different if people were buying A class Condas on their first day + rebuys to burn).
FDev added an unroadmapped bonus year of support for Horizons, haven't dumped the game into maintenance mode (paid expansion coming too etc), and all off the back of cosmetics and existing sales. Really not some terrible demon of player exploitation that needs extensive reigning in.
If you don't want to encourage heinous activity like the above, don't buy any cosmetics
To each their own and I get why FD did it but personally if people wanted to buy A rated condas with their cash and that cash went into ED development AND it meant I could earn all cosmetics with in-game currency and missions etc then it would get my vote
It would mess with Open significantly. Like mess it up. In GTA Online what you got was guys in ludicrous armoured vehicles spamming expensive, deadly sticky bombs. Nigh all the races were set to 'custom cars on' and won by the most expensive vehicles & pimpings. It makes for a sour experience for anyone who wants to earn the win, not pay more to get it.
Engineering adds a 'time to reward' buffer, but you'd still see swarms of 'Harmless' Annies pumping out torpedos and suiciding into you because the cost penalty means zip. Pay2Win rarely makes for a fun gameplay dynamic for the average online punter
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I wouldn't pay a dime for a small update like the Q4 one. Last time I paid was for Horizons where they introduced planets you can land on. For the next paid update I would expect atmospheric landing at a minimum. We wanted to see some serious updates ... and we got "orrery" at the end? I don't want to criticize FDev and I am sure that they will put a lot of efforts in 2019 with their team of 100+ people. This game has the potential to be number one space sim - cross platform.
