If you're wondering where Frontier's attention is directed at...

First off, I'm just sharing this because judging from the view count of 165 views on Youtube as of posting this, and the fact that the video is unlisted, I don't think this video has caught the eyes of some people wondering where Frontier's attention is directed at with regards to their list of supported games.

As a quick summary of this 4 month old video with regards to Elite Dangerous, there is little mention of Elite Dangerous apart from a small mention of supporting the game.

The document is public for quite some time (December/January) and can be found here:

Scroll to the bottom and there is a link to d/l the document

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The document makes if obvious they had 1.3 million ponds losses for the first 6 months of FY2022
And that was due to the failed EDO launch and the 6-7 months of dev crunching to fix it.

The net effect of the meetings and discussions analyzing the results for the first half of FY2022 are obvious already:
- budgetary cuts for Elite team leading to less CM involvement, less dev costs (console canceled, "fixing" of planetary tiling dropped as being to expensive on resources)

Fortunately they didnt decide to shut down the servers so we still have a game to play - much to my delight and probably to many others.
 
Did she leave after the 12 months communication blackout on consoles was ended or pushed. She was the Senior Comunications Manager at Frontier... or so Linked In says, ha ha ha! :ROFLMAO:

And what is the funneh part?
According to the same Linked in she used to work for the same company between 1y7m and 2y5m, since 2012 to present day having worked for 5 companies averaging almost 2 years at each company
🤷‍♂️
 
If we are tinfoiling, I've been half-entertaining a "conspiracy theory" I made up in my head, out of nothing, that when the communication blackout happened; On top of return-to-office, post mortem on past year, and planning for the next, maybe the CMs made an ultimatum of sorts, along the lines of: "We're not going back out there, until you have something we can tell them!", leading to: "Can you do it? You've got a month to collate your work so far, and find out, and try some new stuff - then we cut our losses". :p (EDIT:...about consoles, that is.)
 
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If we are tinfoiling, I've been half-entertaining a "conspiracy theory" I made up in my head, out of nothing, that when the communication blackout happened; On top of return-to-office, post mortem on past year, and planning for the next, maybe the CMs made an ultimatum of sorts, along the lines of: "We're not going back out there, until you have something we can tell them!", leading to: "Can you do it? You've got a month to collate your work so far, and find out, and try some new stuff - then we cut our losses". :p

I concur on the second part; Update 11 was a step up in quality imo.
 
That's so odd. A link on their corporate website leads to an unlisted video on an employee's personal youtube account. I mean, go off?

Well, the person was Senior Studio Communications Manager (Internal Comms & Corporate Affairs) - serious stuff 🙃
 
I can only speak for Horizons, but I started an alt some months ago. Only played it for a few hours a week, and it was easy to make progress. I got a few good ships, unlocked some engineers, made credits doing community goals..

One-two hours daily is more than enough to enjoy this game. Perhaps it's the ideal time commitment even.
 
Another bit that stood out is the statement about Lemnis Gate being put on an accelerated amortisation schedule given the lack of retention/growth after the launch. One of the reasons to put products on accelerated amortisation schedules is when you think the product is mainly going to generate taxable revenues on the short term and/or "die" relatively soon so you can get more tax deductions early on as well; instead of spreading them more evenly to future years where you actually may not have too much taxable income to deduct from.

Well, Elite or EDO weren´t explicitly mentioned to be under such an accelerated amortisation schedule, unlike Lemnis Gate. To the contrary the way Elite and JWE were referred to suggested a more classic depreciation mode for those. Which indicates FDEV still expects more consistent Elite (and JWE) taxable revenues for a reasonable time ahead.
I noticed that too. While the base game dev costs are certainly fully amortized by now, I do think we can take some comfort from the fact that EDO wasn't mentioned in the same terms as Lemnis Gate. Between that and DB's comments about steering the ship, it does sound like they are planning on a normal lifespan for EDO. Which, from their "create and nurture" commentary throughout, I guess means they still plan to maintain it (and get revenue from selling copies) for another 4-5 years. That's good!

There was actually one other oblique reference to ED development costs - in the discussion on capitalizing R&D expenses. Ongoing ED development pulls down the percentage of R&D they can capitalize (i.e. turn into sold products) because it goes into free updates. DB said that percentage was abnormally low last half-year because they spent a lot on post-release Odyssey updates, but they forecast that returning to their usual level going forward. From that I think we can read that the intensive Odyssey-fixing push is done, but we can expect to receive the same level of maintenance work that was typical in past years. TBF I'm not really sure what that means in practice - Horizons (and Beyond, remember that?) were marketed as ongoing "seasons" of rolling content releases, but Odyssey was described as a basically feature-complete release. I don't think there's a clear precedent for what a "normal" amount of ED maintenance effort would look like from the outside.
 
It is clear that Elite Dangerous does not generate money for the company. In reality it looks more like a well to throw money in and this makes it clear why it is just mentioned.
Rightly the company goes on, we can only hope for the success of the other games so there may be money to be thrown away for free updates in Elite.
We are at the end of the game, at least until they create paid content, but up to that point Elite is the son who doesn't work and always asks for money.
 
Progress towards what?

When I play it's for the gameplay itself, as I've made all the progress I want to make and then some. Irony is that 99% of my "progress" sits parked in a hangar as I fly a shieldless Cobra into battle, which is way more fun than flying "end game" ships. Now I'll grant you that my Cobra has some modest engineering, but nothing that required me to play Elite as a full-time job. I'll also concede that I never fully appreciated the smaller, less-expensive ships until I got the "end game" ships and realized they actually took more away from my gameplay than they added. Maybe that's a lesson everyone needs to learn for themselves (well, at least the 10% of us who feel this way).

These days the only progress I'm interested in is moving the tier lines at a CG, and even then I'm only interested in CGs that are actually fun to play.



BTW - when I started playing, it was actually a lot harder to make progress than it is today, yet those early weeks are still my favorite memories of this game.
After getting corvette and G5ing it for PvP i noticed that no other ships except for PvP cutters and condas could even hold a candle to it. And even then the corvette is king of big ship 1v1s. I fell back to flying a DBX with 2500 hull (40+%resist all around), 760 shield (30% thermal resist 50+% others) and a 477 m/s boost. Its got LR fuel rails and a LR/TV fixed beam. I have never had more fun in a ship. Its an absolute blast to fly.
 
Hearing David Braben talking on this video, takes me back to a video where he spoke of having Frontier Developments, thereby being independent of the demands that another software company could make of any projects. Now, with so much emphasis on deadlines to satisfy investors, it looks to me that that independence was lost some time ago.
 
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