This is the exact point I was making about the difference between the "will buy anything" loyal community, and the much larger number of "people who play Elite Dangerous a bit" - and it's that much larger group who put in most of the game's ongoing revenue.
The "will buy anything" community did indeed get really hyped up on the original announcement. Most PC players active enough to post on the forum will own it, and probably make some use of it, and likely enjoy it too. The lesson here is that the "loyal community" isn't large enough, on its own, to make a major expansion a financial success.
It's a niche game. Hard for me to believe most of the revenue is coming from "people who play Elite Dangerous a bit" rather than those who are more committed, but I would love to see the actual numbers. I know I wouldn't be buying things from the arx store after they jacked up the prices if I weren't committed to the game but that, of course, is anecdotal.
The "big mistake" was unfortunately made back in about 2018, when they decided that "space legs plus tenuous atmospheres" was a reasonable scope for an expansion that they could develop in ~2.5 years and sell at full price to the majority of semi-active players. They were wrong then on timescale, on price point, on market size, on ability to sell to consoles at all. After that - with the benefit of hindsight - all they could do is choose exactly which mode of disaster they wanted it to be.
(Did they pick the optimal one? Probably not. Did it really matter by early 2021 exactly which they picked? Probably not.)
Much as I enjoy space legs, the decision to develop Odyssey was wrong. Frontier did not have the required resources to do it properly. It was also a mistake to hype up future game development by selling last chance lifetime expansion passes just before Horizons launched. Did they know they weren't going to be able to live up to that "promise" but did it anyway for the money? Or were they simply incompetent?
You can derive a fair bit from things like squadron and powerplay leaderboards, station traffic reports, third-party tool use, and so on. There's a lot of information directly or indirectly shown in-game about player activity levels. It's pretty easy to tell from those that "spaceship content" gets much bigger and more sustained spikes in player activity than "foot content" does.
But what does that really mean? That foot content is a mistake? Or that shoddily implemented foot content is a mistake? When the spaceship content is better quality and more varied than the foot content, it should be no surprise which one is more "popular."
But I think the main evidence is more about what Frontier has done recently to make Odyssey a more attractive purchase to the people who didn't already have it:
- cut the base price to £10 from £30
The base game is even cheaper, and currently free on Amazon Prime. I don't read much into that other than a 10 year old game is going to be discounted. Odyssey is more than 3.5 years old and most games get significant discounts after a year on the market.
- made it the way to get four new spaceships
Great way to stimulate sales. Buy new ships individually, or get them at a better price by buying Odyssey.
- introduced one novel piece of on-foot content in the last two years (Thargoid Spires)
- had exactly one CG which required Odyssey (they used to have Horizons-exclusive CGs quite regularly, with the first one just a couple of weeks after it released)
Is that the sort of thing that Frontier would do if - post-fixes - Odyssey was selling well as an expansion and their internal metrics showed lots of players were spending lots of time on-foot?
Seems like poor management to me. Providing fewer things to do on foot is not going to stimulate on foot gameplay and more Odyssey sales. "Look, when we don't give them reasons for playing on foot, they don't buy Odyssey. Obviously, on foot gameplay was a mistake." Holy self fulfilling prophecy, Batman!
I quite like a lot of the on-foot content; I think it fits nicely into the Powerplay rewrite, exobio is a good addition to exploration to bring a lot of formerly boring ice balls and rocky moons to being more interesting, the ground CZs make a nice "quick action" break from the more thinky bits of the game, the NPC responses to player actions are a bit more coherent, it isn't embarrassed to have implemented illegal actions. I still don't spend that much time doing any of it, compared with the spaceship-flying content.
So you fly your ships more than you go out on foot. That doesn't mean the on foot portion of the game is not worthwhile. The fleet carrier is my favorite addition to the game, but the vast majority of my play time is spent off the carrier. By the same token, being able to set foot on strange new worlds is a great addition to the game even if I spend more time in a cockpit.
Some players just want to pew-pew. Some just want to explore. Others want to be space truckers. Some want to mine. Some want to raid settlements on foot. Some want to steal things. Some want to race SRVs. The more things we can do in this virtual galaxy, the better. Odyssey was a mistake only in that Frontier didn't have the resources to pull it off. If it was in the shape it's in today at launch, I'm confident it would have been successful.
Agree that exobiology needs some more fleshing out, there should be some form of alien ecology taking place.
