Please be calm to FD – give them more time!
- Thread starter moonsword
- Start date
$150M not even out of alpha after 5 or 6 years and another ship sale for $340 (VAT in) starts today, for a ship that does not even have a game mechanic to support it so far in the alpha!
That puts having the Orca in game for purchase from release, with no passenger cabins available for a year as a minor oversight in comparison!
As being a ED Kickstarter participant and calling myself an enthusiastic ED pilot I want to see more features and content being implemented in ED more quickly.
Then I looked today at the numbers of sold PS4 stations.
More than 30 million PS4 stations are sold by now worldwide!
Let’s imagine that one out of three PS4 players will buy ED for his/her console.
This would mean roughly more than 400 million € cash (!!!) in addition to sold PC/Xbox One/Mac-version of ED for FD, probably even in this accounting year.
And more cash for FD means, more money to recruit more developers/designers/musicians/QA staff and for other investments.
The increase of the development staff will be very important for the further advancement of the game.
Therefore please try to be calm (I know it is hard… I feel your pain, it hurts me too...)
…But if you have some dough left in your pocket that you would spend normally for ice cream, cola and chips
… I would recommend to by some FD stocks instead.
(No, I am not employed by FD! ….. *opening his online deposit, grinning ecstatically while looking at the FD stock quotation *)
Firstly, there are more than 60 million PS4 consoles sold - by the time Elite releases on it there will be close to 70 million consoles. Although your estimates are probably false, it's safe to say that there will be more players on PS4 than PC and Xbox One combined. Let's say the real economy for Frontier will start after the PS4 release. It's possible that Frontier will not only get richer but will also grow which means the game will be able to develop at a faster pace.
This kinda makes me sad as it almost sounds plausible :|
I can't have been the only person to notice that development was, while slow, still moving on up until about 2.1. Then.... everything kinda stopped. Multicrew and Holo-Me were already being worked on when Horizons was just launched, and unless I'm mistaken (taking NOTHING away from the awesome art and audio folks - you guys just utterly rock), there's been no significant development since the Engineers hit. Sure, there's been little things here and there, and some suspicious texture alterations, but on the whole, I'm not aware of anything significant. Megaships, the ill-fated Ruins puzzle, not-Thargoids.. none of these things actually added anything to the over all gameplay. I thought The Ruins was, as I suspect everyone else thought too, a prelude to a huge new 'thing', involving a new species, or at least some new aspect to Elite that would have brought about new content.
Instead we get a broken minigame, and while there was plenty of (mis-typed)Lore, which was really good, it has led precisely NOWHERE. It's POSSIBLE they created the Thargoids, although that is just speculation from reading the lore, and if so, then that's great. But when does that manifest itself into GAMEPLAY?
We have the very sudden discovery of The Missing, a lore staple of Elite since the dawn of time. And again, nothing has come from it. We have more lore, and interesting ships to look at.. but that's it.
We had the publicity stunts involving not-Thargoids. Again, these were dramatic, awesome and... totally pointless. They felt like they were made for TV, designed to advertise the game.
I understand 2.4 will likely be the prelude to the whole Alien invasion thing, and I can probably understand why Frontier want to keep it as quiet as possible, so we are 'surprised'. But.. there is more to the universe than alien ships, and THAT is where communication is sorely needed to address the billion issues with the game.
It's not about giving FDev more time. It's about Frontier giving US more information, and not hiding behind carefully written PR soundbites.
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Not so "safe to say" in my opinion.
So far from what I remember Elite sold around 1.7M copies, 1 million of which appears to be on Steam according to Steamspy. So that's 700000 copies top sold on Xbone. As there are twice as many PS4, you should expect Elite to sell around 1.4M copies there.
PS: and I just found out Arena was removed from Steam AND the Xbox Store, while this now confirmed waste-of-development-time was supposed to help marketing the game for Xbone, so there won't be that for the PS4.
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Eloquently put, true and Repped.
I actually went and looked for a match last night... Couldn't even get past the mode screen. Is CQC dead?? Nothing happened. So sad... If it were worked on and improved by a million, it would be really, really good.
No, what will happen is it will pay for the development of their new game based on a movie franchise. Did Xbox sales speed up development of ED? Horizons sales were partially used to fund planet coaster.
Your avatar is awesome, leave it like that!
verminstar
Banned
Call me a skeptic but I honestly dont think 2.4 will be aliens at all...the game simply isnt ready to recieve unkillable aliens and from what we have seen already, they are literally unkillable with the ability to shut ships down to space wreckage at will. They even refill our fuel tanks remotely.
Can anyone in all honesty say the game is ready fer that?
Its their last trump card...their ace up the sleeve and while things may be disjointed and come together later, I just dont think that thargoids will be the glue that binds the various parts into a cohesive game...I do think they coming just not yet. More groundwork needs to happen and the snails pace canon needs to get their finger out and step up a gear or three.
There are other aspects which could pacify a restless playerbase, like the recently touted karma system. Now if that was 2.4, I might be not only tempted back but for the first time since day 2 in a brand new sidewinder, I might actually have a good reason to play in open. Or a reversal of the biege epidemic and a few other bells and whistles to keep explorers (like me) happy.
It wouldnt take much to restore some faith, but nothing from FD will mean nothing from the playerbase who is already jaded and left wondering what, if anything, happens next.
In the end, after numerous salty speculation threads, none of us really have any choice...either we wait or we dont. But as mentioned many many times, patience are not unlimited. In the end it always comes back to communication...or lack of ^
Isn't 2.5 years long enough?
Why should I give my trust to a company to finally spend time and effort on IMPROVING the game that's not shown themselves to be trustworthy in that regards in the last 2.5 years?
There's no evidence that they will spend any additional resources on the game once the PS4 release is out.
People were saying the same thing when the Xbone version released ("it means more money for ED so we'll get a better game!") and it never happened. Development of ED did not improve, if anything it got worse (mainly slower which at the time didn't seem possible given how slow FD seem to move).
Why should I give my trust to a company to finally spend time and effort on IMPROVING the game that's not shown themselves to be trustworthy in that regards in the last 2.5 years?
There's no evidence that they will spend any additional resources on the game once the PS4 release is out.
People were saying the same thing when the Xbone version released ("it means more money for ED so we'll get a better game!") and it never happened. Development of ED did not improve, if anything it got worse (mainly slower which at the time didn't seem possible given how slow FD seem to move).
As being a ED Kickstarter participant and calling myself an enthusiastic ED pilot I want to see more features and content being implemented in ED more quickly.
Then I looked today at the numbers of sold PS4 stations.
More than 30 million PS4 stations are sold by now worldwide!
Let’s imagine that one out of three PS4 players will buy ED for his/her console.
This would mean roughly more than 400 million € cash (!!!) in addition to sold PC/Xbox One/Mac-version of ED for FD, probably even in this accounting year.
And more cash for FD means, more money to recruit more developers/designers/musicians/QA staff and for other investments.
The increase of the development staff will be very important for the further advancement of the game.
Therefore please try to be calm (I know it is hard… I feel your pain, it hurts me too...)
…But if you have some dough left in your pocket that you would spend normally for ice cream, cola and chips
… I would recommend to by some FD stocks instead.
(No, I am not employed by FD! ….. *opening his online deposit, grinning ecstatically while looking at the FD stock quotation *)
Not sure if someone mentioned this already, but Sony is nearing 60 million PS4s in the wild now.
And I do think FDev and Elite will do very well on the PS4, and also feel FDEV is working hard to make Elite better every day which most of us appreciate
Yeah, and not being able to land on all planets might scare them off. Gonna be interesting.
Agreed. Mostly. Sort of.
You must be joking.
I have MANY people who own this game and don't play due to greifing, and unknowing about simple things like controller remapping.
These are the people I will be picking up, whenever they're ready to go make some serious advancements in their galactic careers.
Just knowing they have the game is a "wow" inspiring moment, and I, if anyone can get them back into the cockpit of their lovely sidewinder, to go make leaps and bounds in the black.
"Didn't happen on Xbox"
Tell that to 6b in assets, with the big-3 all A rated and fully Engineered.
o7 Xbox CMDRS.
your numbers are off and your estimates way over the top.
last i checked there are 53m of ps4 units around, and 27m of xboxone, while elite sales have now gone over 2 million (on pc+xbox). let's assume 3/4 of that 2m are xbox (generous estimate i think), that's
which is still a lot and a truckload of cash!
i doubt however that your assumption that this cash will go into reinforcing elite:dangerous development has any base. they have a well thought out business plan in which elite only plays a small role. but other than that (which was explained in detail in their last fiscal report) here's another quite revealing statement from david braben himself some time ago:
"We have an amazing player community. The average play time among our 1.4 million players is 60 hours – that’s a massive 84 million player hours and counting. With the community’s feedback, we’re constantly making Elite Dangerous better than ever."
two items stand out from this statement.
first, 60 hours average play time, and that's considered good. i assume braben has first hand hard numbers here. while it may be good compared to many other games, myself and many here in the forum have long ago surpassed 1000 hours.
second, the commitment to make the game 'better'. of course, but what does 'better' mean? this was said before horizons and landable planets, the only significant and indisputable improvement to the game since. everything else has been controversial to some degree and is basically a collection of isolated features including some serious flops.
it seems pretty clear to me that frontier caters to the big market, to get new players ready to spend 60h rather than thousands. that's good business, and understandable, but not good news for me. the problem here is that frontier doesn't actually need to invest big money in core consistent game development to appeal to those new customers. as a matter of fact it would be counter productive: it's about grabbing those sales the sooner the better, because the market will saturate soon anyway, and when those gents have done their 60h they will be gone for good. this explains the rush to reach out for mac, xbox, ps4 ... before the game is even half finished.
hey, i still love the game! but i have always been a bit of an idealist
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I hope this isnt taken as negative, as its not meant to be.
In my opinion FD, like any sensible company, are milking as much revenue as possible from a mid to late term product.
In that minor product updates are being rolled out to extend the products life within a limited resource and budget framework whilst FD work on getting their next idea to a position where it can sustain the company .... and so the cycle begins again.
In my opinion FD, like any sensible company, are milking as much revenue as possible from a mid to late term product.
In that minor product updates are being rolled out to extend the products life within a limited resource and budget framework whilst FD work on getting their next idea to a position where it can sustain the company .... and so the cycle begins again.
Blackcompany
Banned
Except that wont happen.
Console owners dont want a loading screen sim. They want GAME PLAY. And they have had nearly 3 years to see Elite NOT get any. To see CQC fall flat. To see Horizons not even meet internal sales expectations for Frontier. To see 2.3 release as a disastrous mess just because Frontier didnt feel like fixing bugs reported in a Beta they charged to access.
I will be surprised if Elite sells a million copies to actual players on PS4. This is why they are desperate for a physical retail release. They think they can trick retailers into buying millions of copies of the game world wide to sit on store shelves gathering dust. Because that's really the last cash injection they have left.
I look for the game to either be abandoned or go free to play or both after the inevitable failure of PS4 sales to inject the amount of cash Frontier needs to continue - or lets be honest, finally begin - actual, qualitative development of this tech demo they have released as a game.
I now realise why I have avoided this sub forum for such a long time.
How unbelievably negative. I'm a big advocate of voting with your feet.
If you don't like it guys then don't play it. Don't come here and post negativity for negativitys sake. It has a knock on contagious effect.
How unbelievably negative. I'm a big advocate of voting with your feet.
If you don't like it guys then don't play it. Don't come here and post negativity for negativitys sake. It has a knock on contagious effect.