Faking financials is fraud and will get a company and it's officers in deep trouble..the chances Frontier borked the numbers is highly unlikely
Facebook likes are not financial information. It's not even illegal to fake them, it's merely against Facebook's TOS. Companies, even publicly traded ones, can purchase likes with impunity; the worst that could happen is their Facebook account being deleted.
I played Freelancer and enjoyed it much for many years both as a bare game and with mods....There is no way that Elite Dangerous is not a much better game than Freelancer....ED beats it hands down in every way that counts...visuals, number of places to go and things to do, political structures, flight mechanics and flight models, varieties of stations..for example, modders went to great lengths to mod the power systems of the original ships to give them more variety---something that ED does out the door in spades
Right now I do consider Freelancer to be a far better game than ED. Heck, I currently consider OOLite to be a better game than ED. More to do and far less boredom, and without all the many downsides of an always online model.
I sincerely trust the userscore far more than the metascore, to be honest. Critics have a tendency to give high scores for anything that doesn't crash and burn. Heck, a 86 score from a critic that described the game as broad but shallow? A 80 score from a critic that said that what the player can do is initially fun and engaging but ends up limited and repetitive? And this in a game that prides itself as an open-ended, open-world (galaxy?) game? I could understand not taking that into account while scoring if the game was still labeled as an Alpha, perhaps if it was labeled as Beta, but it's a released game, so it doesn't deserve any slack in this regard.
The correlation between likes and engagement is loose to be sure but to assert that it doesn't exist is foolishness...in social media promotion, user perception rules and the higher the number of likes, the better the perception of engagement, therefore the better the engagement---it builds like a snowball
It's why Nixon tried to claim that the silent majority was behind him, though that was before the time of social media. I've seen too much manipulation, too much astroturfing, in my life to ever believe something as easily manipulated as likes.
Yeah, there is a correlation between Facebook likes and engagement. The same way that there is a connection between a player dropping a game out of boredom and the game's dev going out of business. They influence each other, but one does not guarantee the other.
(And to build up like a snowball you need more than just perception, or else it will build up more like a bubble: quickly inflating, to then pop and disappear.)
Just for reference, I've recently watched the online reflexes of my country's presidential elections. In an even dispute, with about 50M votes for each candidate, the perception of which candidate was ahead varied wildly according to where in the Internet you looked. In fact, the candidate with the least Facebook likes won in the end. Perception is important, yes, but it's not everything, not by a long shot.
