[QUESTION] Should game updates be paid for?

[Riverside]

Much like the original kickstarter concept, the LEP was also a 'pay up front' system.

This means the company gets a bunch of cash, to invest & use to generate future income. Without that initial fund, the company would have to put it's own money into a project until it's profitable in it's own right (ie spend years developing then get the money in a surge at the end).

I have an LEP too & I don't consider that 'investment' to have been spent poorly, either by me or by Frontier, so I don't see any need to pay more myself. I may choose to with skins etc, and if others do then that's great too, but there is no need.

If Frontier were to request some payment themselves (ie subscription to cover server running costs) I'd have to reconsider my position, but I plan to be playing this game for a long time so I probably would chip in to keep being able to play.

ED is my first 'online' game, I've never bought a game that depended on a server to keep running, and the idea that one day I may no longer be able to play a game I bought because of reasons beyond my direct control (eg PC backwards compatability, I still have a win98 PC for old games) does concern me a little.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Yes, when you force game updates on consumers and then leave them almost a month with a broken game I think it is only fair FD pays us for these updates...

 

[IndigoWyrd]

This is actually an interesting question, as it does bring up a very good point - the fact that we have, essentially, two separate games here.
We have the basic Elite: Dangerous, with all the flying around in space you could ever want.
Then we have Elite: Horizons, with all the dead, beige planets you could ever want to drive around in a spinoutmobile on.

But both are trying to tell the same story - of the discovery of a race of dead aliens, and a mysterious live alien.

Those playing only Elite: Basic are, essentially, shut out of the ruins of the Guardian civilization and all the associated lore, and I don't know if Hyperdiction can happen to them as well.

And this, I see, as a problem with the Season-based model we have.

Let's use this example - Season 3 : A Leg to Stand On
(I know, it's not going to happen, but bare with me)

Those who purchase this are suddenly free from their seats, can walk, run and jump around in their ships, or on stations, or - and where 90% of the "real" content is, on Planets.
Except, you're one of those hold-outs who didn't buy Season 2, but opted to buy Season 3.
You can walk, run and jump around your ship, or station, but without Horizons, you can't even make a planetary landing, and thus miss out on 90% of the content here.

Then, in Season 4: Guts and Glory, we gain access to structure interiors - planetary installations we can now walk around inside of - caves on planets we can explore on foot...
But your hate for Engineers keeps you from buying Season 2, so you only get to visit the bars of space stations, or finally leave the bridge of your ship and see the rest of it.

The season-based model fails you, and you either give up and find something else to do, break down and buy Season 2, or you stick to just flying around in space.

LEPers, you stay in your LEPer colonies and don't care, so you don't even get considered at this point.

But at some point the Season-based model really begins to show its weakness - too much content dependent on other content, all Individually Packaged for Resale, and a $30 game with ten years (seasons) winds up being a $330 game, if you come in at the end but want everything that is available - and essentially need it to get the whole experience.

But, at the same time, if this is changed - if the Seasons-based model is dropped, if new content is simply provided, then the LEPers come out of their colonies, dropping their angry bits all over, as they paid (too much) to always have this, and now, ten years down the road (or 5 years or even 2 years), the Brand New are getting what they paid (too much) for in the first place.

And then you have that other crowd.. the lowest of the low.. the ones ambulance-chasing shysters and flatworms look down on... the ones who actually WANT monthly or even yearly subscriptions. No one with a live brain cell wants another bill, and moving to this sort of model, after any period of time, is a death-blow to the player base. Fewer new players will come, and many long-term players will depart, and it will be known as Elite: Epilogue at launch.

So.. where does the line get drawn? At what point does it really become untenable to maintain two, or three or 11 different versions of the game?

And what should qualify as an "update" as compared to an "expansion"?

Other games have taken different approaches here - Witcher 3 sells their DLC that expands on an otherwise pretty complete base game.
No Man's Sky has given us two huge game-changing updates at no cost at all (Foundations to build bases and Pathfinder to craft surface vehicles - either or both could have been sold as separate DLC).
Star Citizen just sells you every ship you fly, individually, around what, one system? Maybe 2 now? I don't care.

Elite.. well, Elite just does its own thing, and that's fine. I really don't see any reason to change it at this point.

 

[Kayweg]

Fdev like any game developer of an ongoing persistent online world need above all to maintain 'Interest'. If interest falls the game dies.

If i was to be nickel and dimed every 3 months to pay for a new patch iteration and a handful of half baked features i have no doubt that i wouldnt keep up and then lose interest, the more i fall behind the more money it would cost to catch up and the less likley i am to return.

The season pass keeps me engaged because its simple and not a subscription model which i wont do.

All that would change is the payment schedule, instead of once a year (ok, 1½ years with season 2) you'd pay a minor amount every, let's say, 3-6 month.

Only, you get more choice, because you can cherry pick what you want and discard what you don't want, something the season pass didn't offer....plus there would be much less of that "buying the cat in the bag" feeling.

I also don't see them do away with the season pass altogether, why would they ? They can keep it for those who prefer it, but offer other options for those who don't.

For example, 3 content updates for 20 £/€/$ each, and the season pass for 50. Something like that.

 

[Cosmos]

Frontier announced a nice increase in profits this week, and congratulations to them for it. It's also brilliant that, aside from Seasons (of which we've only had one anyway) there's so much new free content in the game.

What? I gotta say this is one very weird post.

None of its free, the game costs money, so did the xpac, so too will everything else they produce. If you've got a lifetime pass you've prepaid for whatever they release for this game. Doing the lifetime pass also offers them a big boost of cash at a particular point in their dev cycle.

There's been so many new features in 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 (bugs aside) that it does leave me wondering if we shouldn't be, at least able, to pay a contribution to what could be reasonably considered new seasons in themselves.

Again, these aint free, they were paid for when people buy the game.

I say this because we all want the game to press ahead and develop. This takes money. As a lifetime expansion pass owner the only way I have to contribute is through buying items from the store, which many of you do as well. If I want to contribute to future development and help us get atmospheric landings, space legs, outpost ownership etc. I've simply no way of doing it. For all of you who had to pay for Horizons, Frontier did in my own opinion charge considerably less than any other games company would for the same thing.

You could write them a cheque if you want. Apparently they've got a 120 people working on the game atm, thats a huge number of people, they are obviously pumping out stuff as fast as they can.

So what are your thoughts? Is £10 or £20 or perhaps more for each expansion as they come through reasonable? Should there be another way to contribute to game development? Or do you believe the game is already expensive enough?

You want people to pay twice for the same thing? If folks want to they can throw money at them by buying the pap in the store.

 

[lenna]

But... is there an argument that, say, 2.2 and 2.3 should have been seasons in their own right, as each of them included as much new features and content as 2.0 did? #justAskin

Not a valid argument IMO.

It does not matter what features or how many are delivered in any given Season, FD decide if given features are included or not and that decision was probably made prior to the Season being put on sale (at least to a degree).

Overall, the fewer versions of the software that FD have to maintain/support the better it is for everyone involved.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

This is actually an interesting question, as it does bring up a very good point - the fact that we have, essentially, two separate games here.
We have the basic Elite: Dangerous, with all the flying around in space you could ever want.
Then we have Elite: Horizons, with all the dead, beige planets you could ever want to drive around in a spinoutmobile on.

But both are trying to tell the same story - of the discovery of a race of dead aliens, and a mysterious live alien.

Those playing only Elite: Basic are, essentially, shut out of the ruins of the Guardian civilization and all the associated lore, and I don't know if Hyperdiction can happen to them as well.

The biggest problem here is if you're playing on a Mac, because 2.x (Horizons) isn't available. Which means planetary landings are out, as are Engineers.

And the really annoying thing is that the whole 'Engineers are only on planets' thing is purely arbitrary. Put some on Stations and a lot of the Mac crowd (I used to be one) will be happier.

 

[ShimEnki]

I'm just throwing this out there because we all want more features and expansion in the game, but those cost money. They need developers, and so the more available cash the company has, the more developers they can hire... and so on.

So the theory goes anyway

They are already rolling in it up to their ears yet, bugs seems to thrive well beyond their identification in early beta and patches are months apart- so it seems anyways. So, na, their focus is on other games and no amount of more money will
change that.

 

[lenna]

The biggest problem here is if you're playing on a Mac, because 2.x (Horizons) isn't available. Which means planetary landings are out, as are Engineers.

And the really annoying thing is that the whole 'Engineers are only on planets' thing is purely arbitrary. Put some on Stations and a lot of the Mac crowd (I used to be one) will be happier.

Mac users should clobber Apple because it is Apple's fault Horizons can not run on Mac OS X (at least as I understand it... they seem to have refused to keep certain APIs up to date).

 

[Triple88a]

i dont see the problem with dlcs as long as they are reasonably priced for the content you get. For example, Horizons was 60 bucks... Blizzard charges half of that for expansions and their expansions are HUGE. They have a big update every 2 weeks or so.. With the amount of content we got with Horizons a reasonable cost would have been closer to 30 bucks.

The fact that the core game was very incomplete when horizons was announced was another nail in the coffin. Seemed like the devs were just trying to nickle and dime the players.

 

[lemny]

I think it is hard enough to implement the seasons in a way which allows a fragmented player base to be together on the same servers, each with different access to the seasons.
Fragmenting it within a season would result in chaos.

But I don't get why so many commanders are complaining about a few bucks every year (and a few month)... FIFA, COD and what ever are bringing every year the same stuff for full price.
In Elite Dangerous, every season fills our beloved universe with more new things to explore and we could use our assets for 10+ years of content.

 

[lenna]

i dont see the problem with dlcs as long as they are reasonably priced for the content you get. For example, Horizons was 60 bucks... Blizzard charges half of that for expansions and their expansions are HUGE. They have a big update every 2 weeks or so.. With the amount of content we got with Horizons a reasonable cost would have been closer to 30 bucks.

DLC type "software feature" expansions probably do not fit with the overall design approach FD seem to have taken.

I have also seen the curse of interacting "optional DLC" with the likes of Skyrim - sorry, but no thank you... even massive software houses have problems keeping their affairs in order wrt ensuring DLC does not badly interact each other (or the main application).

 

[MottiKhan]

Season 2.x is a season. We already paid for it. In my case, I paid for 3 of these. There's no way I'd pay again for "free" patches that I already paid for.

This thread makes my head hurt.

 

[ChrisT]

Im a founder, so I have a LEP in that respect. For me, I certainly want the game to go on, expand and realise its full potential. I kind of feel I've already helped out quite a lot in that respect, in kickstarting it in the first place.

So, Seasons. Personally, Id rather not see the commercial model work this way. Instead, Id rather see it as a yearly subscription. Say of £25 per year that gets you access for a year. I'd sell the game for £25 (years access), with maybe bundles, so you could buy the game for £45 for 2 years, or £60 for 3 years. Once your subs run out, its £25 for each year thereafter (price increasing from time to time for inflation).

With this in place, I would drop Seasonal access and get the entire player base in the same version. I'd expect Frontier to make the majority of their revenue on ED via getting in new players.

LEP would still be an option though....

Beyond this, and non pay to win revenue would be ok with me. People bleated that they had to pay a small price for name and ID plates. Thats just Frontier making non play to win revenue. Perfectly fine with this.

And in this way, I from time to time pop some ££ Frontiers way, by buying new ship kits, liveries, pilot outfits and whatnot. Seems fair enough to me.

But at the end of the day, its down to Frontier how they get revenue for the game.

 

[Triple88a]

DLC type "software feature" expansions probably do not fit with the overall design approach FD seem to have taken.

I have also seen the curse of interacting "optional DLC" with the likes of Skyrim - sorry, but no thank you... even massive software houses have problems keeping their affairs in order wrt ensuring DLC does not badly interact each other (or the main application).

you can call it whatever you like.. dlc, seasonal pass, expansion.. the end result is content that is unavailable until you pay for it.

obviously i'd like to purchase the game and have everything else for free but i also understand the devs have to eat.

What the devs should include in ed however is premium accounts that lessen teh grind, paint jobs, bobble heads. And then DLC costs should be priced to make up the costs after that.

 

[mono]

The free updates are all part of the season we paid for. And if anything every time there's a 'free' update there's usually some new revenue generation stream added as well.

 

[Arkku]

If players could mix-and-match paid updates freely, not only would it exponentially increase the number of possible sets of features that different players can have, but I think it would increase the risk for FDEV when a dud feature would not get any buyers, and thereby it would also increase the risk for customers buying said feature because development on it could effectively be abandoned if not enough people bought it to make it worthwhile.

Paid updates that stack with previously released paid updates (e.g., you need to pay to update up to a certain level, with price of old updates decreasing or even becoming zero as new ones become available), that's ok IMO. The size of updates can vary, e.g., currently Horizons was one big update but I don't think it would have made much of a difference to me if it had been three separate ones.

However, the problem with paid specific updates in itself is that it puts pressure on FDEV to make a constant stream of new features instead of, say, actually making most of the existing ones. In that sense I would prefer that all updates were free, and their revenue would be from either selling the cosmetic addons (paintjobs, etc.), if they manage to make them compelling enough. Of course that would mean lifetime expansion holders would effectively have just overpaid for Horizons (but maybe they could get some form of compensation, such as Frontier store credit)…

Subscriptions would be another way to bring revenue without having to always push some half-baked new feature, but that's even more problematic as existing customers can't really be expected to start paying for the game they already have. So all in all, I think the best practical options are: 1) free updates to everyone with income from cosmetic features, perhaps with occasional major features as paid updates, or 2) continue with the seasons model but limit the number of major features per season + spend the rest of the season perfecting it and the existing game.

 

[=71st=RuSh]

Will FD pay us for the beta test of their products? In fact we had to pay to be a beta tester! If we have to pay for a yearly or monthly license renewal, will be like EVE and many players will quit.

 

[rootsrat]

As a LEP owner, I'm completely indifferent.

 

[Triple88a]

Subscriptions would be another way to bring revenue without having to always push some half-baked new feature, but that's even more problematic as existing customers can't really be expected to start paying for the game they already have.

Well subscription doesn't have to be pay to play. It can be a pay and get say 25% boost or so forth. Say you want to grind money for a fancy new ship.. Subscribe for a month so you'd get more money and reputation per mission.