Short answer is no.
Long answer is noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Long answer is noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Achilles7
Banned
You do realize that ED has micro transactions.. those are the cosmetic pieces......
Which have no effect in gameplay whatsoever, right?
You know you might get more traction in this discussion if you didn't come across as an arrogant .
You're spinning a corporate excuse line there whether or not you realise it. Cosmetics absolutely have gameplay value, if they didn't nobody would buy them. Most notably how cosmetic items in games used to be part and parcel of the experience, rewards for completing challenges or finding secrets. With those moved behind a paywall instead, that potential gameplay has been effectively removed. They've paid some lip service to this idea offering decals for completing some event CGs, but think how much cooler it'd be if all the paintjobs and ship kits and such were acquirable through in-game actions, as a way to show off your achievements and not just the depth of your piggybank.
Never forget this is a premium-priced game with damn near every single AAA or mobile game monetization tactic thrown in. Season passes, paid expansions, microtransactions that aren't even particularly micro (you can get entire games for less than some paint packs). I'm surprised they even had the restraint to resist putting loot boxes in. None of this should ever be acceptable in a full priced game, it's only the industry as a whole pushing the envelope bit by bit every year that has allowed them to get away with it.
Sounds like the problem is actually grind, if so why would anyone want it to go F2P?
Going F2P would surely make the devs even more likely to add more grind rather than less. Gameplay based around encouraging players to buy microtransactions,which to me is awful,are also encouraged by a F2P model. GTA V is a big offender in this area so only have to look over there too see how gameplay designed to push you towards MT's is horrible.
Id rather skins in elite were available to earn in game. BUT i think the implementation currently in elite,cosmetic,is the lesser of two evils when it comes to F2P business models so i put up with it. If it went F2P id be pretty sure we would see other types of MT's.
Going F2P would surely make the devs even more likely to add more grind rather than less. Gameplay based around encouraging players to buy microtransactions,which to me is awful,are also encouraged by a F2P model. GTA V is a big offender in this area so only have to look over there too see how gameplay designed to push you towards MT's is horrible.
Id rather skins in elite were available to earn in game. BUT i think the implementation currently in elite,cosmetic,is the lesser of two evils when it comes to F2P business models so i put up with it. If it went F2P id be pretty sure we would see other types of MT's.
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Saying 'they have' and 'they can have' are different things. I'd give you a week time to show case a single gameplay change because of a ship kit, time more than enough to demonstrate the excuse line I'm moving around. Good luck.
What a nice logical fallacy. Do you actually think people always buy things that are useful?
I somewhat agree, some cosmetics could be used as rewards but I don't think all of them as that'd hit hard FD.
I'd argue this game is very good bang for the buck. 60$ for the base game+expansion is a good deal considering I've made more than 1000 hours of fun with it and it haves AAA level of quality I believe. Oh and the monetization tactics of FD are nothing compared to many many games that follow the P2W model.
You do realize ED is a niche game, that it is still in development and that it needs server maintenance?
Errr, nobody told you about the Frontier store yet ?
Not a fallacy at all, what makes you think cosmetics aren't useful? They provide a sense of enjoyment and engagement to the player who wants to customise their game experience. Cosmetics have traditionally been a very important part of gameplay in a lot of cases. The push for companies saying "it's just cosmetic, it doesn't affect gameplay" is an even greater bit of doublethink that serves no purpose other than to justify monetization.
It wouldn't hit them at all to have all cosmetics as in-game unlockables. ED is a huge success, Frontier is worth nearly half a billion dollarydoos. They have more than enough in the coffers to run the servers for a century. Post-purchase monetization is entirely to stoke additional or renewable sources of profit from people who have already paid, pure and simple.
Don't forget what games companies tell their customers is never the same as what they tell their investors. Look at EA for example, after the BF2 lootbox incident. They told their customers the microtransactions were for "player choice" and because "games are expensive" while at the same time they were telling their investors that removing microtransactions wouldn't affect their revenue streams at all. It is never necessity that runs underneath these skeevy monetization tactics, it is always greed.
Your personal sense of worth has no bearing on the material effects of microtransactions on premium priced games, sorry. And just because someone else is doing it in a more blatantly greedy fashion doesn't mean it's ok for Frontier to do it just because they're more coy about it. If I robbed 100 people and you only robbed 1 person, yeah you're not as bad as me but you sure as hell ain't the good guy either.
Well that's just blatant lies. ED is the most popular game of its class, hugely successful and profitable just from base game sales alone. Its development and maintenance costs have long since been covered, and even if they weren't, plenty of other (even smaller) companies manage to develop hugely popular games over long periods of time and keep the servers running without microtransactions. If Facepunch studios can do it, so can a behemoth like Frontier. They might like to wear the cutesy indie garb but they are as triple-A as they come.
Definitely vice versa, since the solo mode is what backers of the single player offline game got instead. They can't suddenly try to charge a subscription for the single player game. Lots of law suits...
Elite is already free to play
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The deal is that is meaningless. Nobody can't play the game differently than I do because they have extra wide wings or some bobbleheads on their dashboards. You can like cosmetics all you want but it does not affect gameplay at all. If you want to complain about actual gameplay benefits FD provides through purchase then you can look at horizons and its engineers.
Bussiness is bussiness. They found the way to get good money while not actually affecting playerbase (mostly).
The fact is that ED is one of those games that it is virtually impossible to know all about it, that somewhat tells you the reaches of it, besides, as a pseudo-MMO it does generally provide many more hours of entretainment than your average indie game.
Well of course it is because there really is no serious competition. NMS has a huge stigma behind it, SC is not done and abuses of microtransactions 1000 times more than ED.
Facepunch studios doesn't have any games whatsoever that rely on servers to sustain 10000 players aprox at any give time, oh and here a the definition of an indie game, please note its not made by FD:
"While the term 'indie' implicitly suggests that it's all about financial status, most gamers would agree that the indie scene is actually defined by its fierce creative spirit and contempt for corporate meddling."
I'll just leave you with this summary execution of the cosmetics argument by Jim Sterling, an argument which has already been beaten to death over many other games so I won't waste more time on it. (Naughty language warning for kiddos) https://youtu.be/Ce5CDrq4dGg
See above.
I have no idea what this word salad is supposed to mean.
Competition or not they still made heaps of money off this game, to the point where saying "we need microtransactions to afford to keep the lights on" is a baldfaced lie.
Facepunch afford multiple servers that support as many as 500 players each with significantly higher network and performance overhead than frontier's amazon database cluster, from nothing but sales of the base game. They're but one example of many developers and indie self-publishers that manage to make high quality games and support them without predatory microtransaction economies.
By the way if you think that definition of indie you quoted applies in any way to Frontier Developments, then I don't think you know them as well as you think you do.
They should make CQC free to play