Why So Few Cosmetics?

[CMDR Voron]

Last original post for a week, I promise.

Has anyone heard from FDev or inferred a reason why there are so few cosmetics? I don’t know anything about game design but my understanding from modding is that graphical changes are probably lower in the hierarchy of function.

At the same time, these are the things we buy and the games only source of revenue. So - I am just trying to understand the gap between A and B here.

Today, I was riding to an Odyssey combat zone in an unmanned Vulture when I got bored enough to look around the finer details of the cockpit. I noticed that around the seems on the panels, there were little finger smudges, a presumed by product of removing the panel for maintenance - someone really put their heart into crafting that and it’s amazing. I would never have thought of that.

Where is the person who did that?

All the skins kind of fall into a template that seems to be stripes, camo, or metallic, combined with a few common/primary colors. Like, I am fairly certain no ship has standard blue skin and a navy blue skin, if you get my drift. They’re so generalized that there’s very little appeal. There’s a distinct limitation observed in the aesthetic development, as if the creatives are really being kept in check or just don’t want to do this work. As a result, most people I see on social media, absent their specific branding, fly black, white, or chrome.

I just do not understand why we’re not drowning in skins, and why in gods name are they sold in packs? Sometimes FDev feels like that one family member who you can’t get to stop making unsound financial decisions.

I can’t imagine there is an incredible amount of chargeable hours necessary to color shift radiant blue skin with stripes into a Porsche Shark Blue or BMW Catalano Grey with stripes. You could probably get interns or players to do it, who would be excited to just affect the game.

The body kits … just, idk. They’re kind of bad. I like the expedition-esque ones - i digress, why aren’t there like 10x as many more?

I used to play Apex Legends and they had new gun and character designs like weekly, and I don’t remember having to pay for them. You could if you didn’t want to wait to unlock them.

I spent $60 bucks since restarting Elite buying like 3 “packs,” of which, I didn’t like 9/10 thinks it included. This is a really poor plan for monetization. I am now out of stuff to buy. I bought all of the cosmetics I would have any interest in for the new Cobra or Corsair. I am sure that looks like a win this week, but now I’m wary and questioning further purchases and I am unsatisfied with what I received.

I would be much happier having a wide swath of colors to choose from and paying a few bucks for specific skins I actually want. And I am sure FDev would make more money.

 

[DemiserofD]

Packs make perfect sense if you think about it. Most people just fly one ship, or one copy of one ship, so if they buy one skin, that's all they are going to use. By contrast, if you sell skins in a pack, even if you sell them at a discount, you are still selling more skins than you would normally sell.

I do tend to agree with you on the other points though. Part of the problem is that you honestly don't see the exteriors of ships very often. A lot of combat takes place at a significant enough distance you can only barely tell the general color, making ships with more detailed skins somewhat pointless.

 

[metatheurgist]

Maybe the social media people just lack panache or imagination?

Who says we all just fly black, white or chrome?

Spoiler

Not to say I don't have my share of black and chrome either.

 

[CMDR Voron]

I do tend to agree with you on the other points though. Part of the problem is that you honestly don't see the exteriors of ships very often. A lot of combat takes place at a significant enough distance you can only barely tell the general color, making ships with more detailed skins somewhat pointless.

I agree. That is a really key point I’ve noticed as well. I swear I am going to send FDev a marketing packet, or something.

You need to see your ship more. It’s the soft psychological push. There needs to be dynamic cinematic cam angles you can toggle when just pointing at a system 50,000 away for 7 minutes straight. With the option to make it auto trigger when youre using landing assist or AFK for too long.

You need to see your character more as well.

Regularly interjecting 3rd person events is just a must. It being totally absent feels like an oversight.

So many things in this game, the solution is just RIGHT THERE you know?

I will say I saw my ships a ton while doing exobiology. Landing on a bright orange desert planet in a chrome Mamba was particularly memorable.

Anyway, yeah anyone seeing your paint outside of co-op probably isn’t going to happen. And even then, you probably have the same skins as they do because there’s such a small selection and they’re often sold in packs. So, it is unfortunately unremarkable. This is another reason I think it makes sense for FDev to lean more into co-op play and skins.

 

[metatheurgist]

I have to disagree that you don't notice ship skins in combat. There was a brief period when pirates sported some very neat skins that were not in the shop and I remember because I spent a lot of time thinking "Why can't I buy that one?" while blowing them away.

 

[Foxxul]

Yeah the lack of options has been a big issue for me. I really like to colour match everything. I want my ship, colour trails, and ship pilot etc to all be the same colour. There are barely any options, like I'd love to make everything cyan coloured or all black but there are mixed or no options available. I'd like to support Fdev more but there just isn't anything to buy.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

the games only source of revenue

There's also - far more significantly - "selling the game to new players".

The cosmetic shop is a minor sideshow in terms of revenue [1], which is probably why they don't spend huge amounts of time giving it 10x as many options which hardly anyone would buy either.

[1] From Frontier's own figures, the early access sales for the Python Mk II or Type-8 were significantly greater (in cash terms) than their sales of all existing cosmetic options combined for the same month. And the sales of the ship and the cosmetics combined for that month were maybe a tenth of the income they got from new players buying the game itself.

 

[aRJay]

The shop used to sell various seasonal and date related paint jobs for a few weeks at relevant times each year, there was of course some moaning about having to wait until they went back on sale.
There were also fairly frequent new paint releases to add to the available all year ones.

Then the store was reworked, with claims of better access and the higher end paints being more available.

There was also a change to the costs of paint jobs in Arx with an increase of up to 400%.

A great number of paintjobs haven’t been seen since.

 

[aardappelianen]

fdev has no imagination and they hate money, wich is why they wont sell us more colors for decals or nameplates or seperate the packs so i might get that skin i want without the horrible slap on's.
they only care about baiting new player wit mediocre pre builds.
some of the greatest skin are unobtainable, like the anaconda galnet skin is amazing, after all these years they could just plop in the market but no wo got to have artificial scarcity.
after all these years we only have a handfull of decals for sale, single color, cant change their postition, they are displayed wrong on many ships, golconda and the scourge decals in particular, my distant worlds decals just looks like a white spot completly washed out on many ships,
the reason midnight black and chrome are so popular is because the dont look like absolute when viewed up close.
the speed racer on my courier look like the were scribbled on by a toddler.
everything fdev does is the lowest effort slop possible like they have no faith in their own game

 

[CMDR Voron]

There's also - far more significantly - "selling the game to new players".

The cosmetic shop is a minor sideshow in terms of revenue [1], which is probably why they don't spend huge amounts of time giving it 10x as many options which hardly anyone would buy either.

[1] From Frontier's own figures, the early access sales for the Python Mk II or Type-8 were significantly greater (in cash terms) than their sales of all existing cosmetic options combined for the same month. And the sales of the ship and the cosmetics combined for that month were maybe a tenth of the income they got from new players buying the game itself.

Well there aren’t any cosmetics to buy… and they’re much less expensive than the ships… so yeah - that makes sense.

I’m not following what your point is.

Do you know how many free to play games are totally funded by cosmetics? You can only sell the game to someone once. It’s clear FDev is lacking backend for Elite, there are too many obvious obvious oversights. Maybe if they had some cash they could make it so 1 in 3 combat zones doesn’t glitch out.

 

[CMDR Voron]

fdev has no imagination and they hate money, wich is why they wont sell us more colors for decals or nameplates or seperate the packs so i might get that skin i want without the horrible slap on's.
they only care about baiting new player wit mediocre pre builds.
some of the greatest skin are unobtainable, like the anaconda galnet skin is amazing, after all these years they could just plop in the market but no wo got to have artificial scarcity.
after all these years we only have a handfull of decals for sale, single color, cant change their postition, they are displayed wrong on many ships, golconda and the scourge decals in particular, my distant worlds decals just looks like a white spot completly washed out on many ships,
the reason midnight black and chrome are so popular is because the dont look like absolute when viewed up close.
the speed racer on my courier look like the were scribbled on by a toddler.
everything fdev does is the lowest effort slop possible like they have no faith in their own game

I don’t know that that is fair, some things are incredibly detailed and you can see the heart put into them.

FDEV does seem to be very bad with monetization, though, I’ll give you that. I suspect Elite is one or a small group of people’s pet project, and they’d rather see it fail under their control than succeed. That, or … let’s be real, I think they have this very very loyal base of players who are emphatic that .. things not change jn the game. So, FDev probably looks at that and goes, ok well, let’s not rile them up, and we can just keep making marginal but very reliable revenue, and put that towards other projects.

Their social media/community/ and marketing efforts are sigh also a bit counterintuitive. They seem to do a lot of top-down initiatives, that focus on FDev putting something in the game and then encouraging creators to spread word so that people come do/see the one change they made. This is (insanely) inefficient. The advantage in making a game is that you build an asset, this digital machine, and then it mostly runs on its own (mostly), entertains people and accrues revenue.

Instead, they have the devs inject almost imperceptible content and have Burr Pitt tell everyone to come look at it. This strategy will never result in outsized growth, youre just kind of turning a wheel. This is the same reason narrative based gameplay will never work in this model.

Marketing should be pushing content of people having fun in the game, independently from the dev team. I get the impression that the elite teams dev team, community managers and marketing are… well all the same few people - again pointing to a lack of back end.

 

[CMDR Voron]

I have to disagree that you don't notice ship skins in combat. There was a brief period when pirates sported some very neat skins that were not in the shop and I remember because I spent a lot of time thinking "Why can't I buy that one?" while blowing them away.

So not players though, by your account

 

[metatheurgist]

So not players though, by your account

Dunno, I play in the Australian Private Group, I rarely see another player. Can't imagine it's much of a different experience though. It's not like players have access to stealth tech.

Even out of combat though you can see cosmetics just fine. There's quite a few videos of Ed's time as CM where he did regular meet ups and was surrounded by any number of ships with any number of cosmetics. Distinct in my mind on one occasion was an FDL with the ship name "Derek Smart was Right" blowing chaff in the background. Even in the background I could read the name - clearly not a waste of time for that individual.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Do you know how many free to play games are totally funded by cosmetics?

Sure, completely different business model. Huge numbers of games have no cosmetics store at all and are completely funded by sales of the product itself. Others have such low operational costs that they can be run by volunteers as a spare time project with the occasional donation. Pivoting after a decade of operation from funding the game one way to funding it a completely different way is considerably harder than just making an entirely new game funded the other way is (and that's not exactly easy; most F2P games fail quickly never to be seen again).

You can only sell the game to someone once.

Leaving aside that a lot of the more dedicated players do get alt accounts, there are so many people who haven't yet bought Elite Dangerous that "everyone has already got it" won't ever be a problem.

It’s clear FDev is lacking backend for Elite, there are too many obvious obvious oversights. Maybe if they had some cash they could make it so 1 in 3 combat zones doesn’t glitch out.

More budget would obviously be better. But do you really believe that a few better cosmetics would get the player base to spend ten times what it currently does on them? That all the people currently spending £5 a month (already likely way above average) would spend £50 a month instead if only the cosmetics were a bit more varied and higher-quality because they'd feel compelled to change the look of their ship every week?

That's the sort of boost in earnings from them which would be needed to make them a significant contributor to ED's income.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

Sales of the game itself have always been the primary source of income.
There used to be a large number of paintjobs in the store but most seem to have been retired and we saw regular threads complaining that "devs were wasting their resources on paintjobs and not developing the game".
The culling of the store catalogue has caused frustration as paintjobs we were interested in have become unavailable, though I'm sure that looked good on someone's balance sheet.

 

[Koma Pahu]

Well there aren’t any cosmetics to buy… and they’re much less expensive than the ships… so yeah - that makes sense.

I’m not following what your point is.

Do you know how many free to play games are totally funded by cosmetics? You can only sell the game to someone once. It’s clear FDev is lacking backend for Elite, there are too many obvious obvious oversights. Maybe if they had some cash they could make it so 1 in 3 combat zones doesn’t glitch out.

You’re missing the point that FDev are a business. They will be keep a close eye on their budget (they have to legally).

When I was running my own business I’d check my advertising weekly, I knew exactly what age ranges engaged with my FB ads, even what phone they used, the same on Instagram and Google Ads were a total waste of money.

I only put money into the demographics that lead to sale, because that’s what makes the most financial sense.

Technically I could have picked up more customers having a wider spread, but the cost wouldn’t be recovered by a couple of extra bookings.

While some F2P games are profitable from cosmetics alone, most only have a very short lifespan as they quickly stop being profitable.

FDev will know exactly what sells and what doesn’t and will be choosing to put money into the areas of the business that make a return on the investment.

Presumably cosmetics just don’t make enough.