This is the financial report from Frontier Developments. And these are their financial highlight:
Underlying revenue down 24% to £9.2m
Operating result at a loss of £1.7m
Adjusted EBITDA down 76% to 0.9m
Adjusted loss per share down to 3.0p
Deferred income at £2.5m at the year end
The loss was planned. Lets see what their next report says, but it looks like the lack of news about their launch sales comes from low sales.
The absence of server problems since the official launch also indicates low sales.
Yes 100.000 backers reached and an operational loss of 1,7m. Which also means that almost everyone who is interested in this “hardcore punishment no fun to be had niche genre game” has already bought it.
I think he made solid arguments supported by facts.
Now you are doing ad-hominem attacks…
btw, look at other MMOs if you want to see what success looks like. World of Tanks for example has more than 60 Million (!!!) subscribers. 100k backers is nothing…
It’s far from a “complete flop” that he’s claiming it to be. Also this “Which also means that almost everyone who is interested in this “hardcore punishment no fun to be had niche genre game” has already bought it.” is complete speculation.
If you take a look at the companies shares you will also notice that the value of the shares is decreasing and the official launch of the game had absolutely no positive effect on the price.
They planned to make a loss this year, I’m not here to debate how they run Frontier Developments. Elite Dangerous in itself, passed a record KS, they had 100k backers in September and the game was released on schedule. I seriously don’t see how that can be considered a “complete flop”. A “complete flop” is failing your KS, going bankrupt while making it or never delivering a product, and all of those things are still a possibility for INS. Just having ED in the state that we have it, makes it far beyond a “complete flop”…
Even though I don’t want this discussion to continue in this thread (theres an ED thread), i want to say that in general a “flop” in the media industry describes a product that is released onto the market and is sold a lot less or is a lot less popular then what was anticipated.
Now with the world of KS this can be confusing as preorder is a big part.
Attempting to separate “pve and pvp” economies and even gameplay in an open world sandbox which infinity is very likely to be is a really, really bad idea. Your working on the assumption that the game’s economy will be absurdly basic, lacking running and maintenance costs, perhaps even crew wages and other paying of npcs involving planetary/city involvement. Like, i don’t even feel like your ideas about how the economy should work are vaguely compatible with my own. Thats fine, the ultimate question is up to the devs, but i can’t see infinity gaining anything other than a spot in the trash for myself and pretty much everyone i play games with if it’s using an economic model from a themepark game. That kind of game is just terribly boring.
I really doubt the eventual MMO will take that route, though.
Also, player xp in a space sandbox mmo only serves to artificially limit the player and force a certain degree of grinding. Often, it is used as a way to put a barely functional economy on stilts artifically draw out progression and prevent players “bypassing” some kind of intended route of play, which is counter to a sandbox again, for example, world of warcraft.
But as a proportion of the total player population? Any game has threads full of people complaining. Look at Call of Duty, in particular the amount of stick they got for MW2. Yet that franchise has stubbornly refused to die.
10/10
GOTY
I struggle to think of any game I routinely play where there isn’t at least some penalty for failure. Why? Because failure without consequence undermines the game mechanics, and makes the experience feel as if it’s on rails (in some cases, there are valid reasons to do this). In fact, the more risk an action poses in the game, the more thoughtful I am about the choices I make, and the more invested in them I feel. There are entire genres based off that style of gameplay, and many of them are quite successful.
So, yes. I think losing your ship or having to pay (in-game currency, obv) to replace it is perfectly reasonable, and other complaints aside the destruction rebuy cost on Elite works fairly well.
But this throws it in the other direction. For large scale battles to work in cases like this, the space stations need to be fairly strong and/or powerful to prevent zerging, which means that there’s now little incentive to have small-scale battles, because it doesn’t affect anything. If there’s no economic downside to losing individual craft, then the corporation game merely becomes the race to build the biggest fleet. The moment someone builds the Royal Navy, they’ll effectively dominate space. I don’t see a valid economy that way. I only see it working if ships can be destroyed in battle, and that the owner has to replace it (but not necessarily at full cost).
This clearly isn’t true. If SWTOR and ESO can survive amidst virtually no interest, I don’t see how Elite is dead. It might be made obsolete by future games, but I highly doubt it will be Star Citizen that kills it. If Battlescape fails, then it won’t be Infinity either. In which case, the only online space games dominating the near future will remain EVE and Elite.
There have been server problems, they got fixed.
Also, it doesn’t indicate low sales, if the capacity of their infrastructure is unknown.
As for the finances, they don’t necessarily demonstrate if Frontier made profit on Elite in total, as the company went IPO after the Kickstarter campaign concluded. There’s also no mention of their reserves, only income and expenditures. Given that the loss was expected, the data doesn’t really tell us anything about the health of the company
EDIT: But I take Lomsor’s point. This discussion about the state of Elite can be taken to the relevant topic.
I have to disagree with this because this is essentially eve online and they have one fantastic(sarcasm here can be taken either way) economic situation. Having played eve for too many years I’m far too familiar with their mechanics and economy. The current power blocs in null own all the x64 moons which basically gives them free monies, and lots of it. This not only allows them to easily build this large fleets of sup caps, caps, and supercaps, but use it to control and conquer more space to do the same. The alliances will even sometimes reimburse ships lost on any fleet ops.
The economy, and loss mechanics, are great. The ways any person or group can manipulate the economy is incredible. That is why I’ve really enjoyed Eve. I have the option to make my life in eve in any way possible, be it ripping people off, selling ships, making war, etc.
This is only my opinion and I know others will disagree. It has already been said that you need loss to provide a consequence to your actions. These consequences gets the adrenaline flowing and what has kept me coming back these years. If infinity had consequences like these, you would not only have large battles, but you would have large battles that effectively has the adrenaline flowing of every pilot due to fighting for their own ship.
To respond to playbenni’s concept directly,
I personally 100% disagree with you. If anything, I have cherished my ships even more knowing that I can lose them. I do have my throwaway ships that I don’t care about, but I also have a few ships that have managed to live through hell and back and I cherish them. Any engagement with these ships make it all the more sweet when you come out alive.
I think proper engagement(and disengagement) mechanics will be necessary. As probable future pirate, it wouldn’t be fun shooting fish in a barrel. I look forward to a future where I could chase a trader 5 or 10 star systems to finally get the jump on him and lock him down. It’s part of the challenge and makes success all the more sweeter. Even on the traders side, if he manages to give a group of pirates the slip after 10 or 15 adrenaline pumping jumps I know I would be jumping for joy once I got to safety.
A lot of the recent posts have been regarding E:D and I don’t really care about it so I don’t have anything to say about. My ideal infinity is basically Eve’s economy and persistent world with piloting my ship and planetary landing. I know this doesn’t mesh well with a lot of people and that it’s fine. It’s only my opinion so calm down
Disclaimer: There are a lot of eve mechanics that suck and I wouldn’t want in Infinity such as sov mechanics which frankly wouldn’t even work. I’m only talking about its free economy and the ability for the player to affect everything.
i do not see any problem in combining EVE style of losing ships and WOW style of not losing it. I could imagine some core principles:
Make ships hard to destroy completely.
Ships are big chunks of metal. So to kill them you need only to make some holes in right places. No need to completely vaporize it. That makes possible to restore “destroyed” ships.
Make final destroying (vaporizing) high cost or long process.
Equal class ships should not have weapon resources to do that. Thats makes a possible solution to find your wreckage ship and restore it in low cost. You could balance that feature on your choice. Stealing entire wreckage ships may be allowed but should require specialized ships or some other expensive specialized solutions.
Make EVE style security status sectors analog.
In hisec you will have low punishment & low reward WOW style gameplay. in lowsec you will have your EVE style. We can do that by implementing some features:
3.1 Police (EVE style). Which includes destroying players with high criminal status.
3.2 Government Wreckage Service which could transport your lost ship to nearest NPC base if you cant do it by yourself. It can be implemented as part of your basic insurance.
Its just some ideas but core principle is to allow different style of gameplay inside a game.
Another problem that are mentioned before is how to do huge battles without huge risk for players to lose ships? The answer is Faction conflicts. Government gives you ship and you fight. Join army if you want to fight. Or you can join to player owned corporation to serve as a PVP pilot. War cost money. Its not that simple in real world.
I’ve never thought about this and I find it absolutely brilliant. Ship scavenging as a profession would be incredible and a lot of fun. I can imagine the risks of going into a recent battle to be the first on scene and further fights that could be fought over wreckage fields…or the winner of a fleet fight scavenging the field for ships to repair/scavenge.
Actually, you don’t need to get a “complex” economy to have the possibility of an “unbalanced” economy. I was merely pointoing out what I was considering as important questions for designing an economy in-game. If you look at Guild Wars 2, whose dev team hired from start a “professionnal” economic advisor for designing the market, even they had (and still have I think, long time no see) large hiccups that most players compared to “EVE” economics.
I have absolutely no idea as to what the “eonomy” should be for I:B but I’m willing to explore an economy with new hypothesis that are not necessarly solely based on “available / asked for”.
But hey, I might wrong, or maybe not. Economics are not that much of a science after all, unless combining politics, mathematics and human psyche is
As for “sandbox”, I’m not really sure you’re having the same idea that I do of what truly is a sandbox game … “Minecraft” and “Space Engineers” are sandbox. Anything else that only gives skin-changes or even only shipe’s shape different is not a sandbox either. So far I haven’t heard that INS wanted I:B to be similar to a sandbox (or not in the near future at least).
However I do agree with you: separating PvE from PvP in an open-world can make it less immersive.
I think seperating economies just make the whole thing more complex. Creating a working economy for all is more stable and explotation sturdier … even if it is a lot of work.
I’m with those who agree xp is bad. I dislike grinding and just being able to play. I’ve just started playing life is feudal as the gameplay itself creates a rewarding experience. As well as the overall goals in the game. Now it is a completely different genre, but when I think of infinity, there is a lot of angles that can be implemented. Like player tasks and rewards. The concept can only be limited to the content. Infinite worlds? Take examples from games out there. terraria or what ever the thing is called, or will there be only be in ships or out walking these worlds. Space combat is the Main game mechanic obviously. But what will we do with the worlds we discover? Static bases and cities to drive to and from with goods. Or colonize the world making it interactable with purpose to change and develop. Infinity concept has potential for a whole lot with its ability for scale. I have no doubt the minor things like player tasks can be created. The challenge is to think of ways to make them innovative and rewarding. Not recreating something done with better graphics, example the fighter genre. It’s all button sequences and preanimated moves. Infinity needs to take player rewards, say there ships and modification and reveal it in away the player feels accomplished, like for example. Being able to afford a corvette over a light fighter. And the player saying wow, I’m moving up in social stratification and gonna be more initimidating. Or just got a gun improvement extra range. My ship is the best fighter this side of the system hooray! Moving up ship tiers is to easy on eve. Just a little thought. Dunno even want to start on star citizen.
Here is my suggestion, not saying blowing another ship up is out of the question but it can cause negative consequences or something. What we really want is it’s cargo or ship components. If my ship is destroyer there isn’t much left. But say in the last fight, one of my weapons was damage or had a hull breach part of my ship needs fixing. The task then would be buy parts from the local planet mechanic full price set back, I hate fixing my car, ouch to my real life pocket, or in game raid another player. Capture his ship and salavage the parts or commandeer it. The comoondeer obvisouly would be difficult as it’s not star trek. You can’t beam aboard. Either hail and get them to submit or blow disable them to the point of no salvage risking any reward. Or if your the victim utilize infinity capabilities and head to nearest planet, using speed and agility lose them within the planet’s environment where mountains or something create interference in scanners where your able to rest or prepare a warp jump whatever is in game. Creating a scenaria environment in infinity would be much more rewarding experience then a classic shoot um up. But it’s all dependent on the content and what game play mechanics are created outside the core combat.
