Elite Dangerous Developer Frontier Is Planning Layoffs As Part Of An Effort To Return To Profitabili

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Elite Dangerous Developer Frontier Is Planning Layoffs As Part Of An Effort To Return To Profitability | MMORPG.com

Frontier is planning on laying off employees as part of an effort to 'reshape Frontier' following disappointing financial performance, according to a new report.

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mitech616

E:D is a FANTAS5IC game, but all they do is cater to the 10% most active and involved players. They're often adding content and events that only apply ro those with the massive resources and powerful ships that a lot of players don't have.

Frankly, their last year+ of updates has been disappointing.

I do hope they find a solution though.

Tiller

Lets lay off everyone in order to avoid a recession, but in fact cause a rescission.

Dodgybloke

mitech616 said:

E:D is a FANTAS5IC game, but all they do is cater to the 10% most active and involved players. They're often adding content and events that only apply ro those with the massive resources and powerful ships that a lot of players don't have.

Frankly, their last year+ of updates has been disappointing.

I do hope they find a solution though.

Its the quality of the updates that are disappointing in my view, Odyssey was promised for years and just ended up being a buggy mess when it was released.

The initial game was great with the promise of extra content on the horizon but to date  and especially in the last couple of years, most of the content added has been very shallow and not very well implemented.

as an example, all variants of Missions after a while were as boring as hell, which is to be expected when its basically just a random mission generator, rather than meaningful content. Don't get me wrong there is a place for this sort of content but it shouldn't just be that content and as mitceh616 stated, most of the enjoyable content was aimed at the few rather than the many.

I always thought that ED should have either been a single player game, perhaps with some dynamic arching story line and the missions to go along with it, or an MMO, with
mmo type missions and content.

In the end, it was/is neither and the updates kind of reflect this

caalem

Read the trading update & their FY23 report.
tl;dr: They had a significant operating loss in FY23, but it was non-cash intangible asset impairment — that is, the loss from shuttering Foundry, which was significant and entirely responsible for the operating loss. Otherwise, they're mostly fine. "Return to profitability" isn't correct, they otherwise would have been profitable and likely will be next year regardless of any changes made, excluding the F1 game they mention doing exceptionally bad I suppose.


It's also naive of gamers to immediately think any employee cuts will be developers. They increased R&D spending by a significant amount in FY23, good chance they'll cut administrative staff instead.

enesisxlr8

Bwhahah if they kept it updated and added content it wouldnt of happened. So lets fire people for being bad. Best VR game out there, so much possibilities... but neglected as allways.

caalem

enesisxlr8 said:

Bwhahah if they kept it updated and added content it wouldnt of happened. So lets fire people for being bad. Best VR game out there, so much possibilities... but neglected as allways.

Elite Dangerous is not Frontier's most profitable game.
If I had to guess, as they do not say outright, it's  Jurassic World Evolution 2 as of their latest fiscal statement. 

Angrakhan

My primary beef with this game is the fastest and safest way to progress in the game is also the most boring: space trucking. Seriously I have better things to do with my free time.

That being said if they ever make a VR HMD that is worth the $1k+ they want to charge for them I'd probably live in this game space trucking all day long.

Kyleran

caalem said:

Read the trading update & their FY23 report.
tl;dr: They had a significant operating loss in FY23, but it was non-cash intangible asset impairment — that is, the loss from shuttering Foundry, which was significant and entirely responsible for the operating loss. Otherwise, they're mostly fine. "Return to profitability" isn't correct, they otherwise would have been profitable and likely will be next year regardless of any changes made, excluding the F1 game they mention doing exceptionally bad I suppose.


It's also naive of gamers to immediately think any employee cuts will be developers. They increased R&D spending by a significant amount in FY23, good chance they'll cut administrative staff instead.

Well I will agree developers are normally the last to go out the door as they are the only people capable of doing all functions including testing, documentation, and even much of the administration outside of development.

I recall in one office I worked for word came down that 2/3 rds of the staff was being rif'd.  Speculation ran wild on how many, (15 initially discussed), who might survive and how many of each job function might survive.

When the day came I had no false illusions of being retained seeing as I was the project manager with no useful skills  

The company ended up only retaining their 6 most competent developers and the office/dev manager, (who could also test) and no one else.

They ran with that team size for several years supporting the product as it aged out, with only the two most capable devs being retained by the firm (Alcatel Lucent it's called these days) who were moved to other projects.

As far as I can tell on LinkedIn they both still work there today, over 20 years now since the sacking.

No regrets though, as such often happens my leaving back then lead to much greater success in my career than I ever would have obtained had I stayed in that same small team.

Everything for a reason.

Tiller

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Wargfoot

I enjoyed ED, especially in VR it was ground-breaking.

What they needed was more non-spaceship type things to do, like dungeons and old cities on planet surfaces to explore.

enesisxlr8

"Elite Dangerous Developer Frontier Is Planning Layoffs As Part Of An Effort To Return To Profitability"

Yes rather then regular updates, story, communication and things to make players stay or return . Just keep firing people till no one is left! Amazing business model there!

Imagine where the game could of been today, if they had kept at it? that's the sad part