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My Fear for this game
Shadoed
Member UncommonPosts: 1,459
Before i start, i have to say that i am a huge Braben fan, i spent many lunch times at school on the BBC micros loading up my 51/4 floppy disk copy of Elite and losing myself in the huge universe that he had created for us. I have followed the work since on other machines and still indulge in the original up to this day as it is still, to me, the ultimate vision.
My major concern to date on following this development to date is how it is going to move on and keep on developing after the initial release. As much as i love the concept and the history behind it and from what i have seen it looks like the quality is matching that vision, it is still only going to attract, in my humble opinion, a limited market and with no subscription after initial purchase, where is the revenue going to come from.
Of course there will be expansions to charge for which will bring some revenue in, but my real fear is that they go for micro transactions as a steady income and that would be a huge downward spiral for me. There is already talk i understand of allowing credit purchase with cash, but if that moves on to ship upgrades or even ships, where would it end.
Could all be a storm in a teacup on my end, but i care passionately about the 'Elite' name and would hate to see it disappear down that road. I would be interested to hear how others feel about the revenue structure for the game as there seems to be little information at the moment on that front.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Comments
It is a nice romantic idea, but many companies and astute businessmen with far more financial backing than this game has had so far have travelled this road with what should have been far bigger audiences than this franchise will attract and failed badly due to, lets not say poor planning, but over ambitious planning lets say, so it isn't that my fears are poorly founded.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I think a subscription fee would really limit the potential playerbase of this game. Especially as the network architecture is based on a peer to peer model, such an overly greedy move would also cause a major negative backlash from the gaming community as a whole, in addition to greatly limiting sales.
Braben himself has expressed that he does not like pay-to-win.
So I don't think you have much to worry about there.
There are already many limiting factors for this game, the franchise is really only well known among the 30-40 somethings, the hardware requirements are pretty high, but would probably attract the EvE crowd (another issue altogether) and it is a space based game which is not to everyones liking. With all of that in mind, i would think that a subscription is the least of the worries on that front and those that understand what a subscription model brings would not object as long as a quality game if delivered and maintained in the same vein.
Since when did subscription = greed? If you are using that money to maintain a good level of development and support for your player base? Support is a huge area where non subscription games tend to fail miserably and decimate their player bases as they feel that they are not being taken care of or listened to.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I understand that he does not like that option, but when revenues dry up, people often have to do things that they don't like to do to maintain their business, again something we have seen time and again within this business.
I am seriously not trying to put a downer on what i am hoping will be the fruition of the vision that Braben layed out before us all those decades ago, the visualization of combat that was going on in my imagination when i engaged enemies or tried to get away from the police in front of that wire framed fantasy, but 'in Braben we trust' doesn't get to the heart of the matter in hand.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
As any proponent of the F2P monetization scheme will quickly tell you, P2W =/= microtransactions.
In any "good" F2P design, you have the option of earning everything via game play, albeit sometimes many dozens of hours of said game play. Alternatively, you simply buy the desired item/service instantly with hard cash.
Tired of having your ass handed to you in PVP because you're still grinding to "earn" that gun upgrade while the wallet-warriors all had one equipped on day 1 ? Just grit your teeth son, only another 300 kills and then you'll also have that mag full of armor-piercing bullets... except that's when the opposition will buy that hardened armor feature instantly from the Cash Shop (instead of grinding for it)...
Cheating was a problem in the alpha (mainly because nothing was encrypted). But they allowed people to hack/cheat as long as they reported their findings, which they did. Because of that most of the obvious cheats have been fixed already and they will be some kind of anti-cheat system in at launch.
Also the galaxy, currency and trade will still be handled server side afaik.
You can never stop cheating completely though. Even in traditional server/client setups people cheat. What you can do (and other MMOs do this), is set up traps to monitor and catch the ones doing it and punish them.
As for "pay to win". The game isn't free and neither will the expansions be (unless your an alpha backer). Theres no need for this kind of model.
You would agree though that this is a niche market game at the very least and although it is seeing some growth in interest, it is never going to be a game on a WoW scale and when you look at the closest competition which has to be EVE, they are not maintaining huge numbers themselves.
So, ok, if the game shifts 500,000 copies @ £35, you are looking at an initial income of £17.5Mill (which is generous as i am not taking any costs out of that) which sounds like a lot of money, but when you start to ramp up support, servers, developers to fix bugs, marketing etc, you can burn through that pretty damned quickly. The focus changes then from development to support and maintenance which could possibly slow down any development on an expansion, unless you are willing to either pay for more development resource or sacrifice one or a.n.other element with the possible consequence of losing customers in the process.
Factor in also that in real terms we are already in a 4 month overrun from the original estimate (and ok, i understand it was an estimate) and only have a possible estimate of before the end of the year for launch which could lose some of the built up interest, if a subsequent expansion was to overrun by even a couple of months, where does the money come from to hold up everything else?
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
No game is a game on WoW scale except WoW. It's hard to say how many will buy the game. The interest was high enough to raise millions of euros, which is quite impressive. A very similar game called Star Citizen is at almost 50 million dollars now purely from crowd funding. At least to me this indicates a big interest in a genre that has has only seen a few games, none of which were any good, over the last decade.
Also bear in mind it doesn't require a server park as the multiplayer is peer-to-peer.
It's different from EvE in just as many ways it is similar. The hands-on-control and no RPG stat progression makes a huge difference despite both games being about flying your space ship in an open world/galaxy.
I am a little different in that i enjoyed EvE to a large degree, i just think that it was flawed in the character progression front only being able to have one meaningful character per account and the whole 'pay to progress' time based training and that it was a huge time sink to actually do anything. That being said, the game itself was involving and well put together, but since CCP have allowed the lunatics to take over the asylum it has gone downhill rapidly. I will never understand how they allow a bunch of guys who don't even pay subs anymore as they generate that much ISK through their actions, to dictate how the game should be shaped as you would think that they may possibly have an agenda there, would you not?
Anyway, i too am looking forward to Braben bringing the vision to life in this game and now having the technology to do so, fill in all of those blanks that we used to have to make up in our own imaginations. There are many places where this could go drastically wrong if it isn't balanced correctly (refer to EvE newbs being taunted in to getting themselves destroyed) which could chase people away from the game before they even get started. To be fair though, Elite was the first dog eat dog game where you took your life in your hands every time you dropped out of the station (or even trying to dock with a station) so it will be interesting to see how that pans out.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
they are different games,Eve is about players interactions,it is sand box mmorpg ,Elite Dangerous is game about space ships and trade,it is space sim sp game with MP component,both are best in theirs genres
want 7 free days of playing? Try this
http://www.swtor.com/r/ZptVnY
Let me guess: The NPCs "griefed" you and when you went to the forums to complain about "griefers" you got laughed at.
No smarty pants, everyone knows that this game is going to become Eve Online 2.
want 7 free days of playing? Try this
http://www.swtor.com/r/ZptVnY
EVE is an MMO, Elite is a P2P pseudo-MMO with instances capped at, at most, 32 players with ping based matchmaking, absolutely no territory control, minimal industry (so far, may change but donno) and unlike EVE the PVP will be rare not be virtue of mechanics but sheer size of the bloody map... High Sec in Elite is bigger by an order of magnitude than the entire of EVE with 0.0, wormhole space and low sec as well as high sec. Sure PVP will exist but good f-ing luck tracking people across such a gigantic map with no actual locator agents and the possibility of players being able to turn off their IFFs in terms of players being distinguishable from NPCs.
This is not mentioning solo offline, solo online and private group options for Elite.
Smarty pants knows his shit, maybe you should study the issue before "knowing" anything and claiming to represent a group.
Read the title of the topic smart person you, the OP is speaking about his fear, I posted what my fear is, my fear is that this game is going to be EVE Online 2, period, so smart that amazes me your head has not exploded of such awesomeness in you. (English is not my native language so I have to use words that may not express the point. )
want 7 free days of playing? Try this
http://www.swtor.com/r/ZptVnY
May I suggest then that learning the difference between "everyone knows that this game is going to become" and "everyone fears this may become". FYI: Romanian, born and raised so stop trying to mask your intent under the guise of inadequate grammar.