Frontier Developments plc Full year trading update

[chrisjj]

https://web.archive.org/web/20160713000 ... 81582.html

Sales down, cash down, net loss hugely up.

OTOH, there's enough money to run the ED server for a while longer

[Bugbear]

Yeah, that share price chart is not a pretty picture, although to be fair, it's still a way off it's 3 year low of around 100p (I'm assuming 180.00 means 180p, not 180 pounds...)

[chrisjj]

Yeah, that share price chart is not a pretty picture

Pity the guy who bought 1,600,000 shares just before the Elite Dangerous bad news went public... losing him more than £1m...

... and handing a nice profit of £4m to the uncannily prescient seller. One David Braben (link)...

[RockDoctor]

Yeah, that share price chart is not a pretty picture

Pity the guy who bought 1,600,000 shares just before the Elite Dangerous bad news went public... losing him more than £1m...

... and handing a nice profit of £4m to the uncannily prescient seller. One David Braben (link)...

I barely understand what the comments about "shares" mean, but I just saw this item on BBC news : Players probe Elite game space mystery , about some fluster over Elite Dangerous. Never having played it (It's a Windows game isn't it?), I don't know what the fuss is about, but if there are financials that require worrying about "share prices", then drumming up publicity is probably not accidental.

[chrisjj]

if there are financials that require worrying about "share prices", then drumming up publicity is probably not accidental.

Distinct audiences, I think. The drumming here is probably more to counter the publicity generated by Frontier's increasing misfortune with the product itself, e.g.

Frontier cans its own $100,000 Elite Dangerous tournament - Is everything okay?
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... tournament

Elite Dangerous players accuse Frontier of "god modding"
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... od-modding

Elite: Dangerous' latest expansion caused AI spaceships to unintentionally create super weapons
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... er-weapons

You Can Download Elite Dangerous: Arena For Free This Weekend
http://twinfinite.net/2016/07/you-can-d ... s-weekend/

To see why that last one is a misfortune, read how few of those 250,000 continued to play:

[RockDoctor]

"Steam" is some systm for online only games, isn't it? So if I read that correctly there are between 20 and 40 players in the ED universe at any one time. I don't know if that is good or bad - are they charged to be online? Phew, I remember that with trying to get online in the early 90s with a 2400 bps modem and a 4p/ minute phone bill. No wonder people are staying away in droves.
Does the Oolite OXZ server release stats of how many people look at expansion packs and download something each day?
Surely, if there are a couple or triple of dozen people in the universe at the same time, unless you park your ship up in a nice safe station, you're likely to wake up breathing vacuum in your pyjamas and the light of a gigawatt laser?

[Cmdr James]

So if I read that correctly there are between 20 and 40 players in the ED universe at any one time. I don't know if that is good or bad

Its bad, at least for the viability of the game. ED was seen as being an MMO in space, remember all the statements about how "offline play doesnt make sense"? At the end of the day there are a couple of dozen active players which doesnt bode well for the multi player aspect -- and more seriously it suggests to me that there simply isnt a decent number of players wanting to play, and therefore provide revenue for upgrades etc.

For comparison EVE (spreadsheets in space, as someone named it) has almost exactly 1000 times as many players. https://www.vg247.com/2015/06/29/eve-on ... ince-2008/

[RockDoctor]

For comparison EVE (spreadsheets in space, as someone named it) has almost exactly 1000 times as many players. https://www.vg247.com/2015/06/29/eve-on ... ince-2008/

Well, it's fairly plain from what I said previously that I don't go anywhere near the "cutting edge" of modern games. I fact, given the difficulties I had with recent versions of Ooite requiring 3d graphics cards, it's plain that I stay a decade or two away from the bleeding edge.
But does an "online community" of 40,000 people actually mean anything. Most sociologists and evolutionary biologists I've heard hold the opinion that humans have been selected with enough brain power to handle social networks of a few dozen (extended family) to a thousand or so (small village) and beyond that additional people are simply background noise. Or your society starts to fragment into smaller subdivisions (e.g. my family compared to your family, or the Guild of Cunning Artificers in competition to the Alchemists Guild).
Basically, computer networks can scale more efficiently than the human social brain.

[chrisjj]

RockDoctor, Steam is the world's largest web store for downloadable games. 20-40 players at a time is the figure for the Elite Dangerous Arena game, the cut-down version recently given away free, whereas 3000-4000 is the figure for the Elite Dangerous main game, paid-for.

[Astrobe]

But does an "online community" of 40,000 people actually mean anything.

I think you need a player base on this order of magnitude in order to have people to play with 24/7.
For instance for a MOBA game, assuming a player plays a one hour session every single day, you need 24 hours* 2 teams * 5 players =240 players minimum.
While people might actually play for two or three hours sometimes, not everyone plays every day and you get very little choice as for who you play with. Add an order of magnitude to account for the former and an other order of magnitude to account for the later, and you get 25K players as a viable minimum.
Now, MOBAs are typically single-arena games while E:D or EVE are open worlds, so you might want yet another order of magnitude.

[RockDoctor]

For instance for a MOBA game,

MOBA?

not everyone plays every day and you get very little choice as for who you play with.

So, "community" doesn't actually mean anything like in normal speech? I always thought that there was some planning about when a team got online, but since that's based on a sample of one ("I can't come to the pub ; I'm joining my son in an online game in 20 minutes") it's maybe not normal.
Frankly, almost all of the appeal has just disappeared. If you can't choose who you're teaming up with ... well, what does "teaming up" then mean?

[Astrobe]

For instance for a MOBA game,

MOBA?

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Games like League Of Legends (aka "LoL"), DOTA, Heroes of The Storm, or Smite. Quake Online, Tribes 2, etc. also have "multiplayer", "online" and "battle arena", but the MOBA genre include a specific set of other game mechanics ("lanes", shops, etc.) so they're not usually called "MOBAs".

not everyone plays every day and you get very little choice as for who you play with.

So, "community" doesn't actually mean anything like in normal speech? I always thought that there was some planning about when a team got online, but since that's based on a sample of one ("I can't come to the pub ; I'm joining my son in an online game in 20 minutes") it's maybe not normal.
Frankly, almost all of the appeal has just disappeared. If you can't choose who you're teaming up with ... well, what does "teaming up" then mean?

Yes, for very popular games what makes the community is a single common element: playing a particular game. Within that community, there are people who are ok with playing with total strangers, and some who can't stand it.

I'm mainly a lone player. I don't mind playing with total strangers, and I would even say that building up the cooperation - becoming a team while playing - is the interesting part to me; even if it doesn't happen or work every time. But I've met people who strongly prefer to play with friends or relatives, like you do. Both of us are normal players.

[RockDoctor]

But I've met people who strongly prefer to play with friends or relatives, like you do.

Actually, the closest I've ever come to playing an online game was networked Quake (or was it Doom?) a decade or so ago. I never bothered trying to get it going again after I got broadband.
(Ha ha - bloody broadband just went down for a quarter hour.

[Bugbear]

I'm back. Been obsessed with the Battletech universe since that video game came out a few years ago. I'm still enjoying my turn-based giant robot stompy goodness but I'm getting an itch for an old friend. I wonder if my Boa Class Cruiser is still serviceable...

But my reason for this rather bizzare thread necromancy - I've been looking over my old posts and came across this one. I've also taken an interest in real-world trading so I thought I'd revisit my assessment of 5 years ago.

FDEV is doing rather well of late. I really don't know how to pick stocks :-p