Member Info for BobBobbins

Bought 285, share price went up to 320 on Monday. Sold at 320, yay! Tuesday share price gets up to 370. Boo! :)

It seems to be rising and falling on news about the price of oil - unsurprisingly for an oil company :)

Boing! Up 2.5% today so far!

BigLittle said "More users means more costs to provide the game service" Excellent analysis. To increase profit FDEV should sell fewer units. Do you have any other gems for us BigLittle?

> Frontier Devs got your money, so move along, nothing to see here! That would be really quite short sighted of FDEV given that their financial model is based on selling mission packs to their subscribers - so they need to keep them on-board. A sparse universe, apart from being realistic, creates the need for content - getting the balance right between free content that comes with the purchase of the game, and purchased content (say a new mission pack at $19.99), is of course going to be different per user and will cheese off a lot of people no matter where they draw the line. The packs of course are free for the beta backers, so no income from them, but the number of people who have purchased the game after beta is increasing every day and so too is the market for mission-packs. The next big income generator is obviously the consoles, but they'll want at least one paid mission pack out soon after that.

Not particularly - there is a high element of risk involved in backing a company to develop a product. You're paying to back development, not pre-ordering a product that has been advertised. I don't see how the 4-to-3 wheel vehicle analogy is at all similar to a product that works in all way except one mode that affects a tiny proportion of backers. If you do think it's similar then we're not going to get far in any discussion.

It's more a question of what was bought and hence what consumer rights protect - the backers backed a product which was made. They did not pre-order a game - then they'd have some come back I think - but rather back the creation of it. They might have some come back if they frontier had literally produced nothing and run off with the cash, but I doubt consumer law would be the way to sue in that case.

Hey, no, it's not quite that simple. Essentially the backers paid to see a game made, they paid, it was made, the kickstarter T+C's cover changes to the end product produced.

Yes, it's an inviting buy price considering an official announcement about PS4 / Xbox One / 360 must be around the corner. Expecting a jump when that official announcement comes (rather than the previous hints).

> BigLittle456: Google finance share quote reports a 2.89% drop Google Finance doesn't track mid-price but the previous buy/sale. Thus a buy followed by a sale is reported as a drop and the price can "drop" like this 1000 days in a row without the share price actually going down - stocks with low volume and a wide buy/sale spread (5% in the case of FDEV) often exhibit this behaviour. The sale price dropped by 2 points at 1.30pm today, moving the mid price down by 0.41%, but when you wrote the post the share price hadn't dropped at all since the 9th January. The fact you can't get something as simple as this right reflects rather poorly on your other claims.

Hi Crypto, I don't think we'd see Xbox One/360/PS4 until at least Q3, probably Q4, but the announcement is what would bump up the share price. I'd expect one team to be working on content and a few members of the team to each be working on Mac, Xbox and PS4. I suspect that Xbox / PS4 would need more content to get past Microsoft & Sony QA, but by Q3/4 they should have that. Self-publishing won't get around giving 30% to Microsoft / Sony, but it does mean the remaining 70% goes to Frontier, rather than a fixed fee with performance bonuses. There have been changes recently with regards to how platforms handle VAT so it may be that MS/Sony deal with the VAT (as google and apple have to for android/ios) - the end result is of course unchanged.

I hadn't realised they'd made an Xbox One/360 official announcement. Usually the platform takes roughly 30% of any sale price.

I assumed you'd already left.

Frontier: First Encounters was 20 years ago, and not just that, it was in the days when software patches were not common, rather than an ongoing platform. The release absolutely was a full release of the game, (which doesn't mean feature complete) and going forward bugs will be fixed and features will be completed, and more added.

I'm misquoting you? In response to me suggesting they would sell in-game cash for real cash, you said, and I quote: "The difference is that Frontier has already promised it will not go down that road." How is that a misquote?

Ok, we're going in circles, so this will be my last post to you on this. > Development has been in crisis since March 2014. Backlog of bugs. Then the entire software industry lives in crisis. Deadlines will always slip. There will always be bugs - even WoW/Eve have hundreds of ongoing bugs. This is software. > Frontier has promised not to offer in-game credits for real world cash. Link please, because they haven't promised that. > March 2014 was the external target delivery date My point was that the market deadline (Christmas) is the only one that counts, rather than an arbitrary made up deadline. > Game is so bugged it earns negative press (in the register) The register has decided its editorial stance will be anti-ED for whatever reason. But like I said, all games have bugs, they get worked on, fixed and life goes on. ED is getting plenty of very positive press. > The share price shows sell, sell, sell. Hardly any volume, there's not much of note.

Ah, you're a backer who feels burnt by the process. I see why you feel annoyed - that's fine - I get it, but you should understand that it is clouding your judgement. > "has a year's testing behind it" The releases a year ago aren't like the final game, I don't know if you recall the initial combat releases and alpha builds - so much has been added and changed that its just not the same game. > Things have been broken for weeks. Welcome to the world of development. >Tickets are unanswered. New Year's Day breakage continues. Welcome to post-sprint rest and Christmas and New Year. Why would you expect anything else? The developers will have had their holiday requests denied for 8 months and that cannot continue indefinitely. They know the next phase of their work starts now. I'm amazed the fix is coming out tomorrow, that's dedication. > Little chance of the company selling in-game money Poor reasoning there. The company already gave backers better starting ships and money, what's the difference between doing it in beta and selling better ships and money for real cash later on? My idea about purchase of in-game unique extras is speculative and I noted it as such. I see you haven't replied about the PS4 and Xbox one/360 markets. > No mac version - they promised it in March It's January 6th today. Personally I would expect a beta build by March. Deadlines slip, sure, but being the first port of many it will take longer. > Missed the deadline by 9 months Welcome to development. March 2014 was the internal deadline, Christmas was always the market deadline - that hasn't changed in the 17 years I've worked in the industry. > Why didn't they hit the kill switch when it all went wrong? Because Christmas, and because a playable game is better than no game. Also, do you think people won't play because there's a chance they might become an instant in-game billionaire? I understand your frustration, but what has happened is simply a fact of the development cycle and is already factored into the process and, if people know their stuff, their estimated pricing of the company.

> "Daily maintenance that works is normal. Elite is nothing like that." It works well enough for a first release. No doubt they'll be working on that. You mention that feature x has been broken for 12 hours - yes, these things happen in an initial release. As a game programmer myself, I'm not a fan of the release-now-patch-later model that has pervaded the gaming industry, but this is the world we live in. We can expect more features to break and more to be fixed - this is how development works. Again I refer you to other major titles which all have features break at times, and of course at their initial release was much, much worse. WoW's queuing issues lasted 3 years at least. I take your point regarding ongoing, monthly subscription, and it was a concern of mine, however one that the apple/google apps have introduced people to is new models of payment, and subscription is not the only model. Firstly, we're yet to hear an official announcement about PS4 and XBox One - bear in mind that Eve & Wow are NOT available on console, and will never be. I'm almost certain that PS4/XBox one are going to happen and that we'll see a commensurate price bump when the announcement comes. Before Christmas 2014 sales of those consoles are taken into account the PS4 had sold 13m and Xbox One has 10m (since then the monthly sales of Xbox One have overtaken the PS4 due to their heavy discounting over Christmas). That's a huge new market. I rate the appearance of ED on Xbox 360 as 50% - it's much older, but the market is huge (~84m). Porting from PC to XBox (one/360) is trivial compared to porting to MacOS, which they are doing. So that's one huge market to exploit. The other, I suspect, will be through in-app purchases, for instance, £10 for some in-game credits, or £4.99 for a ship with special features, or a limited number of decals. If you have a few designers / artists available for a few weeks, then you can easily have them knock up some special stuff for sale and keep your artists paying their own way for a while. So these two together I think is what justifies the year-3 projections. I have no doubt they will hit the year 1 projections with ease and they'll sort out the bugs in time. Personally I'd also look at a virtual goods market where people can buy and sell everything game-related for a cost less than eBay's selling costs. Anything from accounts, special goods and ships, anything that can be owned in the universe, and take a slice of the market - say 5 or 10%, whatever is competitive. Could be a market worth millions/year. Finally, taking a few weeks off after a development sprint is absolutely normal. Hitting a Christmas deadline so often requires months of working evenings and weekends. They've hit the deadline, they've got it out: the engine is running and now the journey begins. Speaking as a game developer myself, give them a break, rest assured that they have their priority list of

I'm not sure I'm following you biglittle456. 82% on meta-critic gets you 9th place on the list of PC games. No-one is suggesting its a finished game. Daily maintenance is actually quite normal. Eve online goes down everyday at 11am and doesn't come back up for 30 minutes to an hour. WoW does it weekly, but often has random restarts. I'm with you that it's not been a great start, and that naturally there are bugs. You should have seen it when WoW and Eve started up, they were an absolute nightmare. Queues of a thousand people waiting for an hour to join each server was a fairly common scenario. Yes the small investors are selling, but there are no large sells and the one buy you note outweighs all the sells in volume. Imagine what the share price would look like if they'd decided to wait another year for release and compete directly with Star Citizen or No Man's Sky. I think we're all in agreement there is some way to run on this project.

The recent RNS said £10m in pre-order sales - that would presumably include all the kickstarter stuff, sales on their store but I wonder too whether it also includes high-street shop pre-orders? It hasn't affected the share price anyway. Next I'm guessing we have the annual shareholder's meeting and proper announcements about Xbox one / PS4. User reviews seem to be along the lines of "it looks nice, but it is still a shell of a game that has launched with the minimum set of features", major reviewers may well say "don't buy now, wait until it's a proper game". That then becomes a problem since the only source of income for ED is sales, not subscriptions or in-game purchases / pay to win - that would seem to limit their income. Presumably they have a plan up their sleeve.