I have never posted something on Reddit in my life other than comments… but after 100+ hours in the game (and over 500 hours total in Elite) I feel compelled to share this observation with the void of reddit that started with a tin foil hat theory.
Frontier Developments is Envy Adams from the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World movie/comics.
But first the tin foil…One day during the early Odyssey alpha days I told one of my good friends (who has about 1.5k hours in the game) we were joking about the pros and cons of the game and I came up with a conspiracy theory about why I thought Elite could end up being a dead in the water game once Odyssey actually launches.
A TLDR version of said conspiracy theory:
- Elite is going to take a back seat to other cheaper to make and maintain IPs in Frontier's portfolio… they are a publicly traded company now so games don't matter, only shareholder stock prices, right?
- Frontier will shift development resources away from Elite early in development of Odyssey due to the pandemic and other factors, and gradually move most development efforts toward the rest of their more widely recognizable IPs (i.e. Jurassic World).
- Frontier would then use CIG level marketing schemes and content for Odyssey's launch to boost sales as much as possible with existing customers while already having a pre-written apology ready to go the first week or two after launch knowing their share prices would tank but hopefully
- If their short term hedged bet with Odyssey fails and they can't rally or sustain their stock price, then they'll probably just abandon Elite and start announcing that all those roadmap promises from years ago are "not on the roadmap" anymore because they are moving dev effort elsewhere and then start announcing new roadmap promises for IPs that are easier to manage.
Then the 2021 earnings and shareholder calls happen:
And just recently Frontier announced that , there's been silence on any updates or even just "we're working on it" updates since the Post-Launch-Update #5…
So… This is a direct copy paste of from the Scott Pilgrim Wiki. I just added some parentheticals to come full circle:
"Envy" Adams is Scott Pilgrim's ex-girlfriend who brutally dumped Scott in college (Frontier's Odyssey launch) prior to the events of the book (current day and near future). She was initially a quiet, mousey girl, but she decides to change herself and her self image (the shift in focus to other IP titles). She ends up becoming more callous and aggressive in contrast to her initial personality (The Elite "roadmap" silence since update 5, ship interiors being confirmed they are not on the roadmap now, full removal of any FPS exploration mechanics or new FPS trade mechanics in significant favor of PvEvP combat mechanics instead of a balance approach to all three, etc.). Eventually Envy eventually takes over Scott's band and dumps him without warning (beginning to remove major roadmap items that most of the existing community expected and is willing to pay for). She reappears later in the series, introduced as the lead singer and keyboardist for the popular emerging band The Clash at Demonhead, no longer going by "Nat" or "Natalie" (the insane amount of Frontiers media focus with Jurassic World Evolution 2). Scott describes her original personality as being "nice" and is baffled as to what she has become (claiming in the movie, "You used to be so nice!")."
