The primordial mistake of David Braben

Ok, I've been thinking about this for years, never saw anyone discuss it so here goes.

Have you ever wondered why ED haven't launched new ships since 2018? Or why ED has not received the massive expansions we all hoped (and was promised) for when it launched back in 2014?

I have.

I think the reason is a massive miscalculation made before the game even launched.

They should have made it a subscription based game and not a one-time payment model. I don't see how you could have viable business model in maintaining and continuously developing a live service game of the scale of ED based on a one-time payment model.

I mean I play the game since 2014 and I paid them maybe 100€ through the years.

If it had been a live service game, I would have paid them 1400€ during this time + new ships + merchandise + whatever. Same goes for a lot of you guys, I suspect. Personally I know because that's what happened when I started on Eve-Online back in 2004-2009 🙂

Once David Braben decided to go with the one-time payment model, which was already outdated in 2013 when the Kickstarter went up, it was too late. You couldn't charge players for anything after that apart for cosmetics.

I can't think of a single live service games on the scale of ED out there which is not on a subscription-based model.

Odyssey compounded the problem of course. It was the last hurray for ED. They probably counted on a massive new player intake after Odyssey (to prove the validity of the one-time payment business model) and when that didn't materialize, ED was doomed. Before Odyssey launched, and when again when they scrapped the consoles, I actually hoped for a change in business model. But perhaps they didn't dare after all the fall-out from Odyssey.

Subscription is the only way, as I see it (based on back-of-napkin notes), that Frontier could justify development of things like walk-in-ships, first-person Thargoid combat, EVA, bigger station environments and so forth.