Frontier Developments has released financial results for six months ending with
November 30th, showing that
Elite: Dangerous has sold around 300,000
units, earning the company approximately $21 million (£14.1 million).
IncGamers has details on this, including a few scenarios Frontier outlines
for how they see the game selling over the next few years, ranging from a
minimal "base" scenario, through a "bull" scenario where the game sells like
hotcakes. Based on this, they are way ahead of their base expectations, which
says they will earn £2.5m this year if they manage to sell 250,000 copies, a
milestone they have already surpassed. In this model, they project the game will
sell two million copies by 2017, which would equal £20.0M in revenue. In their
"bull" scenario, if the game sells 750,000 units by the end of this year, they
will have earned £7.5M, which they project out to be a staggering 30 million
units sold by 2017 (they do not ay how they arrived at these numbers), adding up
to over $450M (£300.0M). Meanwhile, The
Elite: Dangerous Newsletter #57 is now available, talking more about plans
for the space combat and exploration game. This includes word on content updates
(expanding on a
recent forum post), saying: "To make this happen we’re expanding the team
working on the game so that we can maintain a regular schedule of updates as
well as working on the paid expansions. The regular updates won’t just be the
ongoing fixes and tweaking we’ve provided since release - we will also add new
features and content for all." They also touch on the native Max OS X version of
the game, saying it should enter beta "in about three months."
Brad Wardell
tweets about Stardock's short-term plans, noting they plan on releasing info
on three new games soon, saying: "And in just over 45 days, I'll be talking
about three new games. All of which are 'bigger' than anything we've done in the
past" (thanks
DSOGaming). Some hints about what they will discuss may be found in an
end of year musings post on the
Stardock website recapping the events of last year and talking about what's
going on at their new studios, Oxide Games, Mohawk Games, and Stardock: Towson.
That last studio is the one tasked with creating a new
Star Control game,
but this may not be one of the three games in question here, as Brad says:
"We’ll be talking a lot more about the new Star Control in 2016. Not too much
will happen this year other than saying that while we will continue to support
and promote the original Star Control classic series (
www.starcontrol.com)
the new one will be a reboot and have a different set of lore from the classic
series." The talking he plans on doing about these three games may not be at a
trade show, as the tweet (from Thursday) comes just 26 days before the start of
the
D.I.C.E. Summit and 60 days before
the
Game Developers Conference, though
there are enough game conventions these days that anything's possible.
Dodge, duck, dip, dive, and... dance? A tweet from
Erik
Asmussen notes for the record that
Robot Roller-Derby Disco
Dodgeball was for a while the top-rated multiplayer game on Steam
according to user reviews.
Searching for the same criteria now shows the game has ceded the top spot on
the list to
Portal 2, but it remains at number two, ahead of
Counter-Strike. This is an impressive feat for an early access game with one
lone developer, and word is the indie action game is gearing up for a full
release on February 19th. In the meantime,
this post celebrates the game's success, and outlines the changes in a new
version .38 "arcade" update that just went live.
The
Ferrari Virtual Academy
website announces access to this racing simulator is no longer available.
This game was launched in 2010 with little enough fanfare that we failed to note
it at the time, but this may be of interest since the game was developed by
Kunos Simulazioni, developers of current VR racing title
Assetto Corsa.
While
Ferrari Virtual Academy was played solo, the focus was to compete
for best times on an online leaderboard, so here is a case where servers (DRM)
going down for a forced online element has killed what was essentially an
offline game. Thanks
VirtualR via Aero.
The Super Bowl is a few weeks off, but I generally consider this weekend's
divisional round of the playoffs to be the apex of the NFL season, with four
games to enjoy over two days, compared with the three games spanning three weeks
that will follow. There are some great matchups on the schedule, so here's
hoping the games live up to their promise.
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