Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Elite: Dangerous: 15 Creation Jobs Cut, Operations Move to Cambridge
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Frontier Developments has sent a letter to investors indicating that fifteen "creation" jobs at the company's Cambridge studio have been made redundant and that all Halifax development jobs are being moved to Cambridge. What the implications are for the Halifax studio remain unclear.
Frontier is concentrating its creative staff in one location for both Elite: Dangerous and Coaster Park Tycoon.
Read the full press release on the Frontier Developments site.
Source: Gamasutra
)
Comments
As content creation is sorely needed in Elite at the moment, i personally consider this bad news. On the other hand, they are looking for 12 new people in their UK studio - but mostly they seek programmers.
Have fun
I believe they have more people working on Elite now not less.. the staff were involved in other projects.. well at least that is what I read in a similar article on Gamespot.
Still after a game releases you tend not to need as many people working on it, but I am sure they are dedicated to maknig Elite even better than it is now.
I am amazed how this kind of news is always written like its BAD NEWS. Here's a Fact in the MMO/PC gaming market - Right after release, about 20-35% of the development or "creation" programmers are let go. This is pretty standard in the gaming industry as a whole. The gaming companies hire extra people to get the games launched that are not needed for continued content development or patching/fixing live content, so they are let go. The fact mentioned above , that they are looking for new programmers for continued growth, tells you they are doing fine as a company. So this is overall GOOD NEWS, not BAD.
So the story is that the company is consolidating their development team that works on two of their self published titles from two studios into one, and that by doing that it was found that 15 positions had redundancy and they just cut those 15 redundant people.
must be a slow news day in the gameingsphere.
P.S. inB4 "Elite Dangerous MUST be failing"
My gaming blog
I can't keep track anymore...
If a game is feature complete then yes but Elite Dangerous has bare minimum content and needs significant development to keep people playing for the long run. This development shows that this is unlikely to happen and the game will now be shelved and put on the back burner.
My gaming blog
I do not concur with your conclusion. I think the hiring of the programmers DOES hint at increased work on additional game elements like walking in stations and planetary landings (which will IMHO take at least 1.5 years to implement). However, the current basic game is nice but does lack content. 15 additional content generating personnel would have provided quite a bit of additional content and give the active players something to do until the next big content upgrades (e.g. the planned Thargoid Invasion) hit the servers.
Have fun
If the game blows, it will die, if they have more income then expenditures it will flourish.
Still, this game is way better then that pyramid scheme called SC.
Yes, it's not often that programmers that were used to create the game are being axed when they are not needed anymore and are replaced with coders that are better in maintaining a game and creating content/fix bugs. :S
How funny that doomsayers always think they know it all yet they know nothing.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
We will see soon enough i think.
The real telling point will be if they go ahead and make the game fully off-line as well, like they said at first. If that happens then i would say they are cutting back on development. But we will see if the Wings patch does anything for the game at all.
I do not expect that to make much difference..but we will see.
In the Elite: Dangerous section of MMORPG.com you will find a thread with links to the offical financial reports of FD that the game is selling better than expected, having achieved its target several months earlier than planned. So officially for the shareholders E:D is a success. As most of the network traffic is between user PCs (which act as intermediate servers) and only the overall data management (e.g. station prices and influence management) is done by a central server or two, the operating costs should be quite moderate.
Concerning your remark about Star Citizen: you seem to have no idea about what a pyramid scheme is. And neither do you seem to know much about Star Citizen. In short - SC has no similarities with a pyramid scheme whatsoever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
The coders they are looking for are not for creating content. They look for people with experience in grafic engines, UI design, GUI design etc. - you can read the job descriptions on the FD homepage. Those are not jobs usually related to content generation ... these people you need to create the framework for a game or game element.
Have fun
Finished? What is finished about this game? Most of the promised features are still not in or only partially so.
Another studio that can't live up to it's promises. Big talk, but little production....
yes. Unless we are missing some information this is another reason not to bother with KS. I may be wrong but the idea behind KS is for devs (specially smaller companies) to avoid having to deal with investors touching the cake with their dirty hands.
As for the companie cutting jobs, thats usually normal procedure if there are contractors they leave when their contract ends.
Oh well, i never followed Elite dangerous and i dont care about KS so.....
Stay tuned for more "surprises" at Frontier Developments in the coming year. They are going to be learning how MMO's work.
They are most likely also going to be learning that a game which was a massive hit 30 years ago when there was almost no competition around is not going to be the same record-breaker in the saturated market of 2015.
I expect there will be some changes announced in the 3rd quarter to stimulate the almost non-existant revenue streams as "box sales" continue to dwindle.
You underestimate FP.
They discovered alternate revenue sources like selling Elite:Dangerous novels
https://store.elitedangerous.com/eur/books.html
If you look the novels up on Amazon ... the novels got like 50+ good reviews and seem to sell well .. unexpected ...
Have fun