First, citizens is not the number to look at. Fleet members is. We are looking at an increased paying player pop of 150k, not 250k. I think already bought in players are the prime target for ship sales (I can be wrong on this, we don’t have that data, but lack of new fleet members during sales seems to support this).
Yeah, my point is that they seem to be hitting consistently $30m+ per year. That a sale hits $4m or $2. 8m as previous sales is indifferent to their overall funding (2016 had higher funding than other years, close to that $1.5m extra they did on the sale). They don’t need a 2016 type sale to keep that amazingly consistent cashflow, they just need to keep their usual trajectory, which has been eerily consistent over 4 years. They can keep doing sales to keep attracting new paying users and maintain cash flow. Hitting $2.8 million in a sale with 300k new users since the last year means an average attachment of less than $10 per new user. Hardly difficult for them when they already bought in for 4 times that.
My point is that there’s no data that suggest they’ve capped their monetization or player base yet. It has to come at some point, but the argument that a specific sale was specially attractive and can’t be repeated seems quaint for analyzing the overall future funding potential. Regular unattractive sales will do just fine. It’s a subjective analysis that, although might be right in principle (I think it is), is not really that relevant for the future of the project, since no observable metric has yet changed for the worse in 4 years (if anything, the funding has become more stable over time). There’s actually one metric that keeps improving, which is average number of citizens (people with an account but not necessarily with a ship, so not necessarily paying users). That’s basically interested potential clients, and that’s growing above average in the last two years.
They have:
-Consistent income year over year, not exclusively dependent on sales.
-Consistent player base growth.
-At least 50% of their cash flow generated by that player growth.
-Whales seem to provide a much lower fraction of the funding than what people assume at first. They are certainly there, but they are not the main driving force being the steady numbers (I don’t think they are exactly insignificant either, but we can’t get those numbers from the data at hand).
That seems to be what the data is saying. The business model will collapse when new players stop coming in (if they do anytime soon, this project is really in uncharted territory and has been for a while). If we are going to speculate as to why the cash flow might stop soon (and I would be wary of such speculations, since we have people that have been saying that for years) the speculation should be focused on tapping the potential player base. Reasons I can think of can be:
1-Space Sim market not that big.
2-Technology and assets eventually falling below the curve.
3-Eventual lack of progress stopping people buying in.
1 is not that important since, with the FPS and exploration elements they are rolling out, it’s not just a Space Sim anymore. I don’t think the crafting elements are being proposed by chance. 3 is risible, since it’s been that way for years now without any noticeable lack in funding. The player base doesn’t seem to really care. 2 I think can be an issue for them in a couple years to 5 years, but that’s a really long time and by then they might have released something (50% chances SQ42 comes out in the next 2 years, imho).
I am as weary of the business model as the next guy, but it is working for them for now.
