 Frontier published their annual financial trading report to the London Stock Exchange yesterday and as a result we're starting to get a much better handle on the effect that the launch of Odyssey has had on the company as opposed to what the board had anticipated was going to happen. The trading update that Cambridge developers have published to the stock exchange also talks about their plans for the complete portfolio of games for the year ahead including Elite Dangerous. In this video we're going to break down some key points of the announcement and take a look at the year ahead and what it may mean for Odyssey. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications and if you'd like to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. Before we dig into the financials here's a bit of background based on the company's previous financial reporting and comments made by Liberum one of FDev's official stock brokers. In March of 2021 two months before the launch of Odyssey Liberum stated that Elite Dangerous had somewhere in the region of half a million active players. Furthermore there were around 3.5 million inactive or lapsed players that a relatively small proportion of whom Frontier was hoping to re-engage with with the launch of Odyssey. On top of this the giveaway of the base game on the epic store the previous year had further created a potential pool of something around 8 million accounts Frontier clearly hoping to attract some of those accounts to Odyssey. In the financial year 2021 that's up to the end of May 2021 Frontier expected to get around 11 million pounds in revenue from Odyssey in pre-orders and initial sales. These sales would have been, remember, predominantly all achieved before the problems Odyssey was having were apparent to the public. In the following financial year of 2022 that's the financial year that has just ended at the end of May they were originally anticipating around a further 21 million pounds but this had anticipated sales of the console version of the expansion included as well. Odyssey have now however reported this week that they have decided to quote fully amortize unquote Elite Dangerous Odyssey's intangible asset to the tune of around 7 million pounds. That's basically saying that they have decided to pay off the remainder of the development debt early that otherwise would ordinarily have been spread over the course of a few financial years and this 7 million quid amortization has now left Odyssey with between 1 and 2 million pounds worth of profit. It would seem that the board realized Odyssey wouldn't be performing anywhere near as well as they had expected and so they resigned themselves to paying off the remaining development costs during what turns out to be a bumper financial year for the company overall. This essentially means Elite Dangerous Odyssey is moving into the new financial year with a clean slate which would indeed seem to be a sensible approach for the future. Even if the numbers we have available to us aren't exactly correct the huge disparity between what the board of Frontier thought would happen and what actually happened demonstrates in some quite stark language the very real cost of a troubled game launch. As a company overall however Frontier continues to do extremely well. Overall their profits this year are at record highs again a full 26% above last year's equally record high and they continue to have a portfolio of otherwise very successful and popular titles including big hitters like Jurassic World Evolution 2, Planet Zoo, Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Gate Demon Hunters and they just started taking pre-orders for F1 Manager 2022 which immediately smacked to the top of the steam charts when sales opened. Moving again at the Elite Dangerous Odyssey roadmap Frontier published in May there are a further two updates remaining this year one around August and another around November. Frontier aren't saying exactly what is included in the patches obviously not wanting to deliver spoilers all they have said is that August contains what they have described as quote narrative content unquote alongside further stability and optimization changes and the November update contains the next quote major narrative phase unquote alongside further stability changes Arthur mentioned on a live stream in May that the company is working on something for Elite Dangerous that they have never attempted before as yet we don't know what that thing is or when it will likely arrive. The roadmap also stated that in early 2023 we will see the overhaul of a key feature of Elite Dangerous. In the report to the London stock market with regard to Elite Dangerous in the coming year Frontier have said quote we are focusing on supporting and growing our player community and will build on the narrative aspects of Elite Dangerous during financial year 23 unquote. So even with Odyssey's less than stellar financial performance there is still a clear statement of intent from Frontier to continue to support the game, the existing player base grow that player base and expand upon their narrative efforts in the game. The report goes on to say that Elite Dangerous is quote set to benefit from new DLC during financial year 23 unquote. That line did generate some chatter in the wider community. Here at the Burpit we'd advise a degree of caution when interpreting that particular statement we've seen Arc's store items referred to as DLC in financial reports from Frontier and Liberum before and we think it extremely unlikely that there is a further as yet unannounced paid expansion coming to Elite Dangerous in the next year. With that said we do believe it extremely likely that more has been and is still being developed for the game. When David Brabant announced that the console build of Odyssey was being dropped he noted that the narrative needed to move on and that in going forward it would proceed with new content updates on the Odyssey code base only. The question at the moment is just when will that content arrive with the player base and what form will it take? There was a leak from within Frontier three years ago that is pretty much confirmed as genuine these days that spoke of on foot Thargoids and base building as being part of the games development. We do think it likely that on foot Thargoid encounters are almost certainly a given at this point but what of base building? In a forum post in June 2020 the then community manager for Elite Dangerous Tim Smith posted to the official forums stating that base building was not part of the company's roadmap for Elite Dangerous. Players have dug into the code for Elite Dangerous Odyssey and found references to base building in there so it's clearly something Frontier have at least considered in the past. Base building schematics are of course a collectible on foot material in Odyssey albeit not currently used for anything. Star Citizen has plans for base building, No Man's Sky has base building already and this week Bethesda announced that Starfield also was jumping on the base building wagon. It's a very much requested feature from players and it would seem to be very easy to monetize in Elite Dangerous via numerous cosmetic items. So if the feature wasn't implemented in a galaxy the size of Elite Dangerous it would seem to be an awful waste of space. Do you think we'll see on foot Thargoids in Elite Dangerous Odyssey and if so when do you think they'll arrive? Would you like to see base building in Elite Dangerous? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now, thanks very much for watching. 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