How do we schedule these ships, and why do the schedules change as much has they do?

So it's a surprisingly complicated thing to schedule and manage, mostly because of the timeframes involved. So ships, if we take a very simplistic ground vehicle, that is probably still three to four months of development time. And you go to the other end of a big capital ship, that could be two plus years of development time. So we sort of have to work back from a known point, which could be a gameplay team says, we're going to work on this feature, which happens to be a key feature of a ship or a feature that a ship helps further in the game. And they go, we're going to release this in Q2 next year. Can you give us the ship for us? Nope, you should have asked us last year because it's going to take too long to do that. So if we know in advance when those dates are going to be, then we can work backwards and look at our schedule and go, right, this ship will fit in the time, but we don't have the people. It would take everyone on the team to do it, which means we just released one ship that year, which is not what we want to do. So it's a constant juggling act between wanting to deliver a ship with a specific feature and specific dates and the people we have available. So I think we'd all love to just all work on the big, huge capital ships, but it's finding that balance between getting through some of these larger ships and having a sort of fairly regular release cycle of putting ships into each of the six big patches that we have each year because you have the four quarterlies and then IAE and Invictus. And in terms of prioritizing what ones go, that's generally done at a very high level. I think, like I said, we talk about this every year or so, but every show is someone's first show. So once or maybe twice a year, I sit down with Chris, Erin, Todd, Tony, and we look at the next 12 to 24 months schedule and go, oh, this feature is coming, so let's try and push for this ship there. Or we can't guarantee this feature is going to get done in this time frame, so let's put some ships in that don't have any pre-existing gameplay requirements or even do new straight-to-release ships that can help maintain that regular release cycle without taking away from other things. And that's also the reason why things move. Like we mentioned at the start, we don't do everything related to ships. So if another team, for whatever reason, can't deliver the feature on time, we're sort of left going, do we just stop working on the ship? Some ships we can. It's easy enough to just pause them at some point, come back to it. Connie Taurus was a great example of what happened to a ship that got paused so many times because the people were needed for other things. The whole series. Other times it's like, no, the ship is done and we're just waiting for the gameplay. Can we release it without this gameplay? The RAFT being a good example, we wanted it to be with the cargo refactor so you could be dropping those crates on. Unfortunately, the planets didn't align for that, but it could still be used as a cargo ship. So we made the choice to release it with the existing cargo gameplay rather than hold it for the cargo refactor.

And it's not just the feature teams as well. Even within this group, we've got five different people working on five different things. We still have the concept teams, the VFX, the animation, the audio, the tech art. We represent a rather large section of the company already within us, but that's just half of the picture as well when you take into account all the other departments that work towards getting a ship out. And it only takes one or two things that change priorities there that can then impact what we're trying to do.