Frontier Developments Ceases Development On Elite Dangerous Console To Focus On PC

It’s a sad day for Elite Dangerous console players as Frontier Developments announces that they’ve stopped all development on the console versions of the sci-fi MMORPG to focus on solely on the PC version. The console version, however, will continue to run in its current state on PlayStation and Xbox but will be in permanent maintenance mode going forward.

Here’s the official announcement from Frontier Developments Founder and CEO, David Braben:

“It’s no secret that Odyssey’s launch was less than ideal, including the need to split the PC/console player base to focus on a PC-only launch. Since Odyssey’s release in May 2021, we have worked tirelessly to improve the Odyssey experience on PC, and whilst we have made great progress there is still more to be done. We have been ing the pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey codebases since.

Over the last several months, we have been wrestling with the best way to move forward, and it is with a heavy heart we have decided to cancel all console development. We need to be able to move forward with the story of the game, and in order for us to do this we need to focus on a single codebase. Elite Dangerous will continue on console as it is now together with critical updates, but we will focus on new content updates on PC on the post-Odyssey codebase.

We appreciate this news is not what our console community were hoping for. This was not an easy decision to make, but it was made with the long-term future of Elite Dangerous in mind.”

Elite Dangerous has been available on Xbox One since 2015 and on PlayStation since 2017 but has yet to receive the Odyssey expansion. The expansion was supposed to launch in fall 2021 a few months after its PC release but was delayed indefinitely as the developers scrambled to fix its severely broken PC version in addition to releadates for the expansion and the Horizon base game which are now basically two separate entities.