Frontier Developments To Discontinue Console Updates For Elite Dangerous, Will Focus On PC

Odyssey, the last expansion for sci-fi MMO Elite Dangerous, was "less than ideal" at launch, Frontier Developments Founder David Braben admitted in an update post today. "Whilst we have made great progress there is still more to be done," he said, noting that his team has been "supporting the pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey codebases since."

That's a lot of work, and it's led Braben to make the difficult decision to cancel further console development on the game, which he deemed "the best way to move forward." This will allow the dev team to "focus on a single codebase" to properly advance the game's story. Elite Dangerous will continue to receive critical updates on consoles but further additional content will be limited to the PC version of the game, allowing the dev team to "focus on new content updates on PC on the post-Odyssey codebase."

Console players may be able to transfer their accounts to PC, something the Elite Dangerous Twitter account said it was "exploring" but "at present have nothing to announce."

"This was not an easy decision to make, but it was made with the long-term future of Elite Dangerous in mind," Braben concluded. That future is a little cloudy, when one looks at the stock price of the publicly traded Frontier Developments. It nose-dived in November, losing about 30% of its value in a single day, and currently trades at about one-third of its value from last April -- 1,156 now versus a peak of 3,225 on April 29 -- which might explain why Braben feels the need to make such a drastic change.