To say Elite's been in a bad place for the last couple of years would be an understatement, so the latest announcement from David Braben himself will definitely not bode well for the future of the franchise in general – but especially on consoles.

We’ve been covering the topic of Frontier’s lack of communication and public information on numerous occasions. Even years before Odyssey, Elite was in a state of limbo for basically two full years. Players lived on hope, dreams, and promises of the biggest update to Elite since launch which made people stick around or at least keep following social media and publications on the subject.

Then Odyssey came out in a horrible state that reflected in both active players and Frontier’s planned earnings. We are now eleven updates into Odyssey with many core features still broken, missing, or lacking depth while many players that haven’t upgraded their rigs go back to launching the game in Horizons mode just to have decent framerate.

To give some credit to FDev, there have been some significant improvements to Odyssey since release regarding rendering and performance, but all of this should’ve been done on release – especially since at that point, they still planned to release a console version (older console gen specifically) so optimization should be the priority.

Unfortunately, after even more silence on the topic, David Braben himself stepped up and made an announcement that Frontier is canceling all current and future development of Elite: Dangerous for consoles.

This not only includes Odyssey, but previous versions as well. Frontier promises to keep working on crucial fixes and patches but… honestly, at this point – do people even care or trust their statements?

At the moment, there is no option to transfer your console accounts to a PC account which makes the whole thing even more heart-breaking.

The full statement can be found below

Greetings Commanders,

Elite Dangerous is a game close to my heart.

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 supporting 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.