A lot of new information regarding Elite: Dangerous is coming to light now and the picture that's being painted is one that I can only describe as absolutely disgusting and insulting as somebody who sunk 3000+ hours in that game over the course of several years.

Frontier Developments have essentially stated that there will be no major fixes to bugs and performance for the Odyssey expansion which sits at an abysmal 30% positive rating on steam until the Console release which was delayed until next year, meaning this broken tumor they grafted on to a perfectly functioning game is going to sit there fermenting for nearly an entire year. Not only that, but the PC version is going to be graphically downgraded to PS4/Xbox One levels in order to keep the game builds more in line with one another.

This comes on top of them lying about VR support for Odyssey, them breaking the initial kickstarter promises of ship interiors by basically saying that they have no intention of ever implementing them, all the work spent on the planet generation tech being thrown away to make way for the new system that downgraded everything to what it was years ago as well as straight up breaking the generation entirely, and countless other offenses that can only be described as jaw-droppingly egregious.

But that's not all, Glassdoor reviews are now being found for the workplace at Frontier Developments, and the former employees talk about how they've lost most of their main developers that knew how to work the engine due to severe under-pay, and now they're hiring college students to replace them and not even paying them enough to cover their rent. They talk about how the company is soulless, with no room for career advancement for anybody below management level, the people in charge dont know anything about game design and are just marketers and businessmen, the type of shit you'd expect to hear about EA or Activision-Blizzard.

There's also more information implying that Elite: Dangerous' amazing sound design systems are all outsourced, and that the actual game Engine itself is dogshit awful and completely unsuited to run a game like Elite, which is why every update takes forever to get out, breaks everything, and bugs that have existed for years have gone completely ignored: those bugs literally can't be fixed because they are caused by engine limitations, not game code, so combine that with the fact that most of the people that actually know how to work the engine have left and you have a clear picture of a development team that quite literally has absolutely no clue what the hell they're doing with this game.

I haven't heard a word about David Braben actually talking about the future of Elite and his plans like he used to in, well, years now. I think the last time I remember him doing an interview where he talked about the game's future was the one where they were showing off Gas Giant tech that was never added to the game. Frontier Developments as a whole outside of a few community managers that answer cherry picked non-questions and give vague answers to give the illusion of community interaction are almost entirely radio silent. Their official platforms they have control over are being scrubbed clean of criticism by community moderators allowed to go completely unchecked, deleting criticism, banning people for expressing frustrations, and any attempt to call it out is banned as well for "moderator contention" which is their favorite buzz-phrase they've used for literal years to just auto-permaban anybody that takes issue with the flagrant abuse of power to silence people talking favorably about competitors or criticizing the game in any way.

All the while this is happening, Frontier Developments are picking up contract after contract to do big-budget licensing deals such as yet another Jurassic World game, a Warhammer game, as well as working on this weird shooter they decided to just spit out instead of fixing Odyssey. That, combined with the reviews on Glassdoor about the company being soulless and purely profit-driven with management that comes from marketing backgrounds instead of senior game design positions and it becomes pretty fucking clear what's going on here.

Elite: Dangerous isn't as profitable as Frontier's shareholders and executives would like it to be. They've realized there's more money in big budget license deals rather than an immersive space sim, Braben has decided to go after dollar signs rather than see his vision through and fulfill the promises he made to all his kickstarter backers, and with Star Citizen having most of the promises of Elite: Dangerous' original kickstarter pitch already in a playable state on the alpha's live build and huge content updates coming out like a speeding freight train compared to Elite: Dangerous' years-long content drought with drip fed minor updates a couple times a year prior to Odyssey, they've realized that in order to actually compete with Star Citizen they'd need to actually see Braben's original pitch through to completion, and that would require better talent, a new engine, and a lot of time and money, and Frontier isn't willing to do that because it wouldn't look good for the shareholders when they could just pick up another movie license deal.

So they're trying to phase out Elite. They're doing the bare minimum to keep it up and keep sucking up the occasional sale and milking the whales that buy ship paint jobs and decal packs every time they get released, they let aggressive white knights have free reign to ban anybody that criticizes them on an official channel, downscale the dev team and put underpaid, over-worked college students on the project, and they're content to slowly let the game hemorrhage players and downscale the game accordingly until it gets to the point where they're just going to pull the plug and wipe their hands of it, and that will be the end of a decades old franchise that was the grandfather of the entire genre of immersive space sims. Pathetically flopping around like a dying fish out of water, with the lasting legacy it leaves on the modern era being a disturbingly low review score and an angry playerbase that gave it the "Early Access" tag out of spite.

Eat shit, Frontier. And a big hearty "suck my ass" to the people who I thought were my friends who dogpiled and harassed me when I started pointing out the issues with Elite and using Star Citizen as a demonstration of a viable alternative that's just as buggy and broken but at least doesn't make the attempt to lie about being a fully complete and polished product.

I wish I could be smug and laugh like I usually do about situations like this, but I can't. This is just disgusting. One of the most important game franchises is being treated like a dying animal that needs to be put out of its misery all because a company that used to champion medium-budget Indie studios decided big money for less effort was too enticing to pass up.

Fuck capitalism, fuck what it does to artistic mediums, and fuck the corporate scum and their bootlicking white knights who pretend there's no issue and Elite is flawless that allow shit like this to happen.