Frontier Developments have announced that their universal space trucker game Elite: Dangerous has managed to move 1.4 million copies since the game's release on PC, Mac and Xbox One platforms.
The game, which was successfully crowdfunded back in 2014, has seen an overwhelmingly positive response from their community since its inception.
We have an amazing player community,” Frontier CEO David Braben said. “The average play time among our 1.4 million players is 60 hours – that’s a massive 84 million player hours and counting. With the community’s feedback, we’re constantly making Elite: Dangerous better than ever. We have incredible long-term ambition and we will continue to deliver on those ambitions. We will detail more exciting developments for Horizons very soon.
The game recently went into its second season. This new season, titled Elite: Dangerous Horizons, adds the ability to land on one of the uncountable number of planets in the game and drive around in a dune buggy while they collect resources and do missions. It seems like the future is bright for fans of the space sim.
Elite: Dangerous: Horizons is available now on Steam and the official Frontier Developments website. Players who already own the game can buy the new update for $44.99, with new players able to buy the full experience for $59.99. This pricing structure got a bit of backlash from the community because people who already bought the base game are essentially paying more for the complete experience than new players are.
Quick Take
While I'm personally not too happy with the pricing structure of the update, I am pretty pleased with how well this game is doing. The sheer size and scope of the game and the beautiful visual representation make for an oddly compelling, yet quite slow, gaming experience that scratches and itch I didn't even know needed scratching. The Horizons update is a bit lackluster in terms of content to date, but their continued dedication to improving the game as time goes on leads me to believe that the few objections I have with Elite: Dangerous will become even less in the not too distant future.
