4Game

I think a reality that many ED players struggle to realize is the slow and underwhelming development of Elite and dropping console support are in fact just symptoms of the same years-old problem:

Frontier does not have the resources available to support three separate branches of Elite Dangerous and they probably never did. Because they didn't, yet committed to spreading their resources across multiple platforms, it dragged all forward progress with the game down, and this has only gotten worse as the game has matured and new features have been added.

The console version of Elite is kinda niche and likely doesn't make enough money to fund its own seperate nativization teams, and they probably projected that a PS5/XbX update wouldn't fund itself either. If it was self-funding, they absolutely, 100% would have pursued it. There's a ton of money to be made in the console space and only a fool would exit it unless they had no other choice.

The lack of self-sustainabiity means keeping these versions up to date pulls resources from forward development, and codebase fixes for the game as a whole. This results in the lackadaisical forward progress we have seen for all platforms for many years. This lack of progress further limits the amount of money the game can pull in to support future development, which is then itself caught in the morass of supporting too many platforms with two few resources. They're in a death spiral of technical debt that could, if not addressed, drag the entire game on every platform into insolvency.

I am deeply sympathetic for our console brethren because I'm sure they feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them. At the very least FDev owes console owners 1:1 full account migration over to PC, including a free copy of base game Horizons. But I think Frontier was stuck between a couple of really bad choices: drop consoles and put 100% of their available resources into one platform and exit the developmental death spiral they have been in for years; or attempt to support console Odyssey with a team of inadequate size and then face a very real possibility of the entire game bleeding out via development morass.

Both options really suck, but at least one has the potential for a better, if more limited future. Let's hope they actually make the best of it.