Elite Dangerous
Take control of your own starship and blaze your trail in an ever-changing galaxy. Master the arts of combat, mining and trade or venture out into the unknown across a 1:1 scale universe.
MMORPGOpen WorldRole-PlayingSandboxSimulationStrategy
Your like matters. Every heart nudges this game's GamingPickz Score and where it ranks (a small 5% of the score), so the lists get better for everyone.
- Released
- 2014
- Developer
- Frontier Developments
- Platforms
- 3 systems
- Critics
- 80
- Steam Deck
- playable
- Download
- 25 GB
What is Elite Dangerous?
Take control of your own starship and blaze your trail in an ever-changing galaxy. Master the arts of combat, mining and trade or venture out into the unknown across a 1:1 scale universe.
Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.
The record
| First released | 16 December 2014 |
|---|---|
| Developer | Frontier Developments |
| Publisher | Frontier Developments |
| Platforms | PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Steam Deck |
| Genres | MMORPG, Open World, Role-Playing, Sandbox, Simulation, Strategy |
| Languages | 6 supported |
Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q4980843, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.
How was Elite Dangerous received?
Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Metacritic page. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.
Accessibility
Seeing
None declared
Hearing
None declared
Input
- Partial Controller Support
Difficulty
None declared
Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.
What does it support?
| Capability | Support |
|---|---|
| Controller | partial support |
| Cloud saves | No |
| Cross-platform play | No |
| Mod support | No official workshop |
| Online play | Yes |
| In-game purchases | Yes |
| Steam Deck | playable |
| Download size | 25 GB |
| Add-on content | 2 DLC listed |
| Age gate | None |
Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.
What does it cost?
Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.
Is Elite Dangerous worth it?
77% of 107,348 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Mostly Positive. It costs $5.99 on Steam, on sale from $19.99, and critics score it 80/100.
That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.
How long is Elite Dangerous? How long to beat it
Total play time for Elite Dangerous is about 641.8 hours to do everything, and around 113.6 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.
| How you play | Hours | Players logged |
|---|---|---|
| Just the main story: straight through the critical path | 113.6h | 19 |
| Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do | 271.2h | 32 |
| Completionist: everything: 100% the game | 641.8h | 13 |
At its current price of $5.99, beating the main story works out to about $0.05 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.
Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.
Elite Dangerous system requirements
The minimum requirements from Elite Dangerous's Steam page. These are what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings.
| Memory | 6 GB RAM (other games at this level) |
|---|---|
| Processor | Quad Core CPU (4 x 2Ghz) |
| Graphics | Nvidia GTX 470/AMD R7 240 |
| Storage | 25 GB (more games this size) |
| System | 64-bit OS required |
Can your PC run it? Check Elite Dangerous against your exact GPU, CPU and RAM.
Where Elite Dangerous sits on the grid
Compare the whole catalogueElite Dangerous plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.
1 games have both
Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.
Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.
- Multi-platform
Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Estimated sales for Elite Dangerous
These are estimates, not reported figures. Frontier Developments has not published unit sales for Elite Dangerous, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.
How this was calculated
Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.
| Reviews on Steam | 107,348 |
|---|---|
| Sales per review | 30 to 60 |
| List price | $19.99 |
| Assumed average selling price | 33% to 66% of list |
What this cannot tell you
Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.
The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.
The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.
Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.
If Frontier Developments publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.
Elite Dangerous price & deals: is it on sale?
We have one reading so far: $5.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.
Latest Elite Dangerous updates & patch notes
Pulled from Elite Dangerous's own Steam feed on 5 September 2026. Posts marked as from the studio were written by the developer; the rest are articles Steam syndicated from elsewhere. Every one links to its source.
What readers say about Elite Dangerous
Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.
Loading reviews…
Problems players report
We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Elite Dangerous on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.
- Crashes and freezes16 of 300 (5%)
My experience for the last 3 hours: - Log in the game, disembark to a station to buy gear to do operations, games crashes and I get stuck on a black screen.
Steam review, 12 July 2026 · 44 hours played · 20 readers marked it helpfulnothing works, game crashes on splash screen and reporting a crash is impossible.
Steam review, 11 August 2026 · 10 hours played · 13 readers marked it helpful - Performance and stutter12 of 300 (4%)
A paid DLC was launched to abysmal failure in the form of "space legs" which lets you walk around on the barren rocks and attack settlements in some of the worst FPS gameplay you'll ever come across.
Steam review, 23 June 2026 · 113 hours played · 395 readers marked it helpfulif you want to experiment with ships, well, you're looking at few hundreds hours of BS grinding for materials (fun, right?) - FPS gameplay is just trash.
Steam review, 5 July 2026 · 140 hours played · 19 readers marked it helpful - Will not launch or install11 of 300 (4%)
Within five to ten minutes of logging in, I can almost guarantee I'll encounter some kind of bug—overlapping ship menus, interface glitches, or a black screen after disembarking.
Steam review, 19 July 2026 · 2,298 hours played · 149 readers marked it helpfulMy experience for the last 3 hours: - Log in the game, disembark to a station to buy gear to do operations, games crashes and I get stuck on a black screen.
Steam review, 12 July 2026 · 44 hours played · 20 readers marked it helpful - Servers and connection10 of 300 (3%)
I spent 5.6 hours trying to play this game, but I spent all of that time troubleshooting server issues, fighting invisible walls, and wrestling with a terrible interface.
Steam review, 16 August 2026 · 6 hours played · 10 readers marked it helpfulCo-op desyncs randomly, multiple times a day.
Steam review, 27 July 2026 · 88 hours played · 8 readers marked it helpful
A further 17 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.
Did it run on your PC?
Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.
Where Elite Dangerous appears
The ranked lists and finder pages Elite Dangerous qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.
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Games like Elite Dangerous
24 games overlap with Elite Dangerous on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are Kerbal Space Program, Endless Sky and Oxygen Not Included.
Elite Dangerous head to head
See Elite Dangerous compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:
More Elite Dangerous comparisons: vs PULSAR: Lost Colony
Common questions about Elite Dangerous
What platforms is Elite Dangerous on?
Elite Dangerous is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Steam Deck. It first released in 2014.
How much does Elite Dangerous cost?
$5.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.
Do players recommend Elite Dangerous?
77% of 107,348 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Mostly Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.
What is the Metacritic score for Elite Dangerous?
80 out of 100 for the PC version, as published on the game's own Steam store page. Steam can lag Metacritic by a few points.
Does Elite Dangerous work on Steam Deck?
Valve rates Elite Dangerous as playable on the Steam Deck, from its own testing.
How big is the Elite Dangerous download?
25 GB on PC, from the storage requirement on its Steam listing. Console versions differ.
Who made Elite Dangerous?
Elite Dangerous was developed by Frontier Developments and published by Frontier Developments.
Is Elite Dangerous worth it in 2026?
77% of 107,348 Steam reviews are positive (Mostly Positive), and it is $5.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.
Is Elite Dangerous on sale?
Yes, right now. Elite Dangerous is $5.99 on Steam, down from its $19.99 list price (about 70% off), read on 30 August 2026. Prices move, so check the store.
What are the system requirements for Elite Dangerous?
At minimum, Elite Dangerous needs 6 GB RAM, a Quad Core CPU (4 x 2Ghz), a Nvidia GTX 470/AMD R7 240, 25 GB of storage, from its Steam listing. That is what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings. Check it against your own PC on the can-I-run page.