It’s no secret that an expansion’s announcement is generally a driving force for bringing players into MMOs and multiplayer games, and that certainly appears to be the case for Elite: Dangerous, which is reportedly experiencing some strong monthly active player counts — an estimated 500K of them, to be exact.
The numbers come from a report by Liberium, the official stockbroker of Frontier Developments, and while the full report is locked behind a paywall, regular MOP reader StuartGT shared a synopsis on Reddit.
According to the summary, the estimated 500K players log in to the game on a regular basis and at least one time a month, and only count players that are categorized as active instead of those who got the game from the Epic Games Store for free. The first few lines of the report also state that the release of Odyssey seeks to attract 3.5M inactive players back to the game. On the subject of Odyssey sales, Liberium estimates that 1 million copies of the expansion will be bought within the first year on PC and consoles.
It’s important to note that the lede for this report does state that it looks at “the upside sensitivity to [these] numbers,” but for all intents and purposes it would seem like Odyssey’s pending arrival is raking in players to the game.
