I’m afraid I have some bad news… Elite: Dangerous will stop supporting MacOS later this year.
I was excited to share the Mac release of the space adventure game back in May 2015. It was supposed to be the first of many Mac games from developer Frontier Developments.
But the writing was on the wall. Frontier never released the Horizons expansion on Mac and didn’t even explain why. They never released another game on MacOS. And now they put the last nail in the coffin with the announcement that Elite: Dangerous will no longer support MacOS.
For the record, this is serious. It’s not often that a developer announces that some of their customers will no longer be able to play a game they paid for…
This is what they had to say in their official statement on their forum:
It is with great sadness that we must announce the upcoming end of Elite Dangerous on Mac.
As many of you will know, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to bring Elite Dangerous Horizons to Mac since launch due to technical barriers.
It seems this was a purely technical decision and they simply can’t secure the same quality levels between Windows and Mac (I would be very interested to know what exactly the problem is):
With the planned improvements coming […] we have felt it necessary to make this difficult decision in order to allow us to bring in content and features in the way that we felt was best for the overall Elite Dangerous experience.
And it will all happen soon:
With the release of the Q4 update, coming towards the end of the year, you will no longer be able to play Elite Dangerous on Mac.
They did say their Support team is ready to help. If you happen to get in touch with them to ask for a refund or other, please let us know how it goes in the comments section.
Still want to play Elite Dangerous on Mac?
While I strongly advise you not to buy it, you may already have it or got a free copy. If that’s the case, be aware the game’s system requirements are demanding:
- 2.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5
- 4 GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB video memory
- 8 GB of hard drive space
- OS 10.10.x
If you are disappointed and are still looking for a good adventure game to play next, you can check out Subnautica, an excellent alternative that takes place underwater. And if your Mac wasn’t powerful enough to run games like this anyway, you should definitely check out Cuphead!
Update: Article updated on May 3, 2018, to reflect Frontier’s decision to stop supporting Elite’s Mac version.
The never got Horizons to Mac. Mac will forever be second class.
The Thargomids are present in the game but Frontier have denied access to the weapons necessary to combat them from Mac OS X players. SO there is really NOTHING to be excited about!
I’m not sure I get what you mean… The developer has denied access specifically for Mac gamers while on Windows you can get access to it???
Yes. Oh, and it’s Thargoids. Damn spell checker!
Couple of comments.
I think it should probably be ‘writing was on the wall’ and I’m unaware that Frontier ever promised to release a string of macOS games.
You are very right, thanks! (mistake corrected)
Also, to clarify what I mean. When a developer starts supporting a platform, one can reasonably expect them to bring more games in the future. I’m not blaming them for those hypothetical games, just say that it was disappointing to see them drop MacOS support altogether.
To be entirely fair, they have announced the REASON why this is the case, even though the article here doesn’t discuss why. In fact the article is openly wrong about them not explaining why. Horizons was never released on Mac because the Mac OS doesn’t support the right version of OpenGL, and so having so much content they plan to release that wouldn’t be able to be supported was clearly not a great idea. Overall it was simpler for them to end mac support than try to continue putting funding into finding ways to support Apple’s proprietary systems.
I hear you and agree that they did say something. Other devs simply drop support without even saying something. That was not the case here. That said, the only explanation I found was that they were “unable to bring Elite Dangerous Horizons to Mac since launch due to technical barriers”.
“Technical barriers” doesn’t say much. I simply would like to hear more details. Was it OpenGL? Was it Metal?
I’m not blaming them or claiming they’re bad people, just saying I’m disappointed to learn this…
They happily took the money from Mac gamers for their Kickstarter campaign. Made a bad decision in using only Open GL well knowing that the MacOS version is hopelessly outdated with no hope of getting updated, which kind of EOLed the Mac version right there. If they would’ve decided to use Metal (1 at the time) they could’ve more options with Metal 2 now, or they could’ve considered Vulkan/MoltenVK by now.