Elite Dangerous
Skip · RPG · 2015
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $19.99.
- Length
- 113.6h
- Value
- $0.18/hr
- Reviews
- 77% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 67% over the last 30 days against 77% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 6 GB of memory, Nvidia GTX 470/AMD R7 240, 25 GB of storage. Windows only.
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.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
September 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. It has been discounted 102 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 25 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 89 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 66 percent. Among the games that feel like it, PULSAR: Lost Colony ($19.99, scores 75) beats it on value, while it beats StarMade ($14.99, scores 15).
Players rate it 77 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 67 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 10 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2026 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 24 percent of the 5,312 reviews written there were positive, against 77 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (currency, free-to-grind); the score docks it lightly for that.
Finishing takes 113.6 hours; clearing it takes 748, which is 6.6 times the campaign.
Still 4.8K concurrent players, 11 years in.
Players
4,845 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Owned the game long before Frontier account was required, getting it to link with my steam account required 15 different activation emails to launch a game I have the CD-Key for and have owned for over 10 years. This is rockstar level of retardation
Refund currently pending. Tutorial is a mess and is incomplete. game could be cool potentially -- but if they can't bother to teach you how to play, I'm not interested. The tools you have possess different settings they don't instruct you how to use and I needed a friend to walk me through aspects of the game the tutorial wasn't showing me. When I finished the first half of the tutorial the tutorial stopped giving...
Title: 81 hours in and I finally get it Rating: Recommended Hours Played: 81.0 hrs I am 54 years old. I have been playing video games since the late 70s. I have seen every space game come and go, from Elite on the BBC Micro to Star Citizen's never-ending crowdfunding campaign. So when I say this game surprised me, I mean it. I bought Elite Dangerous on a sale with low expectations. I thought it would be pretty but...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Elite Dangerous scores 45/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/359320/elite-dangerousThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 2, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.