Elite: Dangerous developer Frontier Developments have pulled the standalone arena dogfighter Elite Dangerous: Arena from stores over a lack of players. The standalone game mode has now been removed from Valve's Steam Store, as well as from the Xbox Games Store and Frontier Developments' own store.

Frontier Developments' Senior Community Manager Edward Lewis expanded on this decision in a post on the Elite: Dangerous forums:

We’ve been looking at our metrics which suggest that the vast majority of new and regular Arena players tend to play Arena through the main Elite Dangerous client rather than the standalone Arena one. We’ve made the decision to remove the standalone version of Elite Dangerous: Arena in order to reduce the number of builds that have to be maintained and managed across Steam, Xbox One and in 2Q'17 PlayStation Network, as well as clarifying the choices for new players of Elite Dangerous on these storefronts.

This is, of course, not the end of the game mode. As Lewis stated above, many players opted to use the Elite: Dangerous client over the Arena client to play the mode so you will still be able to take part in the competitive multiplayer mode from inside the vanilla game's client. If you're one of the few that got Elite Dangerous: Arena you will still be able to access the game mode from the standalone client, just like you always have been able to do.

Quick Take

I can't say I'm surprised that they pulled the Arena standalone. The mode was already playable from inside the vanilla game client and because the mode has never been a focus, it wasn't really something I heard people talk about a lot, with people more often than not opting to just play the base game instead of just the competitive multiplayer. That is if you could find any games.

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