Any reason these games aren't on GOG yet? Two awesome space scifi games.

David Braben, creator of Frontier Elite 2 would prefer people play his latest Elite game, Elite: Dangerous, rather than having them play Frontier 2.

And Freelancer appears to locked in limbo by both Microsoft and Chris Roberts. Microsoft has lots of flightsim/sim games perfect for reboots/re-release on GOG but seems unlikely to happen. And Chris Roberts has his own thing going on with Star Citizen, which is a blackhole of hype/promises that a re-release of Freelancer to GOG would only deflate.

At this point I think it's impossible for Star Citizen to live up to the hype. Even if the game is good, but not amazing at an epic scale, it's going to end up getting panned by everybody.

I remember trying a pirate version of Freelancer at one point, but it was more because I was looking for the next game to play. It didn't end up sinking its teeth in me, but I would definitely like to give another try.

Interesting replies. Thanks. I didn't know the creator of Frontier is also the creator of Elite Dangerous.

Source?

Re. OP, I think those two titles can be pretty easily emulated, and back-up ROMs are easy to find, rendering the industry BS surrounding Chris Roberts relatively moot. I agree, it's a pipe-dream that priced itself out of business, a more or less niche country-club title.

As others have said 1. "Because David Braben", 2. "Because Microsoft"... I own both on disc, FE2 works flawlessly under DOSBox (as does Elite Plus) and Freelancer works (even in ultrawide). The copy-protection in FE2 has long been patched out (there's a community patch that means the "Enter the 4th character from 3rd word on the 5th page from the user manual" style check will auto-succeed no matter what is typed. The GOG-less issue as with so many other games by same publishers (Age of Empires, etc) though is entirely down to publishing rights.

What about Starlancer? Same unlikelihood of it appearing here.

Frontier (Elite 2, or First Encounters) have a very cool remake:

Pioneer: https://pioneerspacesim.net/

An extended version of this is Pioneer Scout Plus: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pioneersp/ sadly it seems to be not being updated any more.

If you loved Frontier, these should be able scratch that itch - worked for me in any case :-)

Pioneer is a nice opensource remake or homage to the Elite series. Definitely worth checking out as toxicTom mentioned.

I was extremely surprised and happy when Deep Shadows The Precursors had a budget Freelancer/Privateer mode. Similar surprised and happy moment occurred when I discovered that the Space Rangers games had text adventure mode, and atari arcade game modes too. The RTS/FPS mode in the Space Rangers series is pretty sucky though, and should always be avoided unless hard up for credits in-game.

elite 2 frontier is superior.. which else space game has newton physics?

Why I want a new Freelancer type game is because Freelancer is almost the only Space Trading and Combat Simulator game that offered you three different cams to play though. I NEED that behind-view/chase-cam. Can't stand cockpit, too cramped. Top-down also works, but it doesn't really have the same feel.

Isn't Frontier Elite 2 really buggy? or are there fixes out there?

The original UK release had a few bugs though some bugs were actually fun. Eg, the "core" systems were hard-coded whilst the outer systems were procedural. The Cemiess system (-2, -2) was interesting in that it accidentally had negative prices for gem stones & precious metals (ie, they'd pay you thousands to take away goods that were worth thousands per unit). It was a violent system but if you were willing to take the risk, this was quite a fun way of rapidly levelling up. :-)

The FrontierVerse version is mostly patched up with copy protection removed. The "manual code check" will still pop up randomly upon docking but like one or two games on GOG typing any code will succeed.