It's technically true if you take an extremely expansive definition of "running the servers" but that's all.
This is Frontier's most recent investor presentation: https://frontier-drupal.s3-eu-west-...rontier-fy24-interim-results-presentation.pdf - the thing you want to look at is the Cumulative Cash Flow graph on page 14. This shows the net income minus expenditure attributable to each franchise, with the Y-axis being "release day". So you can see spending building up before release and then - at least for their more successful products! - the sales of the game paying for that expenditure and continuing to bring in money longer term.
If you look at the orange Elite Dangerous line, then you can see a few months in years 5-7 where the line briefly turns downwards. In those months, then Elite Dangerous was bringing in less money than was being spent on its operations and development. This is because Frontier was spending very substantial amounts of money (you can compare with the income graph on the previous page) on developing Odyssey, and in a few months actually spent more on Odyssey development than the ED franchise alone was bringing in. That's not at all a cause for concern - spending temporarily exceeding income during the intensive development phase of a new product is normal, and that's why Frontier runs multiple franchises so that they can cover short-term dips in income or peaks in expenditure for each other.
There have also been a couple of individual months in the recent years 8-9 where the line dips downward again. That's not great but it's not a crisis either - the overall annual trend remains positive.
The other thing to note is that years 8 to 9 (roughly 2022 and 2023) saw continued development of Elite Dangerous - more Odyssey fixes in the early half of 2022, the whole Thargoid war content, plus presumably at least some preparation for the Powerplay rewrite and concept work on the new ships. So expenditure on Elite Dangerous during those years isn't just "the servers" - it's also the salaries and expenses of developers, artists, project managers, testers, etc. etc.
So unless you make some very unlikely assumptions about the relative balance of server costs versus development costs for ED, it's certainly the case that "the servers" haven't been run at a loss. Sometimes they've spent more than ED's direct monthly income on servers plus development, yes - but that's an investment in keeping long-term interest in ED up and should if it works pay for itself fine over the longer term [1,2]. Equally, that also means that if ED's income was to drop further, there's still probably quite a cushion where it can be kept running cashflow-positive for quite a few years on a "critical bug fixes only" policy. (As Legacy players will be very aware, of course!)
To look a bit further ahead ... it is also the case - the graph on page 13 is probably clearer for this - that ED doesn't bring in as much raw income as it used to. That shouldn't be a surprise - it's incredibly rare that a 10-year old game does! - but it does mean that in the longer-term (and we're probably looking more at "5 years time" than "next year", provided the company as a whole survives) the expenses are going to keep going up with inflation, and the income is probably going to keep gradually trailing off. So for further development to continue in the long-term - running the servers could potentially stay a lot longer - they need to get some new sources of ED income.
(Whether any of the recent changes are actually going to be an effective way to get more ED income is very much a "we'll see what things look like in a year" situation!)
[1] If Frontier were to decide that another "big DLC" was the way to boost ED's fortunes, then you'd expect to see that cashflow line go quite noticeably negative during the intensive development periods and provided it sold well afterwards that would be absolutely fine. At the moment Frontier likely doesn't have enough general profitability and cashflow to want to take that risk; if its management sim releases all go well it might think differently by 2027.
[2] "Frontier should be spending less on development of Elite Dangerous" is probably not what anyone on this forum pointing at those negative months is suggesting!
That just makes me despise the new PP even more. Seriously, make fun game mechanics and I'll get into PP. Adding more bribes on top of PP modules just makes me hate it more. Especially if this price hike is a consequence.
