Elite Dangerous 'New Launcher' live today!

[CMDR MagPaye]

When launching the launcher, a graphic artifact appears, and this happens all the time. In the first days after the launch of the new launcher, letters of a certain font were visible in the place of this rectangle, and of a huge size, then this black rectangle appeared in this place. In any case, this is a malfunction, and it is displayed for me from the moment of launching the new launcher.View attachment 365576

That's the steam overlay popup that shows when you launch a game.
This thing:

I realized that when I was having trouble getting the launcher to... launch, and turned the overlay off for troubleshooting.

 

[CMDR MagPaye]

Maybe April is wrong. When did you buy it? I bought it in September and cannot log in standalone. Or could not; actually I bought a license from Frontier on my main account (which was originally the Steam connected one) when it was on sale to get rid of the Steam requirement.

This is interesting.
I bought ED through steam in 2020 and am able to run the game directly from the launcher. The complicating factor is that I bought and had refunded the game in 2017 cus I couldn't figure out how to fly. While I set up my Frontier account in 2017, I'd have thought the Steam connection would be based on the post April 2019 configuration. There definitely isn't a product key associated with it. But, in the Frontier store I see the 2017 purchase in my transaction history but not the 2020 or Odyssey ones.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Yeah this is weird. Also, purchases from third party sellers of Steam keys don't seem to make it easier. I guess one possibility is: A "virgin" purchase directly from Steam after April 2019 means no-key, no standalone, but licenses from third parties might be older ones predating that, and maybe your account was flagged as key-eligible when you first created it and connected it to Steam.

Life would probably be easier sometimes without those game stores like Steam and Epic.