To expand upon this, the primary reason why Odyssey failed to recoup its development costs is because Frontier is still treating a player-testing environment as a marketable preview, rather than what it should be: an opportunity for the community to test their rigs against the current build, and identify and fix major potential problems before the the update or expansion goes live.
I’m sure their QA didn’t detect any problems in their carefully curated and properly maintained testing rigs. After all, mine worked fine, and I found out after the fact that my rig was almost identical to David Braben’s home PC. But once it hit the jungle of PCs out in the wild, with their Frankenstein builds, out of date drivers, off market software, extreme graphics settings that took advantage of the massive amount of headroom Horizons had available to work with last-gen consoles, and and all the other ways we torture our devices, of course there turned out to be massive problems!
Part of that was the fact that Odyssey was poorly optimized, but treating a player-testing environment as a marketable sneak preview did nobody any favors.