It's January 2026. Freelancer is twenty-two years old. Here's where things actually stand.
Librelancer can now run Mission 01A — the first scripted mission of the campaign — completely in the open-source engine. That milestone arrived in 2024 and it means the architecture for full campaign support is proven. Not complete, but proven. The trajectory is clear. In some number of years, playing Freelancer through a fully open engine will be as straightforward as installing a mod. The game will outlast Windows in its current form if necessary.
Discovery Freelancer is at version 5.0 and actively developing. The server is running. People are playing it. The community that has been expanding Freelancer since 2003 shows no particular sign of stopping. Twenty-two years of continuous development is not a fluke. It is what happens when a game creates a world that people want to live in and the developers provide the tools — however accidentally — to keep building.
The community infrastructure is stable. The Starport is there. The Discord is there. ModDB has the mods. Nomad Legacy just updated. HD Edition is the standard install baseline. The information needed to find, install, and play Freelancer in 2026 exists and is findable.
What hasn't changed: Microsoft hasn't said anything. The 20th anniversary passed in 2023 with no response. The 21st in 2024. The 22nd is in March 2026. The pattern is clear. Official silence is the official position.
The honest read is this: the community has built something that doesn't require Microsoft to sustain it. Not comfortably — Librelancer still needs the original game assets, and those assets are Microsoft's property, and the legal situation around that will eventually need addressing by someone. But day to day, month to month, the Freelancer community is not waiting. It is doing.
Whether that changes — whether 2028's 25th anniversary produces a different response than 2023's 20th did — is genuinely unknown. The arguments for a Game Pass re-release are still solid. The space game market is still alive. The appetite is demonstrably there.
But that's speculation. What isn't speculation: the game is alive right now, today, in January 2026. That's twenty-two years after it shipped and three years after the publisher missed the most obvious anniversary. The community flew anyway. That's the story.