Frontier Developments' insertion of aliens into Elite Dangerous sparked news coverage from PC Gamer to the BBC and also peaked the interest in the game which saw an increase in players as seen on the Steam Players stats which can be viewed at SteamDB.

It also promted this lovely describtion in Forbes:

Elite Dangerous, otherwise known as the No Man’s Sky that’s actually good, or the Star Citizen that’s actually out, is making headlines for a rather cool reason as of last night.

From a PR perspective it was a perfectly executed action to increase interest in the game and at the same time add content into the Elite universe.