Frontier flags bumper year as it releases Jurassic World game

Independent video games developer and publisher Frontier Developments updated the market on its trading for the financial year ended 31 May on Tuesday, and confirmed the launch of ‘Jurassic World Evolution’.

The AIM-traded firm said its first two franchises, Elite Dangerous launched in 2014 and Planet Coaster launched in 2016, continued to perform “well”, generating sustained revenue streams following the strong performance delivered in the first half of the financial year just ended.

As a result, the board said it expected to report financial results for 2018 ahead of market expectations, with revenue of approximately £34m and operating profit, as calculated under IFRS, of around £2m.

As the launch date for ‘Jurassic World Evolution’ fell into financial year 2019, no pre-order revenue for the game was recognised in the 2018 financial year.

The board said that, after an encouraging reaction to pre-launch marketing including digital pre-order sales, Frontier's third franchise, ‘Jurassic World Evolution’, was launching as planned on Tuesday, on the first day of E3 Expo - the biggest games industry event of the year - and within days of the opening of the ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ film.

It said the game was now available for digital download on Steam for PC, as well as the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One console systems.

“The launch of Jurassic World Evolution, our third franchise, is another exciting milestone for Frontier,” said chief executive David Braben.

“Today highlights the ongoing success of our strategy to create long-term growth through developing, operating and self-publishing multiple successful game franchises.”

Braben said he was “very happy” with the game, and hoped players would enjoy building their own Jurassic World as much as the Frontier team apparently had developing it.

“It is the culmination of outstanding work by the team and I would like to thank everyone for their significant efforts.

“I look forward to providing updates on our exciting future games in due course, together with news on our three popular existing franchises as we enhance their content further - for example, we will release Elite Dangerous: Beyond - Chapter 2 on 28 June 2018.”

Frontier said it was scaling up to build a broad portfolio of franchises, each different to the last, and each with the capability to offer sustained revenue streams as already seen with Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster.

It said releases of new franchises could be expected to drive steps up in the group's financial performance.

The group's future franchise portfolio was likely to contain a mixture of owned-IP, such as Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster, and licensed-IP, such as Jurassic World Evolution.

Frontier said it already had future franchises in different phases of development.

Subject to its disclosure obligations as an AIM company, it said it was the board's intention to make announcements about future franchises at the “optimum time” for the success of that particular franchise.

That may be some time after the start of a particular project, and not necessarily at the time of the signature of an agreement with a development or intellectual property partner.

“As communicated in the group's previous annual reports, in addition to the current core model of using internal resources supplemented by outsourced services, the group will continue to explore other models to accelerate its scale-up by further leveraging existing expertise, intellectual property, publishing presence, relationships and financial position,” the board said in its statement.

“These models include third party publishing - controlling the promotion and distribution of other developers' games; commissioning - the outsourcing the majority of development of Frontier games to other developers; and enhancing the group's franchise portfolio or capabilities via acquisitions.”

Frontier planned to announce its audited full-year results for the 12 months ended 31 May on 5 September.