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In a trading update to the London Stock Exchange, Cambridge-based developer and publisher Frontier has announced that in the first six months of the current financial year, the company is reporting "record financial results" of £64 million, up from £19m in the first half of the last financial year – that’s a year-over-year jump of 237 per cent.
Given the trading performance in the first six months of the fiscal year, the Board remains confident the company will hit analyst revenue projections of £75 million to £88 million for FY19 (31 May 2019), anticipating that revenue "should exceed the mid-point of this range".
The boost is attributed to Jurassic World Evolution, Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster, all of which have hit major milestones in the last six months, helping Frontier continue "its strategy of building long term franchises delivering multi-year revenues". With Elite Dangerous exceeding three million units sales of the base game, Planet Coaster crossing two million units, and Jurassic World Evolution also passing the 2 million unit mark, that totals seven million games sold in less than seven months.
"We are very pleased with the success of Jurassic World Evolution, which has been our biggest launch to date," said chief executive, David Braben."Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster also continue to perform well, as our strategy of supporting, nurturing and enhancing each of our game franchises continues to deliver. I look forward to providing more details about our fourth game franchise, as well as our existing franchises, in the coming months."
Frontier relocated to a new building in the summer of 2018. In an interview with MCV at the time, COO David Walsh said: "We’re expecting and demanding genuinely world-class work from people and they need a suitable environment, it’s a fantastically better tool than we had before."
"We’ve gone public, we’ve changed our business model and it’s all to make better games," Walsh said, adding that Frontier’s partnership with Tencent has other benefits, too. "It’s a genuinely a strategic investment both ways. We knew China was an interesting and strategically important region for us. [Tencent] sees that the type of games we make are starting to really resonate with Chinese consumers. China is an amazing country that is going from strength to strength at the moment. And we were already selling in China when we first had discussions with Tencent."
