Frontier Developments refused to develop projects for other companies a few years ago and focused on publishing its own. Now the authors of RollerCoaster Tycoon and Elite are doing so well that they are considering becoming a full-fledged publisher.
Frontier Developments was founded in 1994 and is primarily known for its typhoons. She has developed games for Atari, LucasArts, Microsoft Studios, as well as her own projects. According to the founder of the company, David Braben, the developers decided to completely abandon hired work after the success of their online space simulator Elite: Dangerous.
Since 2015, Frontier Developments has developed and published four of its games: Elite sequels, Planet Coaster taikuns and Jurassic World Evolution. The latter received bad criticism and has a fairly high cost ($55). But the game was released simultaneously with the next Jurassic Park movie, and it received a good box office. According to Steam Spy, the audience of the typhoon is 481 thousand players.
Our business is doing very well, and what we do brings in quite a lot of money. We see an opportunity (to become a publisher of other people's projects). We got acquainted with the publishing side of the process, we know the horrors of this side and can do this business well.
Head of Frontier Developments
However, Braben stressed that if the company publishes games of other teams, then these should be projects that correspond in spirit and quality to what Frontier themselves do. The most important criterion is the high replayability of the game, its success in the long term. As an example, Braben cited RollerCoaster Tycoon, which still has a loyal audience after so many years.
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