Elite Dangerous developer Frontier Developments is using its 2023 annual investor report to proclaim that it’s “getting back on track,” as it decides that after roughly six years of branching out into different genres, it’s moving back to making new and supporting existing creative management simulation (CMS) titles instead.
“We need to be strategic in our selection process,” reads the letter from CEO Jonny Watts, who readers will recall took over the CEO role from David Braben in 2022. “We aim to select projects which have strong potential to be profitable within one month of launch and to achieve 100% return on investment within one year. So far, we have achieved this with open-world simulations of galaxies, rollercoasters, zoos, and dinosaurs.”
This of course references many of FDev’s more successful releases like Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, and its two Jurassic Park sims, while Watts admits that the company’s financial performance over the past two years “has not been good enough” primarily because of “the decisions that we collectively made over the last five to six years.”
Ultimately FDev is working on two new CMS games for release sometime in 2025 and 2026, while stating that layoffs in October that ultimately saw its Frontier Foundry subsidiary close “allows an increased operational focus from senior management on [FDev’s] internal titles going forward.” Meanwhile, E:D got a blurb page that promised the studio “continues to support Elite Dangerous, and its player community, and looks forward to more and more Commanders stepping up to engage with Odyssey over time.”
