Frontier Developments

Frontier Developments is a British studio based at the Cambridge Science Park in England. It was founded in January 1994 by David Braben, the man behind the Elite series. The company takes its name from the first Elite games it worked on: the Amiga CD32 version of Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters (1995), the second sequel to the Elite that Acornsoft released in 1984. In 2008 Braben assigned all rights to Elite to the company.

For years it worked for other publishers. It made RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (2004), Dog's Life, two Wallace & Gromit games and Thrillville (2006). In 2008 LostWinds was a launch title for WiiWare, and for Kinect it developed Kinectimals (2010) and Kinect Disneyland Adventures (2011). There were setbacks too: in January 2011 Codemasters dropped The Outsider, an adventure in development since 2005, and the project was cancelled with layoffs.

At the end of 2012 a Kickstarter campaign funded Elite: Dangerous, released on PC on 16 December 2014. In 2013 the company listed on the AIM segment of the London Stock Exchange. Since Planet Coaster (2016) it has published its own games, mostly management simulations: Jurassic World Evolution (2018), under licence from Universal, Planet Zoo (2019), Jurassic World Evolution 2 (2021) and F1 Manager 2022, the first under a deal with Formula One. Braben stepped down as chief executive in 2022.

From 2019 it published other studios' games under its Frontier Foundry label, and in 2023 it stopped after disappointing results. Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin (2023) also struggled, and the company refocused on management games with Planet Coaster 2 (2024), Jurassic World Evolution 3 (2025) and Planet Zoo 2 (2026). Jo Cooke has been chief executive since December 2025, and in September 2026 Frontier announced a game based on Disney properties that it will fully fund and publish.