Planet Coaster devs Frontier double down on management sims as Warhammer RTS Realms of Ruin suffers slow sales

rockpapershotgun.com:

Frontier Developments are doubling down on their success in management sim games, following weak sales for recent Warhammer RTS Realms of Ruin and a lack of success in attempting to break into other genres.

The Cambridge-based developers’ latest business update acknowledged that “sales to date have been lower than expected” for Realms of Ruin. The spiritual successor to Warhammer 40k classic Dawn of War 2, and which serves as the first comparable RTS for Warhammer’s modern fantasy series Age of Sigmar, released to lukewarm reviews earlier this month. The update expressed hope that sales would “build over time” for the game, helped by post-release content and paid DLC.

On top of Realms of Ruin’s struggles, Frontier admitted that their longer-term efforts over the last five years to expand into new game genres by serving as a publisher for other devs’ third-party games and launching games into “adjacent genres” had not been as successful as planned.

This all comes in the wake of a rocky couple of years for the company, including the community controversy around Elite Dangerous expansion Odyssey and player backlash to what was initially read as a final update to F1 Manager 2022, leading the game’s team to scramble to reassure players that ongoing updates would still be coming.

As such, the publishers will go back to what they’re best at: what they call “creative management simulation” games, but we just call management sims. Contrasting that Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, Jurassic World Evolution and Jurassic World Evolution 2 had collectively made over $500 million and became profitable within a month of release, Frontier said they would “refocus” on creative management simulation games while continuing to support