Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20%

ign.com:

Frontier Developments has issued a trading update following poor launch sales of its real-time strategy game Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin.

Realms of Ruin launched on November 17 and promised eye-catching RTS gameplay set within Games Workshop's Warhammer Age of Sigmar universe.

According to SteamDB, Realms of Ruin Steam concurrent players peaked at 1,572. At the time of this article’s publication, just 129 were playing on Valve’s platform, and Steam's Realms of Ruin user review rating is 'mixed'.

Shares plunged nearly 20% on the news, in which Frontier admitted week one sales of Realms of Ruin were “lower than expected”. However, Frontier insisted it will “evolve and support” the game with post-release content, including premium DLC, and so it “expects sales to build over time”.

The Cambridge, UK developer has endured a tough year, with a number of recent games failing to set tills alight. Last month, Frontier announced an organisational review of the business that included a wave of redundancies, subject to consultation.

Frontier is the veteran studio behind 2014’s space sim Elite: Dangerous, Zoo Tycoon, Planet Coaster, and the Jurassic World Evolution games. In recent years, it’s released two F1 Manager games, as well as Realms of Ruin. Frontier also published games from external developers under its Frontier Foundry label, including Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, Deliver Us Mars, and FAR: Changing Tides.

In January, Frontier said it planned to lower its original sales expectations for the fiscal years of 2023 and 2024 after its games underperformed during the 2022 holiday season. F1 Manager 2022, which launched in August 2022, was singled out, with "lower than expected" sales of 600,000 across