Frontier Developments announces development of Coaster Park Tycoon, a second franchise they plan to support concurrently with Elite: Dangerous, their space combat game, saying this "marks the next stage in Frontier’s transition towards increasing its proportion of self-published revenue." Coaster Park Tycoon is coming to Windows PCs next year, and they say this will combine "accessible creative features with a sophisticated simulation," building on their experience with the RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise. Though this sounds like they are adding work, they also announce they are cutting staff, as development positions are being moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Cambridge, and 15 employees in "content creation roles" are being cut as a result. On that topic, Gamasutra reports an anonymous source tells them Frontier's Halifax studio is being closed altogether. Here's word on the new game and the layoffs:

Frontier Developments plc (AIM: FDEV, “Frontier”, the “Group”), a leading developer of video games, announces the start of development of a self-published game called Coaster Park Tycoon. This will run as a second franchise alongside continued development of its existing self-published Elite: Dangerous title, and marks the next stage in Frontier’s transition towards increasing its proportion of self-published revenue.

Coaster Park Tycoon

Frontier became the acknowledged leading developer of Tycoon games for its work on the RollerCoaster Tycoon® franchise, particularly its development of 2004’s c.10M unit-selling PC game RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 which is still considered the benchmark of the Tycoon genre, more than ten years after its release in 2004.

Coaster Park Tycoon, scheduled for 2016 release on PC, is intended to raise that benchmark for ‘Tycoon’ gameplay even further by combining accessible creative features with a sophisticated simulation.

Operations Update

With its business emphasis now on two major self-published franchises, Elite: Dangerous and Coaster Park Tycoon, Frontier is re-focusing its development activities in Cambridge where the expertise in these franchises lies. Development roles are being moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Cambridge, and the overall staffing mix will be changed to match the needs of these two projects. 15 content creation roles have been made redundant in Cambridge (from 281 total headcount), while Frontier continues to recruit in areas such as game and technology programming, server and web front end development.

Jonny Watts, Chief Creative Officer of Frontier Developments, said: “Coaster Park games appeal to a great many people, as proven by RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. It is a field for which Frontier has unparalleled expertise and immense passion, and one to which we have long wanted to make a ‘no-holds-barred’ return. We want Coaster Park Tycoon to be another major step forward for the simulation genre, and sit alongside Elite: Dangerous as a second major self-published franchise.”