F1 Manager’s Frontier is the latest studio to announce layoffs

Cambridge, UK-based Frontier Developments is the latest major game developer to announce layoffs and spending cuts.

In a note published to the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday, the company said it would be conducting an “organisational review” which would result in a recruitment freeze, spending cuts and redundancies, subject to consultation.

The organisational review and resulting actions are expected to conclude by early 2024, it said.

Founded in 1994 by Elite co-creator David Braben, Frontier is best known for the space flight series and its management sims like Planet Zoo, Jurassic World Evolution and Planet Coaster.

The round of layoffs are due to what Frontier calls “a period of disappointing financial performance”, which has seen its stock price plummet by over 80% since the start of the year.

The biggest decline came in January, when its share price plummeted by over 54% in a week, after the company issued a disappointing trading update.

At the time, Frontier said it no longer expected to meet its prior sales and profit guidance due to the underperformance of F1 Manager 2022, and weaker than expected sales across its whole portfolio, during the holiday period.

2023 has seen widespread reports of job losses all over the games industry, with the latest report coming from Telltale Games.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Team17 is planning “significant” job losses as part of a company restructure. Last month it was announced that Epic Games would be laying off 16% of its staff, consisting of “around 830 employees”.

Earlier this year Microsoft confirmed plans to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, including some at Xbox and Bethesda, while CD Projekt Red announced plans in July to lay off around 10% of its staff.

Layoffs have also recently been occurring at a number of other companies, including Unity, Riot Games, Blizzard, Crystal Dynamics, Bioware and The Callisto Protocol studio Striking Distance.