Frontier Game Company Gets Rights to F1 Management Game
Frontier, the British game developer behind construction and management simulators the likes of Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution, and Planet Zoo, has signed a deal with Formula One to develop a new annual F1 management game series starting in 2022.
Frontier CEO David Braben announced the multi-year license deal last week, stating that four F1 games were already planned. The first will launch on PC and consoles in time for the 2022 season, with three more games to follow through to 2025 if the company manages to meet certain “performance thresholds.”
Sports management games are extremely popular among sports fans (the annual Football Manager game is routinely ranked among the top 10 most-played games on Steam), but officially-licensed F1 management games have been, for the most part, nonexistent.
Currently, the best F1 management game is Motorsport Manager, which — while obviously based on F1 — features fictional names and teams. Come 2022, that’s about to change.
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“We are delighted to announce this multi-year license deal with F1,” Braben said. “F1 is one of the most popular global sporting franchises in the world, and we believe the combination of the F1 brand together with our extensive experience in management games will deliver fantastic game experiences to a wide and varied audience around the world.”
F1 can seem impenetrable to non-fans, but F1 director of digital and licensing Frank Arthofer says that the new management series will be designed to be accessible to a wide audience.
“Games are an important part of the F1 media ecosystem,” he said. “This new manager franchise will allow fans to experience the challenging management aspects of the sport through immersive simulation games, and make that experience as accessible as possible for a broad audience.”
Those eagerly anticipating the game will hope that appealing to a broad audience will not strip it of depth, as this tends to severely compromise management games’ staying power.
The new licensing deal will not conflict with Codemasters’ own series of official F1 racing games, which will exist alongside Frontier’s management games and which have also been granted the rights to the F1 license through 2025.
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Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.