Frontier Developments Share Discussion Threads

[yankhanson] 09/3/2020 01:59

"How on earth will they be able to generate over £33m of revenue in H2 in order to meet the lowest range of analyst expectations (£65m to £73m) when there are no new releases in H2?"

It's worth seeing Liberum's basis in their last broker note. FDEV's previous three games are "all continuing to perform well".

They claim.

Despite that industry data shows current sales of Elite Dangerous and Jurassic World Evolution are insignificant. Plus remember that this is the broker that bases its FDEV franchise valuation on false accounting that hugely inflates past earnings.

[yankhanson] 09/3/2020 01:41

"I suspect we'll see a launch of Frontier's games onto Tencent's WeGame platform by the end of this calendar year (falling within FY21). Something that I believe has been on the cards since the Tencent investment in 2017."

Fantasy. The Tencent "strategic investment" was a cash rescue, nothing more. Confirmed by three years total silence on progress of the claimed partnership and the CFO's evasive answer at the Mello presentation.

"IMO they've been working on Elite Dangerous localisation since the investment."

Again, fantasy. Elite Dangerous development has been cut to almost nothing and FDEV has recently turned off major online features of the game, as you'd expect from sales being insignificant (contrary to FDEV claim in the latest report). Catch up on the news .

[pepsiman1] 05/3/2020 22:04

Planet Zoo on sale 20% off, back in top 20.

[shanklin] 26/2/2020 11:52

F1

Presumably that could coincide with the release of the complete ED re-write... ...albeit that is not how FDEV are currently describing it.

[p1nkfish] 26/2/2020 09:27

People spending time at home in china = more gaming.

[mark4231] 26/2/2020 09:17

I'm wondering too as very tempted to buy some more.

[sogoesit] 06/2/2020 14:04

A brief whack to get more stock!!

[sogoesit] 06/2/2020 08:12

Comment from SharesMag yesterday:

"Video game publisher Frontier Developments (FDEV:AIM) reported interim revenues for the period ended 30 November of £32m as indicated in the 15 January trading update. The shares fell 9.5% to £13.07 as analysts cut their full-year revenue expectations by around 5% due to currency headwinds.

MOMENTUM BUILDING

Revenues aren’t comparable with the prior half year (£64.7m) due to the timing of the release of Jurassic World Evolution in June 2019, while the latest release, Planet Zoo was only released on 5 November 2019.

The company confirmed strong demand for Planet Zoo saying, ‘to date Planet Zoo has sold the most units on PC of any of Frontier's games during an equivalent time period, crossing 500,000 units in early December’. The game achieved the global number one and two bestseller spots on games platform Steam.

All four games performed well over the key holiday trading period including Elite Dangerous which is a 2014 vintage.

ALL TO PLAY FOR

While investors will need to wait for the full year results to gauge the full success or otherwise of the current sales momentum, the company stuck to its prior revenue guidance of £65m to £73m with consensus being roughly in the middle before today’s update.

The appreciation of sterling against the dollar in the fourth quarter offset the ‘strong performance of all four titles’ implying that the range would have been raised without the impact. The company hedges half of it’s predominately dollar-based revenues.

Market expectations for full-year operating profits are expected to be between £10m and £12m. The shares trade at a premium valuation of roughly 41 times two-year forward earnings expectations."

[joneeee] 05/2/2020 16:07

Big block buys at 15:30pm

[p1nkfish] 05/2/2020 14:56

Ignore. Onward.

[shanklin] 05/2/2020 12:57

So we had a TS stating what would be in the H1 results and the share price went up quite strongly. Then today we had results exactly as detailed in the TS and the share price is sharply down. Go figure.

[fledgling1nvestor] 05/2/2020 09:29

In case you missed it:

"We have now signed three excellent developers already, and are close to signing more. Working together, we expect to start earning revenue in the next financial year."

So not just Planet Coaster: Console Edition and Elite Dangerous PDLC in the next financial year. They're also expecting to launch one of these three (there were two at last count) third party games in the next financial year.

[mark4231] 05/2/2020 09:12

For FY2021 we have Planet Coaster for the consoles which should do well (and as we've seen with JWE vs PZ sales the console market is an important and big one). Then the Elite: Dangerous release later this year which my gut tells me is going to be a biggie although we don't have solid information about it so that's pure speculation - however, again that is across both PC and consoles and the related bigger sales.

[sogoesit] 05/2/2020 08:50

Ok, thanks.
So we/they consider that this re-write is equivalent to a "new game release" thus fulfilling the "one game per year commitment".
Then a new "new game", or two, will happen in FY2022, I guess.

[shanklin] 05/2/2020 08:13

The publishing side sounded quite positive to me. Also, whilst FDEV do not describe it as such, a full re-write of Elite Dangerous (which I suspect it is) is a pretty big deal.

[sogoesit] 05/2/2020 07:59

First impressions in Interims is that FY2021 is a bit opaque and "action" will only occur in FY2022.
(Frontier Publishing still into the future too).
Am I missing something?

[p1nkfish] 30/1/2020 11:36

A bit if a silver er lining to a cloud.
Word is the lockdown in China is increasing games sales and streaming as people not going out. Cinema attendance at a critical time of year is on the floor too so games sales will be interesting there.

[global nomad] 29/1/2020 09:08

riding nicely on the wave of sentiment shift towards gaming.

[endion] 28/1/2020 18:46

I'd wager a holding pattern between 14 and 15 until any trading update on the 1m units of planet zoo sold. Similar to what we saw around 12 for a while.

[sogoesit] 28/1/2020 18:34

Got 1435 as my resistance line.
Momentum or re-trace?

[pepsiman1] 24/1/2020 15:11

All Frontier games are on sale on Steam, including 15% off Planet Zoo.

[kael] 22/1/2020 13:01

Looking strong chunky block buys going through.