F1 Manager developer accused of “dehumanizing” layoffs and mismanagement

Employees speak out on situation at Frontier

Back in October 2023, UK game studio Frontier Developments posted a trade update bearing awful news for its employees: A cost-cutting program was to be implemented, which would include substantial layoffs at the company to achieve the targeted 20% reduction in annual operating costs – with up to a three-digit number of jobs being threatened as a result.

Cuts affected all areas of the business, but as is common in the games industry, departments like publishing and community management took the primary hits, being often regarded as less essential and more easily replaceable than development positions. It appears as if Frontier subscribes to that attitude, given that after firing a number of these employees, it’s now looking to refill positions in those same areas: A new community manager and digital marketing assistant are currently sought to reinforce the team.

Though Frontier alerted employees being at risk of redundancy of that fact in October, the re-evaluation process for those workers took several weeks, meaning the layoffs emptying these roles only happened very recently. Francesca Falcini, a former senior community manager at Frontier who underwent this from start to finish, described it as “three months of hell” and called it a “cruel” process. She had to wait until December 2023 to get her first consultation and then went through an interview in which she had to present evidence to prove that she’d actually done her job in the time with the company.

Frontier declared these positions redundant recently.

Frontier Developments

Falcini got top marks in this interview, but remained at risk due to the application of the Bradford Factor, a metric that measures employee absence without taking its context into account – so having to stay at a hospital for several days for pneumonia as well as having PTSD massively reduced her score. Again, she had to provide evidence that her days of absence were justified and not excessive, which included handing in a letter from her therapist detailing her condition and treatment. “It was humiliating, dehumanizing, and cruel,” she wrote.

This reduced the Bradford Factor by just enough to allow her to keep the position as community manager – but she handed in her resignation the next day. “The redundancy packages were demeaning, the process was cruel, we weren’t told people had left until they’d already gone half the time, and a lot of talent was out the door,” she summed up the situation.

Speaking to GLHF, Falcini elaborated on these redundancy packages: “We were offered the bare minimum allowable by UK law – meaning those who were working for the company for less than two years (which was a significant number of people, due to their push for growth) got statutory redundancy pay, and we were all told our benefits – including healthcare and rent-to-buy schemes to pay off tech, etc – from our paychecks would be terminated, leaving a lot of people in a serious area of financial concern.”

She emphasized the misuse of the Bradford Factor during the re-evaluation process: “The actual scores were subtracted from our scalable performance scores, so on a scale where the maximum was 100, it was possible to have -200 subtracted for your Bradford Factor, which is both pointless and obscene.”

Falcini confirmed that the publishing department at Frontier was reduced by 50% as part of the layoffs. She had worked on the company’s most lucrative titles – Jurassic World Evolution 2, Planet Zoo, and Planet Coaster – and was still under threat of being made redundant.

Seeing roles that had been filled just a few months ago advertised as being vacant, made her feel “disappointed, but unsurprised,” she continued. “Many people on the impacted teams warned higher ups that this number of roles was unsustainable, but as far as I know, not one single person who fought for the veracity of their role was taken seriously. I know of multiple people who asked to even move their role to part-time for a reduced salary and were rejected at the consultancy period.”

The atmosphere at Frontier after the layoffs was “horrendous,” Falcini said. She described that the process kept being drawn out and “felt very corporate” with “little concern for those leaving or staying.

“In multiple cases, people who either took voluntary redundancy or were laid off didn't even get a chance to say goodbye or handover their work appropriately,” she explained.

GLHF heard claims from former employees that Frontier specifically targeted workers who were vocal about leadership in internal calls, which Falcini could not confirm. However, she described that “people who asked questions or were critical in public channels” like Teams “were told they were being inconsiderate by sharing their concerns or discussing the redundancies on work channels. At one point, the entire staff was told that their use of emojis – clown emojis or sad faces in reaction to the senior leadership refusing to provide answers – were ‘hostile’.”

She continued: “I would also say that most of the people that were kept on – or, in some cases, promoted – during the process were those who were very pro-Frontier, and did not want anyone speaking negatively about them.”

Back in October, Frontier Developments justified cutting costs with “a period of disappointing financial performance and more challenging industry conditions” – which isn’t wrong on any account, but fails to answer the question of how the company got there in the first place.

Since then, GLHF has spoken to several current and former Frontier employees to get their perspective on the situation, who agreed to share some insights under the condition of anonymity. These testimonials depict a company under an inept leadership walking from one financial disaster into another with its eyes closed and fingers in its ears.

One source told us that they have “observed nothing but total and continuing failures of leadership since [joining the company].”

According to the same source and verified via two others, the F1 Manager series has been a disaster for the company with sales being “very underwhelming compared to management's expectations.” 

Frontier secured the official license to make F1 management games.

Frontier Developments

“I don't know how they had miscalculated predicted sales figures, but it was less than one third of what they thought they would earn,” one source explained.

“When they released F1 Manager last year, they dropped console support in the first week. This year's version is a clone of last year's perforce repository with a few extras added, sold at full price. It's an insult to the very small player base.”

Other sources reiterated how F1 Manager was a massive flop for the company, in part due to costly licenses. One Frontier employee told GLHF that the wrong management expectations were the most important point about the entire issue, because it didn’t just impact the F1 Manager project – this seems to be a systemic problem.

“That’s actually been the biggest issue seen across multiple titles: uncontrollable spending, poor decisions (such as what licenses we pay for, games we make, and what we fund), and then trying to offset it with unrealistic sales expectations, which anyone internally could tell you even early on that we’d never be able to hit.”

Falcini confirmed that impression, saying that “forecasts seemed absurd”, though she couldn’t share any specifics.

F1 Manager 2022 actually sold well for such a niche title, “but the spend on making the game and securing the licenses was so high that we never stood a chance at actually making the money back.” 

According to Frontier’s trade update from June 2023 F1 Manager 2022 sold “over 800,000 units in its first nine months.”

Support for the debut title of the series was dropped early “to move onto F1 Manager 2023, which was all the updates they wished they could have made to the first game and then some new features, but sadly not the features anyone wanted because of time. 

“The reality is, it was all down to the dev-cycle. The exec team wanted F1 Manager 2023 released with Silverstone [coinciding with the Formula 1 British Grand Prix].”

Frontier management thought this would be better for sales, which meant the development team only had eleven months to ship the next iteration.

Frontier “signed an expensive multi-year deal with F1 so we have to make the games,” one source expressed. The official announcement of the licensing agreement from March 2020 stated that the license “provides Frontier with the rights for four F1 seasons (2022 to 2025 inclusive), subject to the achievement of certain financial performance thresholds.”

Management allegedly blamed the workers for missing the sales target: “Anyone could have told you that F1 Manager 2023 wasn’t going to sell as well as F1 Manager 2022.”

Responding to our request for comment, Frontier admitted that “sales of our F1 Manager franchise have, to date, been lower than we had expected. [...] It should also be noted that F1 Manager 2023 now features in Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service from October 2023, resulting in additional revenue for the franchise.” 

However, the company denied all allegations of management blaming employees for a lack of sales: “We have not blamed employees for the under-performance in sales – we value the contributions of our colleagues immensely and stand by their terrific work. Our teams have developed and published two great games that each performed well critically (F1 Manager 2022 and 2023).”

“Internal communications said there was no ‘placing blame’,” Falcini told GLHF, “but went on to only criticize marketing, which the senior team had forced to make a number of decisions against their better judgment.”

At the time, our sources noted that this costly and devastating cycle might repeat itself with what was then still an upcoming title – Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, another game based on an expensive license with a niche audience.

Announcing that anyone could be at risk of getting laid off four weeks before the game’s launch didn’t exactly help morale at the company either, we were told. “Can’t say anyone is feeling enthusiastic about it,” one source said at the time.

Realms of Ruin is a pretty RTS, but didn't score highly with players.

Frontier Developments

In hindsight, these warnings appear to have been on the mark: According to Frontier’s trade update from January 2024 covering the launch window of Realms of Ruin, “the revenue contribution from new games launching during the period was lower than expected.”

Those subpar financial decisions didn’t end at development and licensing, according to some of the people speaking with us.

Frontier’s decision to acquire Complex Games with which it had worked through the Frontier Foundry label on publishing Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, a turn-based tactics game, in November 2022 was another point of criticism.

“This business has been a leech on the availability and capacity of Frontier's business operations teams, while serving no discernible benefit to revenue,” one source said. 

Frontier itself stated the following about the merger in its FY23 trade update: “Integration activities and growth plans for Complex are on-track, and the acquisition delivered modest accretive financial benefits in FY23, as expected.”

While the others didn’t comment on the Complex acquisition specifically, they confirmed that Frontier Foundry, the company’s publishing label for third-party games, was another financial misadventure.

Frontier itself dropped the label, created in 2019, in June 2023, after a review of its activities had concluded at the start of the year, citing a “disappointing financial performance and increased competition amongst third-party publishers.”

In the statement provided to us, Frontier said: “The Executive Directors have acknowledged that some of the decisions made over the last five years, particularly in terms of business diversification, have not delivered the anticipated levels of financial performance.”

One source contrasted this streak of unproductive investments with a lack thereof in other key areas, which have come to cost the company in the long run. At one point, Frontier bought licenses for new servers months before actually purchasing the machines, throwing away “hundreds of thousands of pounds” in the process, according to one source.

“The company has been spending money as if the budget was endless and management were operating under the same illusion, continuing to act as if all was well,” one person said.

Frontier’s response to this claim said the following: “Management believes that IT spend has been appropriately managed for a studio with Frontier’s requirements.”

“In my opinion, management are out of touch,” Falcini, who worked at Frontier for almost three years, summed up the situation. “They've truly lost all sense of what players want, and would rather prioritize profit.”

She went on to say that “staff at Frontier are wonderful, and some of the most passionate, talented people I've ever had the joy of working with. They care about the games, want the best for the players, and truly, I hope everyone knows that. The problem is at the very top of the company, not with the majority of the people working there.”

In the end, sadly, it’s not a story unique to this industry or any other: Employees are doing the best they can with the amount of resources and time they’re given, and when that’s not enough the blame for and consequences of failure are on them – not the parties who made the decisions and usually defend their massive monthly salaries with the word ‘responsibility’.

Additional reporting by Kirk McKeand.