Frontier's first publishing deal is for new game from Surviving Mars developer Haemimont

Frontier Developments, the studio behind Elite: Dangerous, Planet Coaster, and Jurassic World Evolution, has signed its first deal as a third-party publisher, and it's with Surviving Mars developer Haemimont Games. Frontier will publish and provide development funding for a new, unannounced game from Haemimont, which will release "in two to three years' time".

The deal with Haemimont should be the first of many that Frontier makes, and chief executive David Braben said the company is "in discussions with other developers and [hopes] to be able to announce further publishing partnerships in the future".

We don't know anything about the new game from Haemimont—Surviving Mars, which came out in March 2018, has taken up most of the studio's time over the past year, and still receives regular meaningful updates, including a chunky DLC called Green Planet last month.

Landing a studio with the pedigree of Haemimont, which also made city builder Tropico 5 and action RPG Victor Vran, is certainly a strong start for Frontier Publishing, and I'm interested to see what deals it comes up with next.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.