Frontier Dev Regulatory News (FDEV)

14 March 2014

Frontier Developments plc 

Frontier Developments releases Elite: Dangerous Alpha 3.0, will demo at GDC San Francisco

Cambridge, UK. Frontier Developments plc (AIM: FDEV, "Frontier," the "Company"), a leading developer of video games with studios in Cambridge, UK and Halifax, Canada, announces the release of the Elite: Dangerous Alpha phase 3.0 to eligible backers today.

Backers eligible to access the Alpha test are those who contributed £200 or more to develop Elite: Dangerous in the Company's successful crowd-funding campaign. The campaign raised £2.36m to date from over 44,500 backers.

Alpha 3.0 is a significant step forward in the game's development. After successfully proving out the moment to moment combat gameplay and multiplayer technology in Alpha phases 1 and 2 respectively, phase 3 adds docking, outfitting of ships, and an early version of hyperspace jumps between multiple locations. This gives the player an embryonic game loop to use the fruits of their combat to improve their ship. Also, there is the debut in the new game of the franchise's iconic Coriolis space station and Cobra Mk III spaceship.

The Company will demo Alpha 3.0 to North American media next week at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, and also gave the first public 'hands on' showing of Elite: Dangerous at the BAFTA 'Inside Games' event in London.

GDC, the Game Developers Conference, is a key event in the global games industry - attracting over 25,000 attendees and garnering worldwide media attention.

David Braben, CEO of Frontier Developments, said:

"Alpha 3.0 is particularly significant as we can start to see the game itself being built out, as opposed to testing the technology behind it.

"GDC provides a perfect opportunity to be able to showcase Elite: Dangerous to the North American games media, as we start to raise awareness in that market." 

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About Frontier Developments

Frontier Developments plc is a leading independent game developer founded in 1994 by David Braben, co-author of the seminal 'Elite' game. Based in Cambridge, UK and Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, Frontier uses its proprietary 'Cobra' game development technology to create innovative games across videogame consoles, computers, smartphones and tablets.

Previous titles Frontier has created on include RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, Thrillville, LostWinds, Kinectimals, Kinect Disneyland Adventures. On 4 January 2013 Frontier raised £1.7 million via Kickstarter, the crowd funding website, and its own site to develop Elite: Dangerous. The studio developed Zoo Tycoon as a launch title for Microsoft's new Xbox One console also is also working on other original IP titles with publishing partners. 

 www.frontier.co.uk

About Cobra

Frontier's Cobra software technology has been developed and evolved since 1988. Initially conceived as a solution for the problem of easily porting the same game across different target hardware devices, Cobra today supports multi-core CPU and GPU architectures of PC, console, tablet and smartphone with a modular, high performance system offering of state of the art efficiency and visual fidelity that is applicable across a wide range of game genres.

Cobra incorporates a framework which enables rapid development of powerful game creation tools, which offer the ability to view, tweak and review changes to content (e.g. animations, audio, 3D models etc.) on target platforms in a live game session running on that platform, without the intervention of a programmer.