Frontier Is Building a Planet Game With Neither Zoos Nor Rollercoasters

Frontier Developments has confirmed work on a new Planet management sim that has nothing to do with zoos or rollercoasters, and it has filed trademarks that hint at where the game might land. The studio behind Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster called the project a "completely new setting," and among nine trademarks it registered on Monday are Planet Resort and Planet Festival. Frontier has not named the setting outright, so the filings are the only concrete clue to where the series goes next.

The confirmation came from Frontier's head of player engagement, Richard Stephenson, in a Discord post preserved on Reddit and reported by RockPaperShotgun. Stephenson said the team had begun work on a new Planet franchise that keeps the familiar formula but moves to a setting the studio has not used in Coaster or Zoo.

"We've started work on a brand-new Planet Game franchise, which has all the familiarity you love, but a completely new setting for us than Planet Coaster or Planet Zoo, one which still combines our love for creativity, management and meaningful simulation."

— Richard Stephenson

Responses to the post filled with guesses. The most common were Planet Resort, a hotel-chain manager; Planet Festival, built around running concerts; and Planet City, a city-builder in the mold of SimCity and Cities: Skylines. Of those three, Planet City is the one missing from the trademark paperwork, which makes the city-builder theory the weakest despite its popularity in the thread.

The trademark filings narrow the field. Frontier registered nine names on Monday. Planet City is not among them, but Planet Resort and Planet Festival are, alongside Planet Farm, Planet Vacation, Planet Dinosaur, Planet Prehistoric, Planet Fantasy, Planet Mythical Creatures, and Planet Dragon. Several of those read as defensive registrations rather than active projects. Planet Dinosaur is the clearest case, since Frontier is already building Jurassic World Evolution 3, and Planet Farm sits close enough to Planet Zoo to clash with Stephenson's "new setting" line. I think Planet Resort is the safest read of the list, because it keeps the park-management loop Frontier already builds while fitting the "new setting" framing better than Planet Farm or Planet Fantasy. Planet Fantasy is the more interesting name on paper, but a management game stocked with dragons and knights would carry mechanical friction that a resort or a festival would not. The "for us" in Stephenson's wording cuts the same way, since it points at a setting other studios have managed before rather than something invented from scratch.

Timing is the other constraint. Frontier's latest earnings report, under a heading labeled New Planet Franchise, states that a new own-IP construction and management sim is confirmed for FY28, part of a stated plan to ship one such title a year and lean on long-running franchises. The same trading update reported record revenue and operating profit, which Frontier credited to Jurassic World Evolution 3 and Planet Coaster 2, with a Rebirth expansion for the former on the way. The two-year gap between Planet Coaster 2 and Planet Zoo 2 lines up with that once-a-year cadence, which puts the next new Planet game years out. I see the FY28 line as the detail that settles the timing question, since whatever this Planet game turns out to be, Planet Zoo 2 in October is the release worth planning around.

Frontier already has that next release dated. Planet Zoo 2 announced for October 13, 2026, debuted a fresh gameplay trailer at the PC Gaming Show and is now up for pre-order on Steam. The sequel to the 2019 sim adds aquariums, both saltwater and freshwater, holding turtles, pufferfish, and ocean sunfish, with divers entering the tanks to keep the fish healthy. It also adds aviaries: tall netted enclosures for white-tailed sea eagles and other birds, with toys to play with and an option to release animals into wild nature reserves. Each species carries its own set of needs, shown as bars that fill as players meet them, and keeping a mixed roster of land, sea, and air animals content is where the difficulty sits. Frontier framed the release option as a nod to the conservation work real zoos do rather than pure spectacle, though the trailer still leaned on guests crowding around the tanks to watch the marine animals.

The outlet that broke the new-Planet story used it to point readers back to Nate Crowley's comedic Planet Zoo features, including a 2021 piece in which he used the game's North America Animal Pack to build a grim facsimile of HBO's Deadwood, dung-caked paths and all. That pack added eight animals from the region, and Crowley themed his exhibits around Al Swearengen's Gem Saloon and E.B. Farnum's hotel, housing prairie dogs, a moose, and American bullfrogs in suitably squalid yards. The article also flagged the free 1.5 update that shipped beside the pack, which finally gave players preset sculpted plots and career-mode maps to build on instead of a flat, featureless field. Frontier released those animal packs roughly every quarter during Planet Zoo's support run, and Crowley, then a section editor, built an elaborate themed park around each one to show the new animals off.

Frontier's existing catalog already spans Jurassic World Evolution, Elite Dangerous, F1 Manager, and Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, which makes a non-park management sim plausible without overlapping its other lines. The clearest model for the move is Two Point Museum, which gave Two Point Studios a less familiar institution to manage than a theme park or a hospital and more room to try new mechanics.

A resort or a festival would hand Frontier the same kind of opening while staying inside the build-and-manage loop its players already know. Frontier also confirmed the new franchise to members on its official Discord, the same channel Stephenson used, and tied it to a strategy of building evergreen series rather than one-off releases. Beyond that, Stephenson committed to nothing concrete, saying only that Frontier would share more as development continues and asking fans to watch for updates.