Pearl Abyss is building four more MMOs as Black Desert swells to 7.65M registered users

We’ve been tracking Black Desert developer Pearl Abyss’ path to IPO since last spring, when multiple Korean outlets began reporting that the company sought a listing on the Korean stock exchange this coming fall. A few weeks ago, the company’s IPO press conference let loose a few more tidbits MMO players might be intrigued to learn. As parsed from Invenglobal’s translation, here are the highlights:

• Black Desert took four years to make and currently operates in 100 countries. “The total RU [registered users] is more than 7.65 million based on July 2017, and the total sales are approximately ￦340b [$301M].”
• As of the end of July 2017, PA has sold 530K copies of the game through Steam, amounting to $1.3M in sales. “The title was placed No. 2 of the total sales on Steam on June 20th.” (There’s a section that notes the game cost only ￦1.2b ($1M) to make, “a relatively small cost […] compared to other MMORPGs,” but we assume they’re talking about just the engine specifically there.)

• The company believes PC online games have “an extremely long life cycle,” on average between 10 and 11 years. “BDO has been on the market for 2 years and 8 months, and we expect it to follow the global games’ long life cycle.” In particular, PA highlights its continuing sales, particularly in Japan, though you can see from the charts, the western launch was a nice spike for the game too.
• PA suggests that BDO is effectively its best performer overseas (i.e., here): “Unlike the sales of existing titles is focused in South Korea and China, we expect our title to make a solid result in the global market with our existing PC IP.”
• “87% of employees are all developers.” Pearl Abyss is self-publishing Taiwan and aims to expand into South East Asia, Turkey, the Middle East, China (where Snail Games is publishing the game), and further European territories.
• Plans still include mobile and console; on mobile, that’d be Black Desert Online M. It is still not clear whether PA will publish that on its own. The company notes the console market is five to 10 times bigger than the PC market and believes BDO will do well on console here. The console launch is not expected to have “any major game changes.”
• PA is working on four more games, all of which “will be able to show [PA’s] competitiveness” and “might have the keyword ‘MMO’,” says CEO Kyung In Jung. “Two games are in development [and] aim to be released in the second half of 2018. The other two aim to be released in 2019 and 2021. All of them are in progress to be network-based games with high-quality graphics by using the self-developed engine.”
• Corporate acquisition is also on the agenda. “We are interested in acquiring companies that can make games just like how we do with our IP.”

The company will offer 1.8M shares at $0.44 apiece when it goes public on September 14th.