We’ve got Pearl Abyss’ financial report for the first quarter of 2020, and in common with so many gaming companies right now it was a solid quarter indeed. The South Korean MMO giant saw revenue stay perfectly flat year-over-year and a small jump since Q4 of 2019. Revenue is down from its peak in mid-2019, of course, but hey, you only get to launch Black Desert on console and mobile once.
To that end, Black Desert’s revenue has held pretty even over the last year, apart from that peak in Q2 2019. Interestingly, North America and the EU, along with PC, continue to make up larger and larger portions of the revenue pie.
EVE Online, meanwhile, is also holding revenue-steady, apart from its drop last fall. MMO players will recall that last week CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petursson suggested the sci-fi game, under the Pearl Abyss umbrella since the buyout in 2018, is “going through a steep upward trend right now.” At the time, we noted that didn’t seem to be true in terms of player logins, and now we can see it also doesn’t seem to be true in terms of revenue either, as the game still doesn’t appear to have fully recovered from the dropoff caused by the comms blackout stunt last summer. Perhaps Q2’s report will bring more clarity (for example, if Petursson was talking about April rather than January through March).
Looking ahead to Q2, PA is counting on the May early access of Shadow Arena and the launches of Black Desert in Japan and EVE Online in China back in April. It also reiterates that pipeline work continues on Crimson Desert, DokeV, Plan8, and EVE Echoes, the launch date for which is expected this weekend.
