Pearl Abyss Q1 2024: Revenues hold steady as Crimson Desert gears up for reveals

Pearl Abyss makes its English financials website a bit of a navigation nightmare, but the company’s Q1 2024 earnings presentation is indeed up – which is more than we can say for its financials, which are basically flat.

The Black Desert and EVE Online company ended Q1 with 85.4B KRW – around 62M USD. That’s down a half a percent since Q1 2023 and up 1.2% since last quarter. Actually, the whole last year has been remarkably consistent, which… I’m not sure what to complain about here.

As for EVE and BDO themselves, PA helpfully breaks down their revenues as well; EVE Online saw revenues of 13.1M USD in Q1, which is down slightly since Q4 but still up compared to Q1. BDO saw a strong recovery after Q4, counting 48.9M USD in revenues, but that’s still down a tick next to Q1 2023. Swings and roundabouts, with the peaks very obviously coming in quarters with expansions – and from mobile, as the BDO Mobile version apparently had a strong top of the year at the expense of PA’s PC revenues.

During the conference call itself, Pearl Abyss talked up ongoing plans to launch Black Desert to Chinese audiences and finally bring the long, long-delayed Crimson Desert to market anywhere, following a marketing campaign kicking off at this summer’s Gamescom event in Germany. That’s no great surprise since last quarter PA suggested marketing would begin in Q3 or Q4 of this year, but clearly plans are firming up now. And DokeV is still on deck after the launch of Crimson Desert, a narrative PA has repeated for the last few years. However, as NosyGamer correctly points out, investors didn’t bring up EVE Vanguard’s testing or the crypto game Project Awakening at all.