Pearl Abyss ended its 2024 financial year on a high-ish note – a welcome surprise after a year of muddling-through – but also a confusing one. In its Q4 investor report, the Korean company best known to MMO fans as the studio behind Black Desert and the owner of CCP Games’ EVE Online announced that its revenues jumped to 95.7B KRW (around $66M US) in the quarter – that’s up 20% since Q3 and 13.4% when compared to Q4 2023. Those results mean the company put an end to a long streak of profit deficits.
The bulk of the boost came thanks to the company’s games, though we’re deeply disappointed to note here that Pearl Abyss has begun combining Black Desert and EVE Online profits instead of splitting them, which effectively obscures how well each game is doing. This is the first quarter we’ve seen PA do that; compare to the report three months ago, when the revenue breakdown included both games separately and allowed the extremely different playerbases to better understand the ebb and flow of the MMOs.
If you’re as annoyed by that as we are, just know that some of the investor reps on the call were just as displeased; one of them even asked specifically about a breakdown for EVE Online and Black Desert.
“The breakdown is quite similar to our last presentation numbers,” PA execs said through the translator. And… that was it.
That’s not great, given BDO’s weak and EVE’s flat Q3 numbers. But more importantly, it also doesn’t make much sense here given the 20% increase in gaming-specific revenues, unless we’re meant to believe that all of those gains came from EVE Galaxy Conquest (lol), the company’s only other launch in the period apart from Black Desert China, which would’ve been lumped under BDO anyway.
Indeed, fellow blogger Nosy Gamer goes further and argues that Pearl Abyss is aiming to hide a poor performance for the Chinese launch specifically. Bolstering that idea, the same analyst who asked for the game breakdown also asked about BDO’s Chinese launch last fall. PA doesn’t really give a clear answer except to suggest that it didn’t underperform, which again seems odd as it could’ve easily pointed to the equally interesting 20% jump in regional revenue for Asia between Q3 and Q4. But here’s the whole answer on BDO China:
“We are actually seeing the performance that we had predicted internally. However, for Black Desert it has already been 11 years since it was first started, so it has been a game that was in the market for a long time. So we can see that for the performance in China, it is not easy to have as high performance as new titles. Despite that fact, since Black Desert has been seeing great results in the global market for a long time, we are going to make sure that it takes part and settles in the China market very stably so that we can service for a long time and do our best with the publisher.”
For what it’s worth, Pearl Abyss reiterates its plan to maintain BDO for at least another 10 years with player feedback demanding “consistent content” at the forefront. And of course, we’re still waiting on Crimson Desert – if the one-time MMO even still has any multiplayer to speak of – by the end of the year.
