Kakao had a rough Q4 – and now it’s having a rough Q1 too, at least in terms of its revenues. While the multimedia company saw revenues decline 6% compared to Q1 2024, it’s primarily the game segment we care about here. And the company’s game segment has declined 31% in revenue since this quarter last year, owing to a “lack of performance from new titles and natural decline from legacy titles.” Once again, it’s the mobile games segment that continues its downward slope, while PC titles are hanging in.
And that’s believable as Kakao has repeatedly delayed several of the titles it has incoming, including ArcheAge Chronicles, which is still currently slated for the first half of next year.
Another title we’re watching is Chrono Odyssey; during the conference call, Kakao told investors that internal testing continues to go well and that we’re expecting a closed beta on Steam as early as this month; that tracks with what the team has already told English-language players as of this spring, and it also tracks with what Kakao told investors last time (that we’d have beta by summer).
Kakao also spent a chunk of its investor call talking up AI and its collaboration with OpenAI as well. Fun.
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Also worth noting is that Kakao is looking forward to Path of Exile 2 as a future revenue source that hasn’t been recognized yet (Kakao is publishing it in Korea). POE2 came up again during the call when an investor rep basically asked how Kakao plans to solve the problem of MMOs and online games eventually losing players and revenue over time (the billion-dollar question right?); Kakao says POE2 represents a “snowballing model” that builds on the IP and loyal playerbase to expand with DLC and sequels and live service revenue.
