Pearl Abyss Q1 2025: Black Desert Mobile’s Chinese endeavor is over

Last weekend, we ran the numbers on Black Desert and EVE Online, thanks to some gap-filling on Q4 2024 made possible by Pearl Abyss’s annual figures released for the Iceland tax authorities. In short, in spite of Pearl Abyss’ dissembling when it came to the fortunes of the two MMORPGs we care about, both games actually showed decent revenues in that quarter.

Well, Q1 2025’s results are now in, and they make hiding Q4’s numbers seem even weirder as that quarter truly was a nice bump for the company. Q1 is a return to form as PA’s revenue showing of 83.7B KRW is more in line with last year’s Q1, Q2, and Q3 – indeed, only a 2% drop compared to Q1 2024.

Still, PA continues to operate at a loss. As MMO blogger NosyGamer argues, the losses likely stem from the premature end of Black Desert Mobile in China as well as continuing development on EVE Frontier and EVE Vanguard.

Unfortunately, PA is continuing to merge Black Desert and EVE Online revenues together, making the revenue breakdown graph rather pointless, frankly, since there are only two factors being broken down as it is, and the other is a tiny sliver from Pearl Abyss Capital. In other words, we can likely only infer the annual splits for EVE Online and Black Desert from here on out.

The company does continue to promise that Crimson Desert is coming and talked up its PAX East showing, but given how many years it’s already been delayed (oh yeah, and how it’s MMO nature has been stripped out), you may not even care anymore. But hey, it’ll muddy the financial graphs even more! Wait…