Pearl Abyss Q4 2024: PA is obscuring EVE Online and Black Desert revenues in its best quarter all year

Pearl Abyss ended its 2024 monetary year on a high-ish notice – a welcome shock after a year of muddling-through – but additionally a complicated one. In its Q4 investor report, the Korean firm best identified to MMO followers because the studio behind Black Desert and the proprietor of CCP Games’ EVE Online introduced that its revenues jumped to 95.7B KRW (round $66M US) in the quarter – that’s up 20% since Q3 and 13.4% when in comparison with Q4 2023. Those outcomes imply the corporate put an finish to an extended streak of revenue deficits.

The bulk of the enhance got here because of the corporate’s video games, although we’re deeply disenchanted to notice right here that Pearl Abyss has begun combining Black Desert and EVE Online earnings as a substitute of splitting them, which successfully obscures how nicely every recreation is doing. This is the primary quarter we’ve seen PA try this; compare to the report three months ago, when the income breakdown included each video games individually and allowed the extraordinarily totally different playerbases to raised perceive the ebb and move of the MMOs.

If you’re as aggravated by that as we’re, simply know that a few of the investor reps on the call have been simply as displeased; one in all them even requested particularly a few breakdown for EVE Online and Black Desert.

“The breakdown is quite similar to our last presentation numbers,” PA execs mentioned by means of the translator. And… that was it.

That’s not nice, given BDO’s weak and EVE’s flat Q3 numbers. But extra importantly, it additionally doesn’t make a lot sense right here given the 20% improve in gaming-specific revenues, except we’re meant to imagine that all of these positive aspects got here from EVE Galaxy Conquest (lol), the corporate’s solely different launch in the interval aside from Black Desert China, which might’ve been lumped below BDO anyway.

Indeed, fellow blogger Nosy Gamer goes additional and argues that Pearl Abyss is aiming to cover a poor efficiency for the Chinese launch particularly. Bolstering that concept, the identical analyst who requested for the sport breakdown additionally requested about BDO’s Chinese launch final fall. PA doesn’t actually give a transparent reply besides to recommend that it didn’t underperform, which once more appears odd because it might’ve simply pointed to the equally fascinating 20% bounce in regional income for Asia between Q3 and Q4. But right here’s the entire reply 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 price, Pearl Abyss reiterates its plan to keep up BDO for no less than one other 10 years with participant suggestions demanding “consistent content” on the forefront. And in fact, we’re nonetheless ready on Crimson Desert – if the one-time MMO even nonetheless has any multiplayer to talk of – by the top of the year.

Note for future researchers

PA places the decision up first, and the pdf presentation is linked in the decision web page even when it isn’t up but in the IR listing.