Pearl Abyss Sells CCP Games To CCP's Management Group

What was rumored in June 2025 finally came to pass on the final day of April 2026. Pearl Abyss sold off CCP Games to its current management team for $120 million (₩177.1 billion). Pearl Abyss announced the acquisition in September 2018 with the deal finalizing the following month. While the final total of the deal was $225 million and not the $425 million originally reported, Pearl Abyss' spending spree following its 2017 IPO may not have been totally wise.

While the numbers from 2026 are not known at this time, in the years 2019 to 2025 CCP Games generated approximately $412 million in revenue for Pearl Abyss. But revenue does not equal profits and by 2022 Pearl Abyss was seeing red numbers in its books. In the past four years Pearl Abyss posed net losses two times and operating losses the past three years. A Korean outlet provided the following information from Pearl Abyss:

CCP Games is an Iceland-based developer with a proven track record, having successfully serviced its flagship space-themed sci-fi game, 'EVE Online,' for over 20 years. Pearl Abyss acquired the company in 2018 with the goal of diversifying its portfolio and securing global IP.

However, persistent operating losses at CCP Games following the acquisition have placed a significant burden on Pearl Abyss' financial structure.

Consequently, analysts and industry experts view this sale as a highly positive signal. By shedding a loss-making subsidiary that had negatively impacted Pearl Abyss' consolidated financial statements for years, the company has resolved a key source of uncertainty. Having shed this financial weight, Pearl Abyss can now actively invest the substantial capital secured from the sale into the development and marketing of new IP.

Regarding the valuation of the sale, Pearl Abyss stated that the price was "determined objectively by comprehensively considering CCP Games' current business structure and market conditions."

I have to admit to a bias. After listening to Pearl Abyss' leadership evade, mislead, misdirect, and the unkind would say lie, about the state of Crimson Desert on the quarterly earnings calls over the last 5 years, I have about as much trust for what Pearl Abyss states as the investment analysts on those calls. Which is not much. If the investment analysts trusted Pearl Abyss we wouldn't have seen the company's stock drop 36.6% of its value in the two days following the release of Crimson Desert upon the early reviews of the state of the game.

Did Pearl Abyss Iceland, the holding company controlling CCP Games for Pearl Abyss, post losses every year? If I recall correctly, the answer is yes. But did the home office in Anyang contribute to the mess?

Let's go back to Crimson Desert. The game was originally supposed to launch in the final three months of 2021, not the first three months of 2026. Imagine what the profits would look like if a game launched every three years beginning in Q4 2021. With DokeV launching in either Q4 2024 or Q1 2025 the company probably doesn't experience any losses, whether net or operational.

Finally, what about Pearl Abyss' revenue from its cash cow, Black Desert? At the same time delays in launching Crimson Desert kept new revenue from arriving, the problems experienced by the Black Desert IP, particularly Black Desert Mobile, led to a 55% decrease in revenue from 2019 to 2024. Pearl Abyss was no longer pulling in the cash to fund any plans discussed at the time of the acquisition in 2018. While CCP Games revenue gains were the equivalent of finding coins between the cushions, the Black Desert revenue loss during that time exceeded the amount of money Pearl Abyss spent acquiring CCP Games.

Now for the fun part of these exercises: what comes next? Pearl Abyss Iceland and CCP Games usually submit their financial accounts to the Icelandic tax authority on the last day of April or the first two weeks of May. With the change in ownership I'm interested to see if the pattern holds.