A couple weeks back Enad Global 7 issued their financials for the first quarter of 2024 and I was doing something else… I think I was in Ione, CA that day… anyway, I am finally getting around to mentioning it.
Enad Global 7
Not that there is a lot to mention. The report straight up says it was a quiet quarter with no major releases and an continued decline in users for Big Blue Bubble’s My Singing Monsters title that saw a huge surge in popularity about 18 months back.
- As expected, Q1 was a “quieter” quarter, reflecting limited planned releases
- No major product and content releases for the period
- MSM lower level performance as expected
- Market weakness pressuring our 3rd party service business units
They didn’t even follow up on the Q4 2023 surprise announcement about the sale of the PlanetSide IP, though we did find out later that the IP somehow ended up with Toadman, another of EG7’s studios, leaving one to wonder what was going on. No further details have been provided.
So earning were down in Q1 2024. All that quiet.
The LTM side of the chart are the “last twelve months” totals marked every quarter, which is supposed to more indicative of how the company is doing overall than a strictly quarter focused view… and EG7 is down on that view as well.
Summing up the quarter in the chart they showed who was contributing to the bottom line.
Contributions to revenue by group
As noted above, My Singing Monsters was down, but our friends at Daybreak were chugging along as expected in a quarter with no big releases.
Earnings for Daybreak and Big Blue Bubble
Daybreak was even up a bit in Q1 and has held steady during the rise and decline of My Singing Monsters. But Daybreak has a few “medium” events in 2024 to keep it going as this chart indicates.
The Plan for 2024… caveats excepted
The only “large” event for the year is MechWarrior 5: Clans.
As part of this quiet quarter EG7 took a moment to remind people that things are bad all over in the video game market, but they are sticking to their goad of 3 Billion SEK in earnings in 2026, with that growth kicking in any minute now.
The promised future
We’ll see how that shakes out with the Q2 results.
But next up, on June 7th, is the first dividend payment, the reaction to capital management investors demanding that EG7 not hold cash reserves when they could be just handing that money to shareholders. EG7 is taking a cautious approach to that, but the shareholder meeting coming up on June 19th will no doubt be a sounding as to whether to voracious maw of Wall Street is momentarily sated or if they will demand more.
Also, I missed when EG7 released their final 2023 company report. That is worth a glance and I linked it at the end of the post along with all the usual suspects. I did pull a couple of charts out just because I thought they were interesting.
The first is the staffing levels of the various units that are part of EG7, totaling up to 736 people.
Where the staff are at EG7
The Daybreak total at the end of 2023 was 264 people (about as many as I hear work on World of Warcraft these days) or about 36% of EG7’s total, broken out into the following groups:
- Daybreak – Standing Stone (LOTRO/DDO) – 60
- Daybreak – Developer & Publisher – 59
- Daybreak – Darkpaw (EQ/EQII) – 53
- Daybreak – Dimensional Ink (DCUO) – 49
- Daybreak – Rogue Planet (PlanetSide 2) – 27
- Daybreak – Magic Online – 16
And then there was a chart about some random demographic metrics for the company which they decided to report on.
Accident free in 2023
Cyber attacks were down, as were reported sick days. I imagine those sick days were all reported in Europe where they require those sorts of benefits by law. Meanwhile, female staff declined in a number of groups… though the seem to be sneaking in a new female member of the board as according to the report she was only elevated in 2024. Details.
Anyway, EG7 made the “slow quarter” excuse, which you can do once in a while. Now to see if they can light a fire under Q2. If they don’t the capital management investors may start howling again for the company to be parted out and sold again.
Related:
- EG7 – Investor Relations Page
- EG7 – Q1 2024 Interim Report
- EG7 – Q1 2024 Investor Presentation
- EG7 – 2023 Annual Report
- Simply Wall St – There’s A Lot To Like About EG7’s Upcoming Dividend
- Massively OP – EG7 Q1 2024: Daybreak still mum on PlanetSide 2, new H1Z1 game hires lead designer
- Massively OP – EG7’s 2023 annual report claims Daybreak and SSG collectively count 264 staffers
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
The “Where Everyone Works” graphic is fascinating, not least because they can’t even get the name of one of their own studios right. Rouge Planet?
If it takes around 264 people to keep WoW going, it’s somewhat incredible Darkpaw manages to run two EQ games, including an annual expansion for each of them, with just 53. The question that raises for me isn’t so much “how do they do it?” as “Why does everyone else seem to find it so much harder?”
They’ve been keeping up the same pace with very little variation for a decade now, whereas almost every other MMORPG I’ve played is much more unpredictable and sporadic in their output. About the only game I play that outdoes Darkpaw for consistency in that regard is AdventureQuest 3D, which puts out updates weekly without fail.
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I feel better having written “rouge” rather than “rogue” in a headline for a past post now.
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@Bhagpuss that is a fascinating question. I wonder (not ever having been an EQ/EQ2 player) how the expansions compare in terms of total changes – landmass, raids, items, class changes, etc.
My first guess is tooling – if the EQ team has better tools it could speed up development. And the second is that EQ takes smaller “bites” for total changes, but I don’t know that – see above.
One might make the argument that the WoW team often takes too large a bite, e.g. redesigning classes that were not really in need of it. But that is subjective and an opinion of course.
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I will say that, on the EverQuest side of the house at least, they do not spend a lot of time revamping classes or worrying about class balance and they leave PvP to whatever comedy the various classes get up to… not that there is much PvP.
On the EQII side they did spend a lot of time trying to make PvP a thing, balancing classes and, at one point, having every skill and piece of gear have distinct PvE and PvP attributes. What a pain. They don’t do that anymore.
For how big of a bite, they add in what is probably 80% of a Mists of Pandaria level of overland, raid, and dungeon content with each expansion, along with a six month later big game update that is usually on par with late phase content drops or additional raids from WoW.
I have played through a few of the later EQII expansions, at least the overland stuff. They probably re-use/re-purpose more stuff, but what is there is fairly substantial. They specifically said at one point, if I recall right, that they had worked out a tool set to do this so they have an established routine. This has led to a pretty big world in EverQuest. The map of Norrath is…complicated.
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I suppose one could add SSG keeping two games going with 60, and while I don’t know about DDO, LOTRO actually gets a regular release cadence too.
But I suspect like EQ there is something approaching a formula to a LOTRO update. And whilst there are changes they are rarely ground shaking. The product is very well understood, some of the staff are deeply knowledgeable. And the teams are small enough communication is comparatively easy. And their aims are considerably more humble. EQ doesn’t care about the new kids, it just sits on its porch and does its thing.
Until the asset strippers come a-calling anyway.
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Turbine was pretty chaotic on their updates and support with LOTRO and DDO before Daybreak bought them, largely because they were trying to make Infinite Crisis. After Daybreak they have started to settle down into a more regular routine. DDO actually pushes out a lot of content in less than expansion sized chunks, while LOTRO has joined EQ and EQII with the “expansion every Q4” plan, though how much substance they can deliver is still not nailed down.
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