Shares in Pearl Abyss, the developer and publisher of Crimson Desert, skyrocketed today after the company announced 3 million sales — addressing a significant stock price collapse that occured around the game’s launch.
Yesterday, Pearl Abyss announced Crimson Desert had sold an impressive 3 million copies in just five days. The open world action game launched on March 19 and sold 2 million copies in a day, with an additional 1 million copies sold in the subsequent four days.
It’s an impressive sales return, but things were looking a little shaky when Crimson Desert came out. Crimson Desert launched big on Steam with nearly 250,000 concurrent players, but was met with a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Valve’s platform. Much of the early criticism from players revolved around the controls, which some had called clunky and unnecessarily complicated. There were some performance complaints too. For example, PS5 owners joined forces to work out the cause of blurry visuals — an issue that was also on the PC version.
Meanwhile, Pearl Abyss saw its stock price plunge nearly 30% in what was seen as a reaction to review scores from critics. A day after launch, the company stock fell a further 9.78% — despite the big launch sales. According to the Korean business press, Pearl Abyss reportedly spent seven years making Crimson Desert, with development costs coming in at 200 billion won (approx. $133 million).
However, Crimson Desert Steam reviews are improving, moving up from ‘mixed’ to ‘mostly positive’ as Pearl Abyss releases game-changing updates. English reviews are now up to ‘very positive.’ The Crimson Desert Metascore is 78, with the user score at 8.1.
Pearl Abyss stock was down 2.51% yesterday, but today it jumped a huge 23.34%. And while the share price still has some way to go before it recovers to the level Pearl Abyss was trading at before Crimson Desert’s launch, clearly sentiment has shifted.
“Now, investors are having a ‘Whoopsie’ moment,” was how Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of Japan game industry consultancy Kantan Games, put it in a post on social media. “Happens in Asian markets all the time with game stocks.”
Clearly, there’s still some way to go for Pearl Abyss and Crimson Desert itself, with further patches expected to improve the game further. In the meantime, we’ve got plenty more on Crimson Desert, including player requests to make the dragon more accessible, a player discovery that shows the devs really have thought of everything, and our Crimson Desert review. If you’re jumping into Crimson Desert’s huge open world, we recommend you take a look at our guide to Things to Do First in Crimson Desert, plus Things Crimson Desert Doesn’t Tell You (we’ve got 28 and counting!). We’ve also got a guide to the Best Early Weapons we recommend picking up, the Best Skills to Get First (including a handy explainer of the skills system), and 34 Essential Tips and Tricks to help you succeed in Pywel.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
