Perfect World Entertainment surpasses market expectations
Perhaps the belief that free-to-play games are bad and do not make money is unfounded. If you asked anyone with stock in Perfect World Entertainment, he would tell you that F2P is where it's at. The creator of the Perfect World International and Forsaken World has stunned the market as it reported a 15% revenue increase last quarter (January 2011 to March 2011) over last year (January 2010 to March 2010.)
However, the biggest surprise is the amount of profit the company generated. The 110% growth over last year greatly surpassed the high-end expectations of the company itself. CEO Michael Chi attributed the stellar growth to the recent release of Forsaken World and Empire of the Immortals. But the profit is due to more than the entry of these two games into the market. "At the same time, we also experienced lower sales and marketing expenses as we did not have as many new launches as we did in the previous quarter. All of these factors contributed to our strong bottom-line growth in the first quarter," Chi explains in a Gamasutra article.
Perfect World Entertainment hopes for continued growth as it continues to solidify its place in the F2P market with more games coming soon.
