Gameloft announces 27% boost in earnings in 2012, 56% of sales from back catalog
Developer Gameloft has announced its earnings for the last quarter, and they're up. The company even beat out its own guidance, ending 2012 with a 27 percent boost in earnings on the year in total, up to $275 million. I would have thought much of that was from the major Christmas sales that we saw, but I would have been wrong: Gameloft says that the company's Q4 sales were only up by 23 percent, with Q2 and Q3 showing more growth, at 35 and 37 percent, respectively.
That's interesting. The company also announced that while sales of major new releases of course played a part in its success, over 56 percent of its sales in 2012 came from back catalog titles, older releases like Ice Age Village, Order and Chaos Online and Asphalt 7.
It's a lot to draw out a trend from the earnings report of one company, but those numbers definitely stand out. I wonder if we're hitting a transition point on iOS in general -- in the past, big new releases (and Christmas sales) have almost always made or broken companies' earnings reports, but I wonder if, as the App Store gets more and more crowded, just having bigger libraries of back catalog titles might not make more of a difference.
Of course, at the same time, Gameloft announced that it has shut down its India-based studio, so not everything is going perfectly over there.
