The Pearl Abyss Iceland and CCP Report & Accounts for the year to December 2025 came out on 8 May 2026.
You can access the Pearl Abyss Iceland 2025 Report & Accounts here and also I have a page on this blog that hosts all the Pearl Abyss Iceland from 2019 / CCP from 2013 to 2018 here. They can also all be found and downloaded for free from the Iceland Company Register.
From here on in we will call the Consolidated Financial Statements of Pearl Abyss Iceland as CCP.
There overall loss was $28.8m which compares to a loss of $19.4m in 2024, a loss of $18.8m in 2023, a loss of $19.0m in 2022 (and then we also had the $50m impairment write off), a loss of $7.9m in 2021, a loss of $1.3m in 2020 but a $13.6m profit in 2019 and then a small $0.7m loss in 2018 after being bought by Pearl Abyss.
The total losses since being bought by Pearl Abyss in 2018 are $132m = $82m trading losses + $50m impairment write off.
I greatly suspect this was not the plan when Pearl Abyss bought CCP in 2018 for $226m (there was also an earnout of $200m but the targets were never met so it was never paid).
To date, the total cost of CCP to Pearl Abyss has been $226 + $82 = $308m.
CCP was sold back to management for $120m. So an overall loss to Pearl Abyss of $188m.
Net Debt is now $51m and the $50m Pearl Abyss loan is due for repayment in October.
CCP needs an injection of cash, in my view.
$28.8m loss in 2025
Management say that "This is the continuation of the Group's deliberate and increased fully funded investment in multiple active development projects — including EVE Frontier, EVE Vanguard, and the Carbon open-source platform — which are scheduled to enter key release phases from mid-2026 onwards. These investments, while impacting short-term profitability, are central to the Group’s strategy and position the Group for strategic and sustainable growth in the years ahead."
So, a lot rides on 2026 because, to me, CCP looks right up against the wire.
Summary
- Revenues were up 8% to $65.3m ($60m)
- Game revenues were up an impressive 11% to $61m and higher than lockdown 2020 levels but not yet the all time high in 2013 of $72m
- North America and Europe grew, Asia in decline even when striping out Tencent decline
- Not sure how much of the 11% rise in game revenues is due to more ingame sales vs more players
- Europe is declining as a % of Revenues
- Costs rose 10% in 2025 - so faster than Revenues due to Market Costs
- Salaries are a steady 45% of total operating costs
- It is the pension / employee tax costs that brings it up to 57%
- The overall loss was $28.8m vs $19.4m in 2024
- Balance Sheet messier this year and Cash Flows messier
- Rising Tokens on the Balance Sheet
- The Value of unused Plex (and i guess MCT) has gone up by almost 51% in 2025 despite all the efforts to reduce the hoarding
- Net Debt is now $51m in 2025, up from $37m and the $50m Pearl Abyss loan is due in October.
- They can either raise cash by selling these tokens again or get cash from partnerships or new investors etc
- But, CCP needs new money or a very rapid return to profitability
Revenues rose 8% to $65.3m vs $60.2m in 2024 (which was up 8% vs $56.0m in 2023).
Gross profits rose 6.5% to $58.7m vs $55.1m in 2024 (which was up 6.4% vs $51.8m in 2023).
Hence the Gross Profit Margin fell again to 89.8% vs 91.5% in 2024 and 92.5% in 2023.
I suspect this is because the level of Royalties and licenses fell - more on that below.
Total Operating Costs were $92.1m, a rise of 10% vs 2024 which rose 6% vs 2023. The main driver here was Marketing costs.
Government Grants added $4.4m to income in 2025 vs $6.7m in 2024.
Therefore the Operating Loss came in at $29.0m vs $22.2m in 2024 and vs $21.2m in 2023.
And then interest costs, currency movements and taxes take the overall loss to $28.8m in 2025 vs a loss of $19.4m in 2024 vs a loss of $18.8m in 2023.
Revenues
Revenues rose 8% to $65.3m.
That is exactly what we expected quarterly updates Pearl Abyss were giving us. In Korean Won revenues rose 13% but the Korean Won fell 5% vs the US dollar.
The revenues from subscription and in-game sales rose an impressive 11% to $60.8m on top of the 13% rise in 2024.
Though there was no subscription price change during the year, CCP has been increasing the amount of ingame sales so we can't say that player numbers rose 11%. In fact, we don't really know the split in revenues between player numbers rising vs ingame sales rising.
The peak revenues were $72m in 2013 but CCP is above the pandemic lockdown 2020 peak of $55m. That is to be congratulated.
This is the third year in a row of rising revenues for what is a game over 20 years old.
The decline in Royalties and licenses from $7.0m in 2023 to $5.1m in 2204 and now $4.1m in 2025 (and this was $10m back in 2021) is i suspect down to lower NetEase revenues in China being replaced by direct sales into China. That seems to be backed up by this note:
Revenues from North America and Europe keep rising vs declining in Asia (i am guessing that is China driving the decline in Asia). If we strip out the decline in Licences then we are still seeing a decline in revenues from Asia.
North America continues to grow as a percentage of revenues.
North America used to be 30% bigger than Europe, now it is more than double the size of Europe. Perhaps currency plays a small part.
I am not sure what Revenues from sale of goods are (Fanfest items?) but they are deminimus now anyway.
Gross Profit
The cost of actually running the game (as opposed to creating new code, marketing et al) is very low at around $7m in 2025, $5m in 2024 and $4m in 2023.
I suspect there is no cost attached to Royalties and licences there of the $7m cost is associated with the $61m game revenues which suggests the Eve Online is a 90% Gross Profit Margin business.
That said, this cost of running the game has gone up faster than revenues and therefore the Gross Profit Margin has slipped below 90%. Not sure why that is.
Operating Expenses
CCP now expense all their development costs (historical costs are still being held on the Balance Sheet and reduced over time). This is a much cleaner way to account for these costs.
It would not be unrealistic for CCP to hold the costs of developing new games on the Balance Sheet and wait for the Revenues to be generated before realising those costs through the Profit & Loss Account - but this relies on these new games being successful and therefore profitable.
Costs have risen everywhere, as they did in 2024. And in 2025 costs rose 10%, so faster than revenues.
Marketing rose a massive 34% - CCP launched "Founder Access" for Eve Frontier + launched EVE Vanguard: Operation Nemesis + major updates to EVE Online (including the Revenant expansion and the Legion update). I am guessing these were the drivers.
General and administration rose 4% which feels like inflation. That all said, General and administration is 34% of revenues which seems high.
In these businesses the biggest cost is people, so we need to look at the above at the same time as looking at employee costs. Much of the above lines of Operating Expenses will be people costs.
First thing to note is that the average number of employees fell by 4% to 385.
I have done some analysis which is interesting on all this:
The top rows are all data from current and historic Reports and Accounts.
Obviously i have to bring my politics into this some where - look at the bottom line. This is the additional costs CCP must bear when they hire someone. As well as an employees salary they also contribute to their pension funds and pay Employer Staff Taxes (in the UK this is called Employer National Insurance). in 2025 for CCP this was 27% and was as low as 25% in 2020. Hiring people has plenty of additional costs!
But, the main point of doing this was to observe that Salaries + these related costs as a % of total operating costs has generally been 55-59% and having been hovering around 58% has fallen to 57%. Salaries only as a % of total operating costs has been a remarkably steady 45%.
It looks like the average salary at CCP was $93k before jumping to $017k in 2025 (hard to compare to prior years without knowing the mix changes in developers vs general staff vs marketing staff et al). But it would suggest the people that left the company in 2025 were lower paid vs average.
And Revenue per employee is $170k today. It needs to be around $240k for CCP to be making some profits. In other words, a 40% higher number.
Other Income
There is $4m of Other Income in each year which is Government Grants.
Finance Costs
The Group had a $50m bank loan from Pearl Abyss itself in Korea (it used to be a bank loan but it was converted to a parent company loan in 2023). Pearl Abyss charges 4.6% interest on this loan. This loan is due for repayment in October 2026.
In 2025, the Group received an advance of $15 million (the "Advance"). The Advance is repayable quarterly, commencing upon commercial release of EVE Frontier, with no fixed maturity date.
Foreign Currency
OK, we can't ignore this. CCP i suspect has most of it costs in Icelandic Krona, great British Pounds and that Euro muck. But only 28% of its Revenues are in GBP and Euros.
Lets for a moment assume the Asian currencies follow the USD - then we can say that 72% of the Revenues of this business are USD related vs lets say 90% of costs being non-USD related.
But . . . . the fact that we have a positive FX move suggests that this relates to the $50m loan that is Korean Won and therefore a weaker Korean Won is a positive move for profits.
Tax
Given the business makes a loss, in Accounting the loss is reduced by a tax rebate (in actual cash flows tax is still paid given this is a global business making sales across the world – somewhere there will be profits to tax). This accounting rebate was $1.9m in 2025 vs $4.4m 2024.
Underlying operating loss
Add all that up and the underlying operating loss of the business rose from $19.4m to $28.8m.
Balance Sheet
The Balance Sheet is a bit messier this year with Tokens issued again and more debt.
Non-current Assets are being depreciated as expected.
Within Intangible assets a cool $20.3m was added, which seems to be "in return for the sales of token warrants". That takes total "Token Warrant" sales to $57.8m.
The $20m issued in 2025 is not counted as a sale in the Profit & Loss Account and this time did not deliver any cash to CCP. Perhaps it will do in the future.
$37.5m has been received in cash in 2022 and 2023, where has this next $20m was not.
And $5.0m of Intangibles was sold - not sure what was sold but $5m of cash was received.
Deferred Tax Assets are rising which is a function of the company generating loses and so having a "tax income" in the Profit & Loss Account. That is not a cash item, no money is reclaimed from the Icelandic State. Instead the "tax income" sits on the Balance Sheet as an asset and will be reduced down when the company starts making profits.
Current Assets look ok.
The leases are effectively a capitalisation of the annual rents they pay for their buildings - looks ok.
The $50m borrowing is from Pearl Abyss, interest charged at 4.6%. That is due in October 2026 and so moves from Non-Current Liabilities to Current Liabilities - and CCP need to get this refinanced in the next few months!
Also, it looks like CCP did not pay the interest on the loan to Pearl Abyss but instead added the interest payment to the total debt.
The $60.4m deferred revenues are proceeds from the sale of Token Warrants. $10m was received in 2022 and $27.5m in 2023 + non cash sales of $20m in 2025 + a new $2.7m "Exclusivity Right" - and i have no idea what this "Exclusivity Right" is!
It may relate to this
"In October 2025, the Group announced a strategic collaboration with Mysten Labs and the Sui network to support the
technological platform underlying EVE Frontier. This partnership provides scalable infrastructure for programmable ingame systems and digital assets, supporting the development of a broader ecosystem of tools and services around the EVE
Frontier platform."
Mysten Labs is some sort of Web3 business with a16z as an investor.
For the Token Assets, the notes in the Accounts spells it all out - CCP is developing a blockchain-based network and planning to issue crypto tokens on the network upon completion of the development:
Current Liabilities all look ok but lets look at the deferred income here because this gives us an idea of the amount of Omega / Plex in the game.
The $5.3m of Subscriptions is Omega that has been bought but not yet used. It will convert to Revenues as it is used. Accounting rules don't allow it to be recognised as Revenues before all this.
This is a large rise of 51% vs 2024 which suggests players were buying longer term Omega and/or more players in the game.rage.
The In-game purchases not yet consumer i believe is Plex and i guess any real money purchases other than Omega that are not yet used. This was higher at the end of 2025 vs 2024 and higher in 2024 vs 2023. As this Plex etc is used up it will be converted into Revenues.
But, again, suggests players are hoarding Plex.
Cashflows
Profits are one thing but cash is real.
Cash is a bit messy this year. in 2024 a loss fo $19.4m resulted in $19.4m less cash. But in 2025 a loss of $28.8m resulted in $1.2m more cash.
$12m came in from the "Advance" + $5m came in from the sale of Intangibles (not sure what it was) + $3m came in from higher deferred revenues + $3m from the "Exclusivity Right" + $2m came in from debtors paying CCP quicker (probably tax credits) + $2m from not paying the interest on the Pearl Abyss loan
Net Debt
However, we can't get away from this - CCP is building up debt.
Net debt has risen from $37.4m to $51.3m, and that would have been higher had we not seen the $5m came in from the sale of Intangibles (not sure what it was) + $3m from the "Exclusivity Right" + $2m came in from debtors paying CCP quicker (probably tax credits) + $3m came in from higher deferred revenues.
In other words, CCP either needs to be profitable very quickly or needs anoher cash injection.
CEO Salary?
I am not here to speculate on someone’s remuneration so I will just put the item below with a few lines of text.
So, $1.0m was paid to the Directors. I don’t think the Korean Board members will be taking any pay. So this is the CEO and whoever else is not Korean on the Board.
