They haven’t been profitable in over a year and a half.
Ya kinda are if you want to be able to continue playing the game (online).
That feels a bit odd given the badges. Unless you’re pissed off with the (apparent/presumed) change then it makes sense.
None of that is from the article you linked. Though it was interesting to read how they did the acquisition.
From the article:
Founded in December 2017, Eleventh Hour Games is a privately held company. As of the end of 2024, it reported total assets of KRW 26.87 billion, revenue of KRW 57.95 billion, and net income of KRW 8.59 billion.
I used a rough actual conversion rate from KRW to USD.
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Ahh, I missread that.
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Happens to the best of us ^^
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Not really. Like I said up there:
They had a huge profit from the launch sales (which was season 0), then seasons 1-3 were not profitable.
No surprise there… we got exctly 3 shit-shows in terms of Cycles… out of 3 Cycles.
That’s basically a 100% sub-par rate 
Cycle 1 failed to tackle the core issues of the game, focus was on pinnacle content when neither balance nor end-game content overall exists.
Cycle 2 failed to be provided in a reasonable timeframe.
Cycle 3 is undercooked beyond end as interactions are very shallow. You don’t really care for anything happening outside of ‘this will be the resulting reward type’ basically.
The issue isn’t that EHG doesn’t put effort into their work, they absolutely do! You can clearly see that.
The issue is that EHG seemingly has no clue - and they prove it repeatedly - how to cause large effects with little effort.
Imagine for the 3 cycles those things being done instead of what we were provided with:
Cycle 1: We get 2 phase bosses for the Harbingers, a specific type of Arena layout which is a combination of boss-fight and arena. Hence you fight the Harbinger of that timeline in a separate area and waves of mobs between the phases or even together with the Harbinger for the second phase.
Miniscule extra effort… massive effect in perception.
Cycle 2: Instead of stuffing the tombs/cemeteries into monolith maps how about it being similar to dungeons? They procedural generation causing you a need to find a way through them, kill the boss and get rewards. Then at the end you can advance to a higher difficulty (scaling similar to corruption to simulate that) and do directly the next layout. Access per stage is limited by an item dropped in Monoliths. Starting access area is freely chosen from all which you already managed to beat. So a procedural progression.
Miniscule changes… massive impact in perception without screwing over Monolith gameplay as it did as it’s detached from it. The cocoons can be a randomly appearing bonus-mechanic in monoliths simply.
Cycle 3:
Allowing several ‘ancestry lines’ so you can focus each on a specific reward type and tailor-craft them to your liking, providing variety in what you find rather then ‘always the same’ as well as a longer-term setup stage in total.
Large impact little effort once more.
It’s not that they do stuff… it’s how EHG does stuff which leads to issues.
Well, who’s in the wrong then? Judd or the report? Either is a massive massive issue.
And even if the shelf price revenue was those 6 mil profit… that would mean a total amount of 2 million sold copies during that timeframe. So I imagine it not upholding truth actually to be solely the shelf-price.
Yes, and it might bite them in the arse if there ever is a big lawsuit from one of the consumer protection agencies in the EU.
If we scrutinize the statement, then maybe 2024 overall was profitable, but the timeframe of Season 1, 2, and 3 were not by the used metric.
It might be that it wasn’t profitable on supporter packs and MTX, and the only saving grace were box sales pre-season 1 - which is a high indicator that the MTX model at the current point is not sustainable, but fixed sales are.
Perhaps EHG might want to elaborate on this statement a bit more?
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So, Simulacrum?
Greater rifts?
I don’t get it, how is that different from what we have? Each evolution you get 3 evolutions you can focus on to get a specific reward. I don’t get what you’re getting at there.
So 3 suggestions, 2 are pretty much the exact same as what is in other games, which is something EHG doesn’t want to do. They don’t want to make 1 for 1 copies of what already exists. They want to give their own spin to things.
Which they did with tombs, definitely. They might have their failings, but it was an original and interesting mechanic.
Reduced, but kinda a bit? Has more impact perception-wise at least.
Yeah, absolutely fitting there as a comparison, also true. They worked well for people overall though.
Yeah, but you got max 6 evolutions and a sinle ancestry line.
If you increase that to ‘3’ you can for example focus on 3 different rewards heavily rather then having to enforce a spread of all potentially.
It simply provides a longer-term option for grinding and perfecting it without enforcing a need to do so.
In comparison we could take Heist equipment in PoE… you can focus on a single person and shove everything into them for specific contracts with specific rewards… or you can min-max all of them gradually.
It’s mostly about longevity here which is the issue, and the more replayability the more longevity the systems have… wouldn’t be a problem if LE had much longevity in their content but it sadly doesn’t all too much.
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Yeah, I’d forgotten that 1.0 was Feb 24.
Neither, Judd was talking about seasons 1, 2 & 3 but not season “0” (1.0). So overall 2024 was profitable but only because of the launch.
I have a solution for this problem… make MTX that isn’t looking like ass and you’ll sell it.
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Also use proper sales techniques. ‘We did it like our competitors do and realized this doesn’t work for us’.
Nah… EHG did it half-assed without realizing why the methods of competitors actually work and that’s a big reason as to why it doesn’t work… not for them… but overall.
The supporter packs from GGG provide the full range of points related to the cost of the pack. That means if you buy a 30€ pack you get 30€ points. The MTX is the cream on top basically.
This way people look at it and say ‘what a deal!’, buying in even if the MTX is only barely something they personally want… after all you still got the points and can use em to buy MTX you actually want a lot and got the stuff on top!
And the ‘it looks like ass’ part, absolutely so.
I still remember the absolute baller looking supporter pack back when Abyss came out in PoE 1, that one was amazing! And what do we have here at LE? A slot back attachment… ok, fine. A toucan… ok, fine. An axe and a sceptre skins.
Yay? The chance someone wants those specific things is not all too high now, is it?
But a fair comparison is only available when we look at what the 30€ and 60€ supporter packs provide comparatively.
LE:
30€:
150 points (15€ value, so you basically pay 15€ for the MTX)
The included MTX are: 2 back attachments (wonderful, so we get double slotted stuff… great…), a pet, a portal, an axe skin, a scepter skin, a one-handed skin, one armor, a evade effect and a footprint effect.
The footprints by the way are absolute ass. The cloak is mid, as are the weapon skins.
60€:
300 points (so now the MTX costs 30€ already)
Another cape, another portal, a two-handed staff, another armor, another evade, another footprint for the 40 upgrade
And then another back attachment, another portal, another one-handed sword (now we even double up on weapon skins!), 2 more pets (which makes a total of 3, so 1 unusable), a shield skin, another armor, another evade and another footprint.
It’s plainly spoken shit, utter and absolute shit. Stuff is either extremely specific (weapon skins being for weapon type rather then generic melee/caster/ranged ones)
The result is you pay 15 or 30€ and have to like the specific stuff in those packs to have gotten the value out of em.
Now for PoE:
30€:
300 points (which means all MTX is free on top, you already got your value. Kinda… ya know… supporting the company with it rather then simply buying points normally)
The extended digital soundtrack
a character effect
a weapon effect.
Now… that doesn’t look like much, LE’s looks like it provides vastly more. But for a price-tag of effectively ‘0’ it’s quite the massive value, right?
60€:
600 points (So still the MTX is absolutely free)
A full armor pack with hood and helmet for small variety of choice… and a pet! Also the pet looks really nice. Animated, has a ongoing effect, despite that being one of the worse ones overall available.
Also another thing EHG utterly failed to provide which is a massive money making machine for GGG in comparison: A social space you own. In PoE it’s the hideout… and that has decorations. People buy decoration stuff like mad, after all it’s a massive aspect to show off your stuff to other people. LE lacks basically all methods to make that a actual thing. It would’ve sufficed to make the mechanic which PoE 2 has (buying stuff remotely and then simply picking it up at the Hideout) to make that a valuable and viable thing.
But nah… they ignored massive incentives and now they’re all pikachu faced wondering why their MTX fail.
I just want to point out that this isn’t really true. You can only use 2 per character, not total. You can equip 2 with one character and 2 different ones in another character.
The majority of players are generally single-character players, that’s universally true for all ARPGs… and all games even. The replay value is just higher for ARPGs and hence we see a higher prevalence.
And that still doesn’t mean you’ll use the third one. Heck… the vast majority of people doesn’t use the MTX from the supporter packs in PoE neither. They use whatever they think looks best, the majority has ‘1 set’ or switches every so often around to another style at best. Pets included.
I’m a prime example even of the ‘what’s done is done’ one. The best thing GGG ever implemented was the ‘random portal effect’ option so I actually see them all rather then only having my dragonhunter portal effect which I used since it came into the shop and never switched for anything else
It’s just not good value for the customer. Packs commonly have 1-2 things you like inside and everything else is perceived as ‘worthless’, so that’s why GGG for example makes their supporter packs have the full point value attached, to give extra incentive.
The EHG packs are basically full-priced MTX with some extra garbage (for you personally, one person’s trash is another’s treasure) tacked on.
And worst-case? It comes more expensive to acquire then similar items in the MTX shop. A situation which should never happen.
I am not oppose to charging for expansion if the expansion is beefy.
The issue, and DHG isn’t the only one guilty of this, is making promise and not delivering. It is especially bad if its related to cost.
Under EU regulation, I think this is not okay. You cannot charge membership for a gym, tell customer that the gym is basic, but there will add More machines and classes and you do not have to pay extra for at least 2 years. Then after paying the fee, they said you have to pay for the extra.
I knew it was a red flag when they said only MTX will be extra. Expension and Qol will be free. We all know the finanziell situation changes, then well, they will have to pull back some promises.
The honest and correct thing is NOT to made promise you know you may not keep.
There is a big difference in setting some targets (which is usually not binding) , vs making financial (which is often binding) base promise under most law.
POE/POE2 has one of the worst and extortionary pricing in MTX Outside of mobile games.
No game should use the GGG games as example. That is coming from someone who spent over half a grand on the game. Bad is bad.
The only way I feel less bad was convince myself the thousand of hours I spend on the game.
I think I have like 5-8x the amount of mtxs for the same amount I spent on fortnite.
It’s though what keeps it going to be fair. So business-wise it’s not bad.
I would also enjoy if the prices are cheaper though, but given EHG’s situation… well… there clearly is a problem existing and higher prices at least make up for the reduced turnover rate in total.
They still have no clue as to what exactly is actually causing their downfall… and that’s kinda sad when it’s rather clear-cut and explained over and over and over for the myriad of small things they did wrong.
Exactly! 100% with you there.
Weren’t you the one that said that players shouldn’t support poor business practices? Unless it’s GGG?