Black Desert's Black Wednesday.. Pearl Abyss Plummets

Pearl Abyss’s ‘Black Desert Mobile’ has opened the door to the Chinese gaming market after five years, but Pearl Abyss’s stock price is fluctuating wildly. On the 26th, the stock rose about 7% following news that the game had ranked first on major app markets within an hour of its release, but on the 27th, it opened at 86,000 won, down 12.24%.

The game, which was released on Chinese app markets the day before, reached number one on both the Chinese Apple App Store and Tencent’s app market ‘TapTap’ within an hour of launch. However, as of 6 a.m. on the same day, 22 hours later, the game had dropped to 29th place on the App Store. Kim Hajung, a researcher at Daoul Investment & Securities, analyzed, “While live streaming traffic has maintained a steady flow, limitations in profitability have been revealed. Since Pearl Abyss does not incur publishing costs for Black Desert Mobile in China, the poor performance of this business has a significant negative impact on profits.”

Foreign investors seemed to have anticipated this situation, as they had been short selling even before the release. On the 26th, Pearl Abyss’s short selling transaction amount reached 54.04 billion won, the largest short selling fund among both KOSPI and KOSDAQ on that day. The short selling ratio of the total transaction amount on that day was 19.70%. This means that one out of every five Pearl Abyss stock transactions was a short sale. Short selling transactions steadily increased and then exploded on this day. Since the 20th, short selling transactions in the 20 billion won range had been occurring. The Korea Exchange designated Pearl Abyss as a ‘short selling overheated stock’ due to indiscriminate short selling attacks and banned short selling transactions for one day on the 27th.

However, the securities industry’s response to ‘Black Desert Mobile’ is positive. Kim Jingu, a researcher at Kiwoom Securities, said, “This game was released with a limited revenue model due to Chinese game regulations, and with the issuance of the game license within this month marking the end of Chinese regulations, the charging structure is expected to improve sequentially.” He also predicted, “The initial revenue ranking reflecting 48 hours after release will be in the early to mid-teens, and it is possible to enter the top 10 within the second quarter of this year. At minimum, a daily revenue of 2 billion won is achievable.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.