Daybreak Game Company to Be Acquired by EG7 for $300 Million

I bet it's even worse- I bet they're not just counting "accounts" as every subscription/registration, ever.... I bet the DDoS and other internal issues they've had over the years means they are counting every email linked to every game as an individual account. So Wulfy and Myst would count as 2 each, from time spent in EQ1 and EQ2.

Wonder if they're counting Vanguard accounts in that pile, too?

 

I thought about Vanguard. I miss it honestly. I've probably got 20-30 "registered" accounts. I have 2 actual accounts that I pay for. The others are just accounts I've made over the years to self start guilds or help others start guilds and never played again.

 

I wonder if SWG is also included in that number...

Edit: and FreeRealms.

 

ÖVERVÄGER ASIEN OCH SWITCH FÖR IMMORTAL UNCHAINED - VD (DIREKT) | EG7

The complete press release in english

AND a Presentation

EG7-Investor-Presentation-Dec-2020-Acquires-Daybreak-Games.pdf (enadglobal7.com)

 

From the mentioned presentation you can pull some very interesting numbers:

- 178m registered users ("potential to leverage for marketing and reactivation" - well - most likely they are counting accounts not users ...)
- Daybreak EBITDA (YTD Q3'20): USD 26m (41% margin) (sounds not THAT bad - but: 2016 they brought in Turbine with EBITDA USD 39m on the game level - where did that go?)

- EQ had $1bn lifetime bookings

- EQ has 66k subscriptions (Sept 2020) (max of all games), EQ2 21k (lowest of all games) (paying subs!)

- EQ has $11.5m YTD Boodkings (per Sept 30th, 2020) (max of all games), EQ2 $6.5m (lowest of all games)

- EBITDA by game: EQ (30%), DCUO (28%), LOTRO (15%), EQ2 (13%), DDO (10%), PS2 (6%)

- Bookings by game: DCUO (38%), EQ (17%), LOTRO (14%), PS2 (11%), DDO (10%), EQ2 (9%)


You can also extract some nice information that EQ2 players are spending more money on the game on average. Well - shows how the p2w model works I would say.

 

Wow, reading this makes me want to invest in this company.....

Sarcasm off now as I am in work!

 

One of the loans they took for 50mil usd is on a 12 month contract... that might be hard to pay back considering as in october of this year EG7 was short on cash....

Time to short the **** out of EG7.. /cackle

 

The numbers are starting to get posted up on the OF now too. Which begs a question: how exactly do they arrive at a number for subs per game? Aren't most of us AllAccess these days? I only log in to EQ2 these days but I still have EQ installed and get an urge to log in there once in a while. And theoretically I could log in to DCUO or Planetside if I wanted to so where is my sub number being allocated?

 

I was wondering the same thing. Does DBG/DPG even have separate subscription options for their main stable?

 

My off-the-cuff and fully uninformed thoughts are that the material provided confirms what anyone with a brain understood about EQ2: it has a very small player base, but that base is very loyal and pays far more than average for the privilege to play the game.

[edit] - The information provided shows 21,000 EQ2 accounts. Since most raiders maintain a second account for the heartstone buff you can probably shave several thousand off of that number if you are looking for an idea of how many active unique players there are. There's probably another cohort of several thousand who no longer play but never bothered to cancel their subscription. So my best guess is that there's probably 16-17,000 unique players across all servers. Yes I know that this is based on several layers of speculation but I feel good that this figure is in the ballpark of the actual number.

My read-between-the-lines speculation is that, as far as the EverQuest IP is concerned, there is going to be a shift away from the EQ1 and EQ2 and a development of new titles using the IP. Being that EQ2 has 1/3rd the player base of EQ I would imagine that it's among the first things cut if resources need to be allocated elsewhere. I also notice that the EverQuest IP, in general, is not highlighted at all. It seems that the goal will be DCUO and LOTRO, combined with a 'new' project that I would guess (again, based on nothing but my speculation) would be an EQ title.

 

Someone on Discord posted that one of EG7 main project will be a revamp of the Lord of the Rings Online-game. There will be a new TV Series based on this on Amazon as i understand. The goal is to get the game at a state where it will benefit from the TV show.

 

This is the kind of thing that would make perfect sense. LOTR is a well established and popular IP. With renewed interest from a TV show they can get people into the game and increase revenue. DCUO seems to be the other IP they mentioned by name because it has by far the largest player base and by far the largest revenue.

 

Lols. Our inferences were right in the ball park for just about every eq2 number posted.

With respect to my own guesstimates, however, I was waaayyyyyy too generous on the actual income eq2 was generating. In fact, 6.5MM through the 3rd qtr is so unimpressive that I'm surprised the title was able to stay afloat. The EQ income #'s also really surprised me.

No wonder Longdale was in panic mode.

As a side note, we're already seeing the effects of Swedish transparency and ethics norms for information posted by publically traded companies.

I wonder if Kander can even function within a culture like that. I mean, stuff like that flies in the face of everything he believes in.

 

The announcement on the LOTRO boards: Daybreak Acquisition News and Standing Stone Games

 

Amazon is already developing a LOTR game to go along with their TV show. I saw an early look at it and it doesn't look like my kind of game (I still play the original LOTRO). It looks twitchy and more like a first person fighter type game.

Given that, I have no idea of Standing Stone Games (current developers of LOTRO under Daybreak) have the rights to the LOTR IP to create a new version of LOTRO and not sure they would even want to since the current version is still going strong.

 

I miss Vanguard. I had just gotten into it only about a year before they canned it.