Also, it's important here to mention that we will be getting MTG's Q2 financial report by the end of this month. I think the 26th? So that'll give us more info.
I didn't mention profits because I don't know the profits. It's possible that as a result of the layoffs they were able to maintain the same profit, or just as possible that they still lost a bunch. I also wouldn't be surprised if they've been dumping resources into their newer games, and with the servers coming online had to invest more heavily in server architecture and so spent more money.
For the most part, I tried to keep the discussion to something that I could show visually with a graph or chart or something to avoid just giving numbers that don't mean anything to the average viewer.
Lastly, positive momentum likely means that they are still losing money - so not necessarily a good thing. Just something that sounds good to investors. Per my professional graphs here, they're claiming that it's the green one. Whether that's true or not is going to be difficult to tell until we see what's happened with Q2, which includes the Anniversary, Wildlife, and start of Summer events, all of which we've seen have major spenders emptying their pockets for due to the Key Master's Workshops and Cartographer Houses.
From what I saw of the reports I took it to mean reduced profits moreso than losing money.
i.e.
- given that inno is almost entirely dependent on FoE (their other games aren't nearly as popular as far as I'm aware)
- and that the revenue from FoE is flatlining or decreasing
- then it follows that they either have to find a way to change that, or to cut continuing development costs. they appear to be trying hard to do both.
- but on the revenue front it seems their recent path of "come on, OP stuff, spend more guy$$$" is not sustainable, so in the long run it may result in it falling off even harder. It could be a close-out plan to milk what they can get before they cut development on the game entirely.
- Perhaps I'm wrong though. Perhaps they have a deeper plan I do not see to reach a new stable, strategically-interesting point (no indications of tapering off in the next two events after this one though).
- Or perhaps enough of the population is placated sufficiently by a never-ending stream of OP stuff that it'll keep making them money and those who aren't looking for that will need to find something else to take up their time.