Focus Home Interactive’s revenue is up 80 per cent year-on-year

Focus Home Interactive has reported a “record start” of the 2019-20 financial year, revealing its revenue is up by 80 per cent year-on-year.

From April 1st to September 30th, 2019, Focus Home Interactive posted revenues of €79.8 million, an increase of 80 per cent YoY, with digital sales accounting for 84 per cent of total sales in the first half – up from 65 per cent during the same period last year.

The company attributes the successful launches of a number of titles – including World War Z, A Plague Tale: Innocence, and GreedFall – in the first fiscal half of 2019/20 for the boost, as well as “continued strong performance of the back-catalogue”. Focus says titles such as Farming Simulator, Vampyr, Insurgency: Sandstorm, the Surge, and MudRunner confirm “Focus Home Interactive’s ability to build its success over time and gather communities of players around its games over the long term”.

In the second quarter of the 2019/20 fiscal year, Focus Home Interactive reports its revenues as €37.2 million, an increase of 135 per cent YoY. “This very high performance was driven by GreedFall, which showed a stunning start and beat expectations,” the firm said. 

“After the successful launch of World War Z and A Plague Tale in the first quarter, the Group’s positive momentum continued in the second quarter, mainly driven by the successful release of GreedFall,” said Jurgen Goeldner, Chairman of the management board of Focus Home Interactive. “This record performance demonstrates both our ability to leverage the know-how and talent of our teams with that of our partner studios and to maximise the monetization of opportunities. We will continue to work hard with the commitment of pursuing our growth journey.”

“Focus Home Interactive’s growth further accelerated in the second quarter compared to a record first quarter,” added John Bert, COO of Focus Home Interactive. “We anticipated that 2019/20 would be a front-end loaded year and we are very satisfied with our performance during the first half of the year. Even if we do not expect such an exceptional growth rate in the second half of the year, these good results demonstrate our ability to change scale, hence the confirmation of our 2021/2022 revenue targets.”

Looking ahead, Focus says it is committed to its “Enhance, Evolve, Explore” strategic plan. “During the last months of the year 2019, the Group will validate its strategy to expand on new platforms, with the anticipated launches of Farming Simulator, Vampyr and Call of Cthulhu on Nintendo Switch as well as Mudrunner on mobile platforms,” the company said.

In other Focus news, Sherlock Holmes developer Frogwares recently hit back at Focus Home Interactive for refusing to hand over the rights to its games following the scheduled termination of its distribution deal with Focus.

In a statement shared across the developer’s social media channels, Ukrainian studio Frogwares reports Focus conveyed via a statement to the developer only last week that it “has put in place a policy in accordance with which they will not transfer any title – the content ID or title ID – belonging to any developer which has removed all of their games from the Focus catalog”.