Star Vault has released their fourth quarter finances for the 2014 year and the results are not all bad.
While net sales fell for the second quarter in a row, down to $57 thousand, net profit dipped slightly more out of the red at $109 thousand below. This year Star Vault made advances toward release on Steam, announcing that Mortal Online would support the Oculus Rift, testing a territory control system, and worked towards the upcoming release of Sarducaa, the next continent.
As always, here are CEO Henrik Nystrom’s (translated) comments:
We have throughout 2014 continued to improve the quality and the experience of playing Mortal Online. During the early years was updated game engine Unreal Engine which has facilitated and laid the foundation for further development. Territory control system was in place during the second quarter. This allows for further development with new features and experiences that will be interesting to follow the 2015th
We have in the fourth quarter continued to work hard for the upcoming launch of the platform Steam, which is the world’s largest digital distribution channel for PC games. In November we released a so-called “performance patch” to improve the performance of the players when especially a large number of players are on the screen simultaneously. This has previously been heavy for players’ computers but have become much better and the players now need not miss out on the game experience when playing surface is under heavy load. It is thus an impressive performance increase.
We are continuing to work on the new continent, which is the last step before STEAM launch, where the technical challenge is now complete. This means that our network solution now supports both the existing continent and the new continent that soon we will be presenting to our players. What we have left before launch is improving the artificial intelligence that gives players a better gaming experience. We think it’s important to stability in the continent is so good it can be before we release the update. Our previous goal was to release it before the end of the year but we want to give it extra time to the players who patiently waited for a new continent will get as good an experience as possible. We are committed to releasing the continent first quarter of 2015, and shortly after this launch the game on STEAM platform. We made the decision to have two continents implemented before STEAM to even be able to handle an increased number of players in the game world. As previously commented, we will continue to be very honest with our loyal player base and allow them to participate and judge when we have what it takes for a successful launch. One of the major challenges in the industry is to bring in new players, but also to retain existing players by offering a high quality and solid gaming experience which is very important for us at Star Vault.
Furthermore, I can happily comment that Mortal Online was nominated and came in first place as the most “hyped” game on the Gold Chip – a stipend provided by Estrella. The Gold Chipset provides Estrella players the opportunity to vote for a title that offered a place in Estrella’s booth at Dreamhack. DreamHack went well, we got a lot of fans who tried the game and playing now.
Oculus Rift is that earlier in wait for when we know when it will be released and the hardware will apply to the market. Before we know it, we will not do any work here. We focus remains on being able to provide full support in Mortal Online as Oculus Rift will be on the market, precisely because the game fits so well on the type of hardware with dedicated first-person view. We believe that many will try out a game like this when they own a pair Oculus Rift, and then we also have the chance to reach out to many interested players.
Work on the continent release is proceeding according to plan.
Henrik Nystrom
CEO, Star Vault AB
(Disclosure: Star Vault’s finances are published on the Aktie Torget stock exchange in Swedish, linked below, and translated using Google’s automatic tools. Figures shown above are based off of the SEK to USD conversion rates as of the day of their publishing.)
(Source: Star Vault)
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