Quoted from unigroove:The 40% number over 2016 I have heard before. As far as I was told the company actually sold less games that year than previous years due to the ghosting issue and other unforeseen problems. The main reason revenue was up: Batman 66.
The 30% number over 2017 is new to me, but can easily be explained (aside from price increases): They still sold Batman, Aerosmith was a steady seller and Star Wars sold very well (to distributors. Whether they sold all of them doesn't show on Stern's numbers). Add the reruns of small batches of elder titles and that should explain the increase in revenue.
Are you sure?. Batman didn't start shipping until after xmas 2016. Also with all the Ghostbusters that were out in the field I can't see how they sold less? Also Stern really only made money on the SLE. I personally don't think batman was that good for stern, otherwise we'd have seen more SLE nonsense.
Because of the factory move they did less new titles in 2016.
I believe that Stern had a great 2016 because of the following:
The Walking Dead Code released at the end of 2015 put the game back on the map.
Ghostbusters released early 2016, even with the ghosting issues look at the GB threads thousands of them must have shipped.
Metallica - again look at the pinside threads
Game of Thrones - another game that I saw everywhere in 2016.
All of those games sold like hotcakes, TWD and Ghostbusters especially. I remember at the Stern tour in Oct 2016 our tour guide saying The Walking Dead was the gift that kept on giving.
in my view the good news is that they invested to build a bigger factory - clearly a more for more strategy; a little more cost for a lot more volume.
Revenue up is great, key issue is costs and profit. I have to believe that they are up; and look at all the people stern are hiring, Zach - Keith Elwin and a bunch of other folks.
How anyone can take view on CGC is hard given they do so much in supply chain for pinball and arcade and other stuff. Sense I get is that they are doing very well indeed.
Cheers.
Neil.