CCP ponders IPO after $66m year

Icelandic MMO studio CCP said it made $66 million last year, despite facing a community backlash over the summer.

The sales success raises the possibility of an IPO, said CCP chief Hilmar Petersson (pictured).

“We want to be ready for an IPO from a policy standpoint,” Petersson told Tech Crunch.

“We’re quite a substantial company, so we’re thinking, ‘Okay, what is the next step?’"

EVE Online generates cash through player subscriptions, offering each customer a vast, sci-fi universe to play in.

It is believed the game hosts as many as 400,000 active players.

Revenues climbed by about 53 per cent, CCP said.

But community uproar after internal company communications were leaked to the public shows the studio has had to fight for its margins in the wake of a public relations fiasco.

The backlash resulted in in-game protests joined by thousands of subscribers, during which the Hungarian studio Avatar Creations saw such a spike in user registrations for its subscription based sandbox MMO Perpetuum that its servers were taken offline.

CCP has since released a well-recieved EVE expansion targeted to improve the experience of new players.

No timeline for the IPO was given.

CCP is scheduled to release a PS3 MMO shooter, Dust 514, this summer.

The game will provide PS3 customers access to the PC based EVE online servers.