Online gaming company almost doubles profits

PRE-TAX profits at the Irish unit of game giant GOA Games increased more than eight-fold in 2009 as revenues almost doubled.

According to accounts recently filed with the Companies Office, GOA Games Services Ltd increased its pre-tax profits from €161,000 to €1.39m.

This coincided with the company increasing its revenues by 93% from €14m to €27.3m.

However, the directors said that 2009 activity was lower than anticipated and it has put a redundancy plan in place.

The company develops, edits, publishes, markets and distributes all types of online games and provides online gaming services across 27 European countries.

The directors said they are looking to acquire new free-to-play games to develop the goa-com portal and to continue operating the other games.

The company’s operating profits almost trebled in 2009 from €650,000 to €1.53m.

However, the company benefited in 2009 from lower interest payments going down from €489,000 to €147,000.

The company had 191 employees in 2009, with a staff cost of €8.6m

The accounts included depreciation costs totalling €2m. The company had accumulated profits of €1.3m at the end of December 2009 and had net assets of €2.2m.

Goa Games is part of a growing number of gaming companies that have located in Ireland and others include Pop Cap Games, Big Fish Games, Activision Blizzard and Havok.