Welcome, everyone, to our FY 2025 Financial Results Call. If you could mute yourselves, please, and keep your cameras off. We'll have plenty of time for Q&A at the end. And without further ado, I will pass over to Jonny to kick us off.
Thank you, Alex. Yeah, good morning, everyone, and thank you for all making the time. So if I just go through this headline slide, I think what I really want to say is the strategic pivot to refocus on CMS and our established core titles is delivering momentum. I think there are three themes to this. So first off, I'll say we're very happy to report a significant uplift in financial performance. Alex will go through these numbers in further detail, but here are some headlines. So revenue grew by GBP 1.3 million to GBP 90.6 million.
Adjusted operating profit grew by GBP 8.6 million to GBP 13.2 million, which I think is very significant. And cash grew by GBP 13 million to GBP 42.5 million. I think also, if we look to the future, we're confident the board is confident that we can deliver further growth in financial year 2026. And with that cash, we're also initiated a share buyback scheme, which is again enhancing shareholder value. If I move on to our core franchises, I think they continue to demonstrate that they have a long tail and deliver ongoing revenue. Planet Zoo, Jurassic World Evolution, and Elite Dangerous all had very strong years.
And then we move to Planet Coaster 2. By collaborating with our players, sentiment has strengthened, and this is ready for a monetization reboot where we're going to be launching paid downloadable content. I'll talk a little bit more about that later on in the presentation. And then finally, when we look at the future and our roadmap, we're really excited by the pipeline that we have. As we said, we're focusing on CMS games, and we have three of them to deliver. The first one is Jurassic World Evolution 3, releasing 21st of October.
That's 41 days away. Countdown has begun. Financial year 27, we have this tantalizing unannounced CMS game, which is in full development, and then we're announcing today an unannounced game, which is another CMS for financial year 28. Again, this has really given visibility that in the next few years, we're going to be releasing this cadence of CMS games. I'll talk a little bit about that on the next slide, so this slide, I think what I've tried to do is distill down what our strategy is into the most simplest of terms.
Again, hopefully, this is going to give insight into how we have these two dimensions of growth, but it also gives you visibility on what you would expect from Frontier in the very short to medium term, so the two areas I want to focus on is, one, this launch one major game per year. So this is a commitment, and you can see. I'll show on the next slide you can see that this is actually in action, but again, it gives visibility. They're going to be CMS-based as well, again, for reasons that we set out when we decided to repivot to this strategy. Again, I think it's going to be very successful.
We know how to make them, and we know how to sell them. I think the other thing I want to point out on this is this three-year production cycle. So if we wind back three, maybe three and a half years ago, the games that we were doing were in a shorter development time scale. I think by moving the studio to a three-year development cycle, it really helps us do our market analysis. It really helps us to develop the game and listen to the players.
And it also helps us to sell that game. And also, I think it's very important when we're trying to get subscription deals to give Microsoft and PlayStation as much visibility of the game as possible. But that's just one dimension. That's filling up the funnel of these really successful titles. The second part is nurture. And this is where our established games, we want to work out how to monetize them. And I think the best way of doing that is we've got to engage the player with new experiences, and we get this win-win where the players are enjoying new things to experience in the game, but also there's opportunities for them to spend money for that.
Again, Elite Dangerous is a great example of that, and I have a slide on that later on. We're always looking as well as how else can we expand the game. So we're always looking at platforms. Can we bring it to other platforms, subscriptions, promotions, PDLC? It really is a never-ending way of establishing the long tail for these games which players still want to play. Next slide, Alex, please. And then on this slide, what I've tried to do is just to pictorially map out where we are with our CMSs and our established franchises. I think the two key points on here is it shows that previous success that we've had where titles have generated 100+ million GBP+ in revenue.
And then if you look at the last four on the bottom of the slide, this really shows the present and future and really illustrates that we're going to be releasing a CMS game in the next three years, one major launch a year. I just think it's just a very nice slide to show history, but also a little bit of that immediate future. Alex, over to you, please.
Classic non-muting error there. Sorry about that. You think we'd know from COVID now not to do that. So I'll whiz through this slide. This is a slide we showed back in June when we did the trading update, a nice visual illustration of the share of revenue across the core franchises. So the dotted section there highlights CMS, as Jonny mentioned, 77% of total revenue from the CMS games, and they grew 25% year on year, driven by Planet Coaster 2.
If we look at back catalog and we look at the core franchise back catalog, so that's Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster 1, Jurassic World Evolution 1 and 2, and Planet Zoo, we actually saw growth there, really helped by two things. Elite Dangerous grew year on year, and Planet Zoo, we had a full year of the release on console. But if we look at Jurassic, actually that did really well in the period as well with no new content. PDLC continues to be a core part of our strategy, pretty similar percentage of total revenue, 36% in the year versus 35% in the previous year.
Clearly, with Planet Coaster, as Jonny will talk about again in a minute, we're in the monetization reboot phase, but PDLC is still very important and very core to our strategy. Subscription revenue is an interesting one because actually we had a relatively low percentage. Probably the average over the last few years has been about 10% of revenue coming from subscription deals. We only got 5% compared to 13% in the preceding year. So a couple of positives there. First one is the underlying revenue from excluding subscription deals actually grew 11% year on year. That's a nice positive stat.
And the other thing is if we haven't got subscription deals, particularly with Microsoft in the year just gone, it bodes well for the future. We haven't done a big deal with Microsoft for Planet Zoo on console, Planet Coaster 2 on console. And of course, we have Jurassic coming up shortly. So we do think that we'll get deals in the future. We haven't baked those into the guidance, so they should be upside. And then Elite Dangerous, Jonny will talk about that in a minute, actually delivered, although it's only 7% of revenue, it delivered some nice growth, which we're very happy with.
If we then turn to the cumulative revenue performance chart, this is similar to the one that we showed before. So this shows our core franchises with sequels included on the same line. So if we go in chronological order, starting with Elite Dangerous, which has been out for approaching 11 years now, we can see there towards the end of that orange line, the tick up in the slope of that line. So the team have done a great job with monetization. And again, Jonny will pick that up again in a minute when we talk through the franchises.
Planet Coaster, then the blue line, Planet Coaster 2, that launch was strong, as we talked about at the time. We then had in probably the four to six weeks post-release some challenges, particularly player sentiment. And that's where we've been in recovery mode to some extent with a lot of free updates. So that line continues to grow. What we want to try and do with PDLC and as we approach the holiday season is to tick that line up and deliver some strong revenue from Planet Coaster 2. Next one at the top there, you can see Jurassic World Evolution has done really well.
This chart goes to the end of July. So you can see towards the end of that purple line, the tick up in revenue. We've had a really strong success with promotions over the summer, helped by the movie, which came out in June. So the combination of those two things has delivered a very good result for Jurassic World Evolution 2, and then Planet Zoo is the green line there. So that's a single game, but of course, we brought it onto console in March 2024.
Again, you can see if you look at the slope of the end of that line there. It's ticked up as we've seen really good sales over the summer. We're feeling good about our core franchises from a revenue perspective. Moving on to cash profit perspective, looking at those same core franchises and how much cash profit they've generated over time. This is all revenue, less all costs, so distribution costs, royalty costs, dev costs, marketing costs. On the Jurassic line, this is just one and two, so we haven't layered on the costs for three. Of course, when we've got that game out, then we'll update that chart.
Look at that tick up at the end of the Jurassic line from the sales performance that we've seen. We haven't had any new content for Jurassic World Evolution 2 for a while. So pretty much revenue, less distribution costs, less IP royalties, drop through as a cash profit. So we've seen that strong growth. Same with Planet Zoo towards the end of that period there. Planet Coaster 2 helped us tick up that blue line. And as I said earlier, we're on a recovery journey there with the reboot monetization. So we want that one to grow. And then finally, look at the orange line at the bottom.
We're very pleased on a revenue performance, but look at that cash performance from Elite. That's very encouraging for the future. As I said earlier, 7% of our revenue. We're not saying this is going to suddenly be a 20 million annual revenue stream, but we've grown it up to six if we can kick on and grow that a bit further. It's great return on investment. Okay, Jonny, I'll pass back to you to chat through the franchises.
Yeah, doing a bit of a deeper dive so I know Alex has been going on about the financials, but just to reiterate some of the points, Planet Coaster franchise accounts for 25% of total revenue in FY25, and that was like a 200% growth in the franchise. Again, we are looking at our franchises as these evergreen things that we want to continue to support. Planet Coaster 2 sold 600,000 units in nine months after launch. Again, we need to be very careful that this has been success. Alex uses the term, it's within the bracket of success, but we actually want more, and we want more upside, and this leads us on to this monetization reboot that Alex has been mentioning.
Just before getting to that, I think before we could do that, we really needed to get that sentiment up, and we've achieved that by moving from 41% to 81% on Steam recent reviews. This is really, I guess, this is a very, very important part of Frontier's strategy is we need to listen to our players more. We've always had pride in ourselves that we have collaborated with our community, and to be honest, I think we probably took our finger off the gas, or we need to do it even more because players rightly are being more discerning.
So what we did was we listened, we looked at all the forums, we've talked to our players, and we did six free updates, which was like sort of fixing the things that they wanted to fix, adding the features that they wanted, features that we didn't move across from Planet Coaster 1 to Planet Coaster 2. And it's been a long journey to do that. But what's really nice is to see that sentiment, to see all those anecdotal sort of quotes on YouTube that Frontier is listening. And I think in this market, with all the macro conditions, with all the saturation of the games industry, players are king.
At the end of the day, they're the ones who pay our wages. And we just need to make games which really, really appeal to them. But we've done that, and we've enjoyed it as well. Again, there are learnings from that which are applying to Jurassic World Evolution and our other games. So again, it was really, again, looking at the positives for it. It really reaffirmed what we need to do. We need to be player-centric. Now we're in this position where we announced yesterday that we're going to do a paid downloadable content pack.
This is our start of our monetization reboot. I'm really pleased to say that the response has been fantastic. The players have acknowledged and appreciated all the work that we've done to get us to this stage. They think it's the best paid downloadable pack that we've done. It's going to launch on 16th of September. I hope this is really going to add to the already successful part of the franchise and to move it forward.
So I think it's a really great lesson and really a note to self about focusing on players. You look after the game, and the game will look after you. Probably going into too much detail on that, but again, I think it was a real sea change in how we could enhance that strategic change to CMS. This was the other part of the puzzle, which is looking after our players. Next slide, Alex. So we moved to Planet Zoo. And so when I look at Planet Zoo, yes, it's 25% total revenue, amazing sustain rates, 20 PDLC packs. This is exemplar. When we get it right, this is what all the graphs can look like for our games. I call this our exemplar.
One of the things I want to just talk a little bit about that is our PDLC strategy because I think people just think that on the PDLC, let's launch some coasters, let's release some animals, let's have some more dinosaurs. That's not the whole story. Obviously, we look at what players want in terms of the animals, the coasters, and the dinosaurs, in this case, animals. It really is how do we add more gameplay value with each pay-downloadable content. An example I want to use is the Barnyard Animal Pack. Obviously, we have sheep, pigs, and chickens.
It's what people want. We always add gameplay. This gameplay element is free. In this one, we added animal encounters. This is where players essentially can create a petting zoo and interact with their animals. This was, as I said, free content. But I think there's a synergy here. And when I come to talk about Elite Dangerous, I can talk about that again. But I just want everyone to know that these paid downloadable content packs, these expansion packs, there's a lot of careful design in here. Keep reinvigorating the franchise.
And this, again, means that we have this long tail and these sustain rates. So yeah, it doesn't happen by accident. And it is very gratifying to see players still playing our games. They are very sticky for this reason. Next slide, Alex, please. So Jurassic World Evolution franchise. So again, spookily, it's round about that. Just over 25% of total revenue, again, shows that these CMS franchises do very well. Part of that was Jurassic World Evolution 2. And Alex said that we hadn't done any content for almost 12 months.
But by doing this channel management and these, we call them mega sales, it really did contribute to that financial year. And to me, it shows that people really want dinosaur games. So doing a sale where it's like sort of 14 days and it does over a million units, I think is quite amazing for a game at this part of its life cycle. So the big one, obviously, is Jurassic World Evolution 3. And so we announced that that would be launching on October the 21st, 41 days from now. And we're very, very excited for it. When I look at how the game is performing in terms of player reaction, it's extremely positive.
Why? Because I think this is applying the learnings from Planet Coaster 2. We really have looked at what the players want. We've added those features in. We've made sure that we haven't changed the game, the fundamentals of the game, as much as we did in Planet Coaster. And you just have to look at all the YouTube videos that people are really enjoying, the baby dinosaurs, the greater creativity, the larger global campaign. And of course, Jeff Goldblum reprised in his role as Ian Malcolm. And interestingly, or not interestingly, as I say, as predicted, they are really into the balloon ride that we've asked, which was a feature from a Jurassic game, which was around for 20 years ago.
And one quote was, "I've waited 20 years for a balloon ride. It's a game about dinosaurs, but I get it because, again, it's that legacy." And it's also very nice to look at the path that you've created. So it really is no stone left unturned, looking at what the players want, reacting, selling. Got an amazing community impress event at the end of the month for Secret Cinema. It really is. We're just doing everything we can to make sure this game really succeeds. And yeah, and maybe we'll have some questions on pre-orders later on. And Alex can find a very cryptic way to say that we're encouraged by them.
And then next slide. So Elite Dangerous. So again, I've said it many times. It's really nice to be talking about this game. This is having an established franchise and breathing new life into it. We're adding new content. The players are engaging with that content. We're having this stickiness, but also we're monetizing it with this new content. And I think this is really important to try and get this synergy. We're releasing ships, which you pay for.
Those ships work with some of the new experiences that we're putting in, such as colonization, where you can own your own systems. And I think it was all encapsulated that when we announced this, oh, it must be about 12 months ago. And on our forum, someone said, "pay to win." And then the next post said, "Pay to make the game better." I think this is really important. It's looking after the players, looking after the game, and they can reciprocate by spending their time and their money on the new content that we deliver. So it is a success story, as Alex said, 7% of total revenue, but it's growing.
And it shows that in this world where, as I say, there is so much content out there, we're always fighting for eyeball hours. We know how to really work with our players to maintain the enthusiasm for the games that we make.
Thanks, Jonny. So back to me to talk through some of the numbers. I'm sure everyone's read the RNS already. So we won't talk for too long about these. So we save plenty of time for questions. We've already talked about revenue. So pleased to have grown that revenue up to just over £90 million, £90.6 million. On gross margin percentage, that 70% really reflects the switch to a bigger proportion from own IP having released Planet Coaster 2. As I mentioned earlier, subscription deals are actually a relatively small percentage, so they didn't help us too much. So a lot of that is just the switch to own IP.
Looking at this year, financial 26, I think we talked about in June, my guidance there is probably more like a mid-60s margin, 65%, maybe 66% gross margin, depending on the proportion that we get from Jurassic World Evolution 3. But we are expecting that margin to reduce. On OpEx, then, this is total OpEx, and this is the adjusted profit measure. So this bakes in the benefits from tax credits, but also we've included depreciation because a lot of our depreciation is just the lease cost. So as we talked about in June, we've made some adjustments to the measures, the KPIs that we state.
And this adjusted operating profit measure we think is a good proxy for cash profit. So on that basis, we have a total OpEx in the year of GBP 54. On the old measure, the adjusted EBITDA measure we talked about, sort of a high 50s number. So that's the difference between the two. It's probably three or four million from tax credits net of depreciation. Now, that combination of the revenue growth, strong gross profit margin, and the much more sustainable level of operating costs meant that we had a trading profit before any sale of publishing rights of GBP 9.3.
So a really strong swing there. Almost a GBP 10 million increase from a small trading loss to a strong trading profit. And then on top of that, we had the sale of publishing rights in the year. We had the sale of publishing rights in the previous year as well. So there's a couple there. We're not expecting anything significant in the future from publishing rights. Those ones were related to some of the things we've done with Foundry. So don't bake anything into the future on those things. So really, the comparative number for FY25 on a trading profit basis is that GBP 9.3 million.
Just to make a couple more comments about the reconciliation of adjusted measures. So here you can see the IFRS profit number actually came out very similar to the adjusted op profit number. So 12.7 for IFRS and adjusted op profit at 13.2. Of course, how those arrived at are quite different. We've got the capitalization, amortization of development costs. I've put an orange box around the things that have changed since the old measure, the adjusted EBITDA measure. So as I said, we've baked in the benefits from tax credits, R&D tax credits, and VGTR tax credits there.
And then depreciation charges, we don't adjust out because previously those were removed, but really that's a cash cost of the business. A lot of those are just relating to the lease cost, the building costs that we have. So that's where we get to the 13.2. I'm sure we might have some individual questions on some of those reconciliation items later. And then on cash flow, one of the benefits of that adjusted operating profit measure is it does tend to equate very closely to the cash generation. And of course, with a pretty minimal level of working capital movement in the year, we made GBP 13.2 million of adjusted op profit, and that pretty much flowed through to grow the cash number.
So aside from any working capital changes in the future, if we have a release just before a period end or something like that, we do think that this AOP measure, this adjusted op profit measure, is going to align pretty well with the cash generation. If you rewind a couple of years ago, of course, people were thinking that cash was at risk and we might have to do a fundraise. Of course, we took some action back in financial 2023 and 2024 to optimize the cost base to resize. So it's great now to be talking about such a healthy cash position and to be doing the buyback as well.
I think the buyback is a very sensible thing that benefits everyone for the longer term. We're about, I think we're just over halfway, something like GBP 5.5 million, I think maybe almost GBP 6 million through the GBP 10 million buyback right now. We will clearly have some opportunities to talk about capital allocation post Jurassic World Evolution 3. But if we keep throwing off cash and generating cash, then we've got some interesting opportunities there. We certainly want to make sure that we invest in the business, grow the business.
But right now, Jonny's constructed here a nice clear plan around CMS, and we're busy going off and delivering against that. But the cash in sort of 12 months could give us some options to consider other things, but more to discuss in the future on that. Jonny, back to you.
Yeah, so just trying to wrap up this presentation. So we have that headline there, creating momentum. And I think that's exactly what we're doing. We wind back, as Alex said, three years ago when we had to initiate this reset. And that phase has ended. And now we're in the second phase, which is all about building our business back. Our CMS-focused strategy has achieved significant uplift last financial year. Our established core franchises are strong and delivering. Our roadmap is our strongest ever with Jurassic World Evolution 3 coming out in 41 days and two CMS games for FY27 and 28.
So I'd say we're focused on building sustainable growth with our high-quality player-centric games. We're really excited for the future. Alex has mentioned we have a very clear plan and a team of very passionate people to deliver on it. So yeah, we're feeling very positive for the future.
Okay, thank you, Jonny. So we'll move to questions now. So please pop your hand up, and we'll take questions in turn. Just unmute yourself, turn your camera off. Sorry to ask you to turn your camera off if you like. So I think James Lockyer is first up.
Hi, yes, good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. I've got three, please. So 41 days to go, as you've said a couple of times. Can you talk us about, tell us about those days? What's going to be happening? What are the focus points? And when will you get the first indicators that Jurassic World Evolution 3 is meeting or potentially beating market expectations for that game? Secondly, a sort of financial question. If you are going to one game per year with a three-year cycle, how should we think about D&A and CapEx? Is there a point in time when in-year D&A matches CapEx? Because in theory, things should match if things are that way inclined. And then finally, I've noticed a change to your working hours, Alex. So it'd be good to get a bit of color around that, please.
Thanks, James. So Jonny, do you want to take the first one on Jurassic World Evolution 3?
41 T minus 41 days.
T minus 41.
Yeah. So obviously, the game is nearing completion. Again, we're just doing more and more QA on it, final balancing. Game's gone into submission. We're feeling very confident on the development side. A lot of the work now is on the publishing side. It's really having all these different marketing beats. So we've already talked about this Secret Cinema that we're doing at the end of the month. This is where we're going to get press and influencers to experience Jurassic World Evolution for real. So very excited about that. Obviously, we have lots of paid digital marketing to be done.
I think we're also looking at what the response is to the various videos that we're dropping all the time. So the dinosaurs features, we're doing this lovely set of release beats. And where it's not positive, which again, most of it is positive, we're making sure that we're communicating and selling. So it really is, yes, the business is the business end. And I'm feeling very good from the response from our players. They really do appreciate the listening that we've done. They really do appreciate us going through the top 10 lists and delivering on everything. I still can't believe how much love we got for that balloon ride.
You wouldn't believe it, but I'm just so happy because that's something that we put in after listening to players. And then when we're looking on the pre-orders, obviously, we've got to be very careful what we say. So I might just pass over to Alex to use some CFO language on that. But yeah, I'm encouraged.
Yeah, I think you've used the words encouraged already for the pre-order. So we'll just leave it at that, I think. Second question was about one game per year and depreciation, sorry, amortization, capitalization. Absolutely, James. If we're keeping OpEx at pretty similar levels over time, we'd expect those numbers to equalize. We've flipped from a period where amortization plus impairments was pretty high. And of course, now we're capitalizing costs for the future. But because we wrote off some of those games in the past, the amortization impairments number, or just amortization, is not as big.
So at the moment, we're capitalizing more than we're charging. I think the accelerated amortization that we introduced, I think three or four years ago, helps as well because broadly, within about six months, we've capitalized about 50% of a game's base game capitalization. But yes, over time, we will move towards having those numbers pretty similar, all other things being equal. And then the last question was about the working hours change for myself. So there's some words in the RNS about the executive board that we already talked about previously.
Jonny set that up to really focus very much on developing games, publishing games, and our people. Those are the three key elements of our business. Yvonne, who was previously reporting to me, was promoted up to Chief People Officer. So Yvonne's great, very capable, lots of confidence in her. But it made sense, I think, to have someone report directly to Jonny that looked after our people agenda and our people strategy. So it was just an opportunity for me to consider taking a bit of a step down in working hours.
This doesn't reflect any change in my commitment to the business in any way. As we've talked about, the focus for us, having set the plan a couple of years ago, is delivering on the plan, and the teams are doing that. If we do more complex things and I'm needed, then of course, I'll step in and increase my hours. But for now, certainly the next 12-24 months, it's delivering against that plan, and that enables me to just nudge my hours down a bit.
Great. Thank you, guys.
Will Lahlou next.
Yeah, thanks, guys. Can you hear me?
Yep.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Great. Three from me, please. Just firstly, if you could give a bit more clarity on the guidance. I know that you're expecting sort of growth in FY26, but what does that relate to? Is it revenue, your new Adjusted Operating Profit? Is it cash? And obviously, should we be not including the gain from the sale of publishing rights going forward? So just helpful, just a bit more guidance on that. And then secondly, you sort of shared some details on Complex Games as making a new game. So any sort of details that you can share on that, sort of the size of the investment into that, whether it's going to be licensed IP, this timing around that, that would be really helpful.
And then just, again, a bit of just in terms of the cash balance, and you briefly spoke about it, Alex, but just maybe sort of framing sort of the optionality that you have, whether that's likely to be continuing to repurchase shares or whether that's going to be M&A, just any additional color would be helpful. Thanks.
Okay. I'll probably take all those. So first one was on guidance for FY26. Absolutely. Well, you've called us out on a rather vague statement about growth. We're certainly very confident about growing revenue and growing above the GBP 90.6 for last year. Really want to try and break the GBP 100. We've got great potential to do that with Jurassic World Evolution 3. And as we've talked about, we've had a good summer. I think it's very sensible to keep expectations down for now in the low 90s. We're seeing most people I chatted to last night and this morning positioning numbers around sort of GBP 92 million for revenue, maybe GBP 94 million, that sort of level.
So very comfortable with that. If you look at the comparative period, we have that high gross margin percentage, and we've got the publishing rights. So I think there is definitely potential to grow the Adjusted Operating Profit number. If you take out the publishing rights, as we talked about just now, we have a trading profit number of GBP 9.3 million for last year. I think if we can get to the sort of mid to high 90s, then we can grow from there. If we are at the low 90s, that's more likely to be, I think, sort of six, seven million, something like that.
So we have been a little bit vague about the growth expectations on a profit basis, but clearly very confident of growing revenue. I hope that kind of answers your question there. Second one was about Complex Games. So yeah, this isn't really too much new news. We bought that studio because we like what they've done with Chaos Gate, and they're working on a game. That whole studio is working on one game, and it's a game that will benefit from their previous experience. So don't really want to give too many more clues than that. So release for that is likely to be, I'd say, in the next 12 to 18 months.
And again, don't really want to say too much about the timing for that one, but we'll get to that in a minute. I think it's sensible to most people haven't got much revenue, if any, for that game. So I think it's probably sensible to assume it's a bit of upside. And if you do put it in, I'd put it in not in this financial year, but in the next one. Oh, in terms of scope of budget, that's probably in the sort of high single digits, GBP 5 million-GBP 10 million budget for us. That first game in its first financial year, that was PC only, first 12 months, I think, did about GBP 10 million of revenue on PC. So that's the sort of scale.
It's probably about half a normal Frontier CMS game in terms of sort of budget and revenue expectations, and then your final question there was about cash balance, so we think the buyback has made a lot of sense. We'll continue to complete that buyback. We may well consider doing one next year. Very much want to support the business and probably move to some growth in the future, but for now, we're keeping the OpEx where it is. I think M&A is less likely to be on the cards in the short term. Clearly, we've had a difficult journey with diversification over the last few years, and we're very focused on delivering on the plan.
So the board will be discussing this next summer and considering all the different methods of utilizing cash, maybe giving some cash back. But I think the buyback is quite nice because it gives the optionality to the investor, to the shareholder, to decide what to do. Special dividend takes away that ability for people to choose. And having a dividend policy, I think for us, is too early, right? And I don't really want to get stuck on that dividend, growing dividend train right now. But I probably said more than I should. But we'll get into that discussion with the board and talk to investors about that next year.
Great. Thanks.
Patrick.
Yeah, thanks. A couple of questions for me. If we could start with PC2, you've mentioned the six free updates. And in terms of the first PDLC, do you think the free updates are now sufficient, or do you have to kind of keep that dynamic growing through 2026? You've shown the sort of review scores have improved from it. So do you think you can return to a normal monetization pattern with the Coaster series after that, or is it a bit of a balance? And then secondly, on JW3, you've mentioned encouraging as the sort of pre-orders sentiment. How would you describe the pattern of pre-orders relative to, say, JW2 and any different expectations in terms of the split by platforms than you had on JW2? Thanks.
Okay. Jonny, the first one was about Planet Coaster 2, free updates, and PDLC. Do you want to take that one?
Yeah, absolutely. So you're absolutely right, Patrick. We did six updates and listening. We need to continue to listen. If you look at all the updates, all the PDLC that we do for all our games, there's always a free component. So that's going to continue with Planet Coaster. Now, as I say, I think it's really important to get that experience enhanced on every release that we do. So I think that's just going to be par for the course. Again, not being complacent at all, but I do think we have addressed the major issues, but there's always more to do. And I just think it is, you're right, it's that balance.
We need now to get in the space where we release these expansion packs, players spend some money and buy these great rides and great themes that we're doing. And at the same time, we're going to continually improve the game. And I think that is how you focus on players. So I'm feeling good. A little bit of insight is if it hadn't been so positive last night with all the responses, I would have not been in the happiest moods this morning. But I think by listening to the players, I think we've judged it correctly. And I think this collaboration just feels really good, and we need to do more of it.
Thanks, Jonny. And the second one was about Jurassic World Evolution 3. Yeah, we've used the word encouraging a few times. Patrick, you asked about how's it compared to Jurassic World Evolution 2. It's really hard for us to compare, actually. I'm not trying to dodge the question, but the campaign is very different. It's much longer. So what we tend to see in the shapes of pre-orders is a strong spike, and then it sort of flattens a bit, continues to grow, but then it accelerates upwards, and we see this real ramp-up.
So it's very hard to know where you are with pre-orders until you're pretty much there because the last few days tends to be just the last three days before the release could be 50% of your pre-orders. So it does tend to ramp up pretty quickly towards the end. So yeah, I'm not going to say too much about that other than just to reiterate that we're encouraged.
Can I say one thing?
We're encouraged. Yeah, go on.
I'm not going to do anything. I've stole your thought by using the word encouraged. I just want to take just a little bit of a step back. I guess in the last trading update, we weren't asked about the date shift. I just want to sort of just explain that I think it's working really, really well. Again, I think pre-orders have definitely benefited from the film. The film's obviously done very well at the box office. I think they've also benefited from the big sale of Jurassic World Evolution 2, which had an upsell in as well. So we were allowed to do that. I do think the extra time has meant that we can put even more features in the game, which I think is really resonating very well. Just search on YouTube and see all the love that we have at the moment.
And I also think that launching in October, especially with GTA moving into next year, really puts it in the window that we're very confident that is one of the best windows to launch. So again, sorry for doing a politician's answer and turning your question into someone I wanted to talk about, but I just think it's very important to know that the tactics so far have worked well.
Thank you. Just the last thing was just the split across platforms. Any visibility there?
Yeah. PlayStation has been really strong on pre-orders. We've got some additional featuring there that's helped. PCs always tends to be the biggest platform, but PlayStation's up there. Xbox, as we've seen over the last few years, and this is not a new trend, has been impacted a bit by Game Pass because the average person there, if they're on Game Pass, will be looking to see what they can buy and won't be so engaged with other experiences. I also think that some people are anticipating things being on Game Pass so they don't pre-order. But certainly, PlayStation is strong and PC is strong.
Great. Thank you.
Ross.
Yeah, thanks very much. I'm interested if you could say a little bit more about your expectations for your marketplace over the next two to three years. And within that, what do you think are the major factors? What are the major things that need to happen for that expectation to come true? And then finally, how do you place your expectations against that of third-party commentators on the market? Does that all make sense?
Okay. Yeah, maybe I'll pick it up, and Jonny, you can.
Sure.
Yeah. We do look at the market, and we do look at competition. But not to be complacent, we've always got to be careful. We think the CMS space is a really good sector for us. The really big companies are probably not so interested in games that can make maybe a million units in a year. It's probably not interesting enough for the really big publishers and developers. Smaller publishers and developers would sort of struggle to invest enough and just have the expertise to be successful in this genre. I mean, look at Planet Coaster 2's experience with how much experience we had there, and we had a bit of a misstep.
It's very hard for anyone else to break into it. So as I mentioned at the start, we cannot be complacent, but we feel like we can own this CMS space. We can really deliver a very strong business model. And that's not to say that we don't have to look around at competition and what's going on in the market, but we feel like we just need to get on and deliver here. We are always looking ahead at industry changes and new platforms and talking to everyone all the time. But just delivering premium-priced games in the CMS space on the main platforms and getting subscription deals, we think over the next few years is going to really deliver for us and for shareholders. Jonny, do you want to chip in there as well?
I think you just got the name on my head. We've spent 20 years becoming experts in CMS games, and that gives us an advantage. Again, what I would add to exactly what you said is that we can't be complacent. We need to innovate within our space. We've already with Planet Coaster 2, we needed for it to be even better. We've got it in that place now. Sort of nine months afterwards, we need to make sure that Jurassic World Evolution 3 is much better than 1 and 2. And so you've got to run to standstill in the games industry. But I do think the niche we operated in is hard-fought, and it really underpins our strategy, and we're feeling good about it still.
Yeah, I think some of the trends we've talked about over the last few years have been quite slow to come through. Look at streaming. That was going to be; everyone expected a few years ago that that was going to come through really strongly. We think it will shift over time, but there's still some pretty big technical hurdles there. So I think it's unlikely we will be at the bleeding edge of some of those things. I think we'd be happy to be a second or third follower right now. We're just very focused on delivering with our key partners. Got a great relationship with Steam and Sony and Microsoft and Epic and a bunch of other platforms, and we think that's really going to deliver for us.
Great. Thanks very much.
Sean.
Morning, everyone. Can you hear me and see me?
I can. You're on your phone.
Perfect. I am, yes. Classic issues with Citrix working from home.
Nice.
Three from me if I can. First of all, we touched on the outlook for platform deals. I think you said there were 5% of revenues for the year just gone. Any outlook for what we should expect sort of this year, next year, sort of longer-term trajectories you might expect to see on that side of things? Second of all, given Jurassic World Evolution 3 as well as the PDLC for Planet Coaster 2 launching in the first half of financial year 2026, is there any guide you can give us on what we should expect to see for the revenue weighting H1, H2? And then also, I guess, for the cost base, given I'm assuming that sales and marketing should be a little bit higher in the first half to coincide with that.
Then just finally, Jonny, I think the last time we did one of these calls, you said or you mentioned that Switch 2 would be capable of running some Frontier games, which I believe Switch 1 wasn't. Anything you can share on the relationship with Nintendo and if there's anything in train there? Thank you.
Should we do it in reverse order? Because probably Switch 2 is the more interesting question. Jonny, do you want to go first with Switch?
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. Switch 2, it is a step up, and obviously we've been investigating to see where its performance is. Talking to what Alex has said, and also the previous question, the way I look at it is I want to bring our games to as many people as possible, so we use our engine called Cobra, which is platform agnostic, and that's deliberate so that depending whether the game works on it, depending whether there's an audience for it, we'll bring it across. Can't say much more than that, really, but yeah, I'm a fan of Switch. Jurassic World Evolution 2 has done very well on Switch.
Jurassic World Evolution 1.
One, sorry. Yeah, Jurassic World Evolution 1 Complete. That's done very well. So yeah, always looking to see how we can bring our games to other platforms. And that's not just on Switch 2. Again, streaming services, whatever's around there, I just want players to play our games, have amazing experiences, and then we need to find out how we can monetize it. So a vague answer, but yeah, I am a fan of Nintendo as well as Microsoft and Sony and everyone, really.
Yeah, Jurassic World Evolution 1 on Switch has been a real strong performer for us over time. Initially, the sales weren't massive, but it's just kept plugging away year in, year out. It's doing decent revenue. F1 Manager didn't deliver such a big chunk of revenue, but certainly Jurassic is, and maybe the younger audience on Switch really works with that dinosaur game as well, so going back to the first two questions, the outlook for platform deals, we've got some deals that we've already recognized actually over the summer with PlayStation Plus across a couple of our games.
I think we've got another one to recognize. The bigger amounts tend to come from Microsoft. I mean, the PlayStation deals are nice, but the Game Pass deals tend to be a bit bigger. You might remember we had a nice one for Jurassic World Evolution 2, which is our biggest yet, and F1, we had a nice deal for that as well back in, I think that was financial year 2024, so we've got great potential there.
Can't really say too much more because we don't know until we know, so the platforms always want to plan ahead and really get into the games, and what's encouraging there at Gamescom, we had a bunch of really great meetings about our future games as well as ones that are already out there, so we do think there is good potential, but for now, I would certainly not bake too much into your numbers, and then we can have it as upside, and then you're.
Alex, could I just add one more point on that? It's a reiteration of the point about us moving to this three-year production cycle. The deals are to be had, but as Alex said, I think the platforms want more confidence, and they want to see your games early. Again, this longer development cycle means that we can be presenting things to Microsoft a lot earlier, and that's what we did at Gamescom. So it really is making sure our business adjusts to how Sony and Microsoft want to do things. And I think that's a really strong fringe benefit of our new production cycle.
Yeah, I think going back to a question that I think Ross asked earlier about the market, and we talked about the CMS genre. One of the reasons the platforms like us is not just because they're making decent money, but because these are games which are a little bit different from a lot of games out there. They tend to be a bit calmer, maybe a bit more family-friendly. So having a Jurassic World Evolution 2, as we did in Game Pass, is very appealing to Microsoft. There aren't many games around there that they can put into it. And then, Sean, I think your last question was about sort of phasing half one, half two.
With Jurassic coming on the 21st of October, we are anticipating a nice big launch revenue there. I think if you had about 90 for revenue, I would say sort of a 50 first half, 40 second half split is about right. If you've got 95, obviously, just tweak that a little bit. We do have Christmas in the second half and then building with PDLC. But Jurassic World Evolution 3 in the first half is clearly going to help us quite a lot. Cost base is pretty stable. I mean, there'll be a bit more marketing costs in the first half around the launch compared to the second half.
But then second half, we've got Christmas, and we're continuing to engage with people. So I think simply, I'd probably get your OpEx for the full year and halve it and maybe nudge a bit of marketing towards half one. But apart from that, it's pretty even. Okay, I'm just looking to see whether we have any more questions on the board. Can't see any names. Okay. So thank you very much for your time. Much appreciated. Thanks for joining. I'm sure that we will see some of you in meetings over the next few days to follow up. But if anyone else wants to reach out and have a chat with us about anything, then please do let us know. Thanks for your time.
Thank you, everyone.