I'm Alex Bevis, CFO, and Jo Cooke, CEO, myself, will take you through today's trading update. We'll probably whiz through the slides fairly quickly, so we've got plenty of time for questions. If you could turn your cameras off and mute yourselves, please, during the call, and then we'll have time for Q&A at the end. Thank you. Here's the agenda for today. I'll chat a little bit about the financial results. Hopefully, you've all seen the RNS this morning. Great to have record numbers. Jo will talk about current games, future games as well, some strategy and focus areas that we're looking at, and then we'll wrap up with current trading. On the numbers, as I said, hopefully you've had a chance to read the RNS already. Delighted with those results.
Our second highest ever revenue, considering where we came from just a few years ago, that's an amazing result. Our highest ever adjusted op profit at around GBP 19 million. We had a series of upgrades during the year, and we're able to confirm now that is our highest ever performance. Actually beat financial year 2019, which was the launch of Jurassic World Evolution 1. We had a much lower cost base back in that year. Really pleased to have turned the business around in the last few years and to have delivered a record profit and record cash generation as well. If you exclude the investments that we've put into share acquisitions, we generated pretty similar number to the profit, around GBP 19 million of cash. A great set of financial results. A little bit more detail here.
You can see for this presentation, we've put a pro forma income statement together to show you how those adjusted numbers fall through. We'll talk a bit about, or Jo will talk a bit about the revenue breakdown, but obviously delighted with Jurassic World Evolution 3, which was a real driver of that strong growth year-over-year. On gross profit, as I think you probably all know, because we have IP royalties to pay, our gross profit margin tends to vary between 60%-70%. We record gross revenue, which means effectively it's the retail price that we would be charging on Steam or Microsoft or Xbox, for example. With a deduction, typically on Steam, all those consoles of about 30% for an own IP game, we'd be recording about a 70% gross profit margin.
When we have a licensed game like we do with Jurassic World Evolution 3, that gross margin would probably be more like low 60%s, maybe 60% margin. You'll see here we have reduced gross margin year-over-year, but that's because of that success of Jurassic World Evolution 3 and the royalties that comes with that. As we look to FY 2027, which has just started, we've got another licensed IP game in Warhammer, but we also have Planet Zoo 2, which is own IP. We should see that gross profit margin increase back up to the high 60%s again. On gross operating costs, this is essentially payroll costs, marketing costs, IT, facilities costs. There's no amortization of costs or capitalization or amortization of those dev costs. Because we went through that reorganization a few years ago, we're continuing to be cautious on costs.
We've only increased by 3% year-on-year to GBP 62 million of gross operating costs. A big highlight for us this year was on tax credits. We've always benefited from Video Games Tax Relief, which has helped us over the years, and generally, we've received maybe GBP 5 million-GBP 6 million per year. A new regime has come in called Video Games Expenditure Credit, and the big benefit for us there is we get a deductible on the IP royalties, and that wasn't allowable before under VGTR. That's helped us in FY 2026, particularly because of the success of Jurassic World Evolution 3. Now some of that GBP 10.7 million number there is a bit of a catch-up from prior years as well.
You'll see in the guidance in the RNS, we've talked about some of this benefit being transitory as we move from regimes, there will also be a permanent difference, we are expecting higher tax credits as we go into FY 2027, probably between GBP 8 million-GBP 9 million. A nice increase versus the sort of GBP 6 million that we would have had in previous years. Other operating income for FY 2026 there is from the sublet of our ground floor. We've got a tenant in our building now. The prior year number is actually the sale of publishing rights of GBP 3.9 million. We had a couple of years where we sold some of the publishing rights for some of the Foundry games.
All of that means that we drop through there to a nice adjusted op profit of 19% and 18% profit margin when you look at the revenue number, and we close cash, as you know, at GBP 44 million. Moving on to cash flow, as I said, GBP 44 million for the closing cash. The adjusted op profit number does move through quite nicely to the cash movement. Adjusted op profit there of GBP 19 million would have essentially got us over GBP 60 million of cash. We decided, I think quite sensibly, to do a share buyback. We did two share buyback programs in the year. We also bought recently some shares in EBT, the Employee Benefit Trust. Even after those substantial investments, we still closed cash up year-on-year at GBP 44 million. Yeah, very pleased with that result.
Okay, I will pass over to Jo now to talk a little bit more about current games, future games, and the strategy.
Thanks, Alex. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. You can see from this chart, we've compared last year's split across our franchises that our revenue from CMS games has grown by 34%, now accounts for just under 90% of our revenue, which shows we're absolutely committed to the CMS genre. A big contributor to this has been Jurassic World, which has delivered revenue of GBP 46 million this year in the last year. Our CMS franchises, they've all performed well. Planet Zoo has continued to deliver a strong performance despite having no new content. We've got Planet Zoo coming up in this fiscal year, which I'll talk about shortly. Planet Coaster 2, despite its bumpy start, is now performing well. Sentiment continues to grow. We now have a very positive recent review score on Steam, and we're continuing to support Planet Coaster 2 with updates and PDLC.
Finally, Elite Dangerous. The changes in monetization is continuing to work well with more ships and updates planned for this year. If we go on to the next chart. This is our franchise revenue performance chart. When you look at the revenue performance, you can see how each franchise performs overall. JWE as a franchise is our highest revenue earner. Excluding subscription deals, JWE actually overtook JWE 2, JWE 3 actually overtook JWE 2 in revenue over an equivalent period by the end of the last fiscal year. Last week, it was released on Game Pass, where we saw the highest recorded download for the game. Planet Coaster on this chart, you can see it's our second performing franchise, actually it's only released one game so far.
We've got really high hopes and high expectations for this franchise with the launch of Planet Zoo later on this year. Go to the next slide, thanks. Alex? [inaudible]. If you go back. Thank you.
Sorry.
It's all right.
It's terrible incompetence.
This gives you a lot more detail around each franchise. JWE is the franchise with the most releases to date. It continues to deliver for us, and sentiment remains really high at 93% on Steam. We've sold 1.2 million units to date, delivering revenue of GBP 46 million, as I said. Oh, some fun facts. I know everybody likes those. Since launch, 638,000 guests have been killed by T-rexes in JWE 3, and 140 million dinos have been released from the hatchery. Our players have been really enjoying diving into that game. Planet Zoo has continued to deliver for us with a really strong performance, and that is with no additional content in the year, with a sustain rate of 76%, which makes us very excited about Planet Zoo 2, which I'll talk about shortly in more detail. Planet Coaster, as I mentioned earlier, continues to grow.
We've invested in improvements and updates and now sentiment has improved. We have started to deliver PDLC, and generate more revenue. We're going to continue to do that throughout the year. We'll be continuing to release more updates, more content, more PDLC. Importantly, all our games will be supported by a roadmap of updates and PDLC, which I'm going to talk about shortly. If we move on to the future games. There, thank you. Planet Zoo 2. This has had a really good start since we went into pre-orders earlier this month. It's been described as a major leap forward, which honestly, really is. Many people have commented that it exceeds expectations and will deliver those long-requested features. We've included aquatics and flying species, which people have asked for. Last weekend we showed the first gameplay and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.
I'll share a few quotes if you haven't been able to look at all the various different social platforms. Around the quality and realism of the animals, which is a really big feature for us, the behaviors and the fidelity. People are saying it's absolutely stunning, incredibly detailed, beyond anything they've ever witnessed in terms of animals. It really is a true sequel, a generational leap. People are talking about this being more promising than their wildest dreams. Water physics, aquatics, some of the best-looking water in video games. We're really, really pleased with this response. We do have a jam-packed marketing campaign that will build on all this excitement up to launch and keep revealing more about the game. Our second game for FY 2027 is Chaos Gate: Deathwatch, which is a sequel to Chaos Gate.
We announced the sequel at Skulls, which is the Warhammer event last month, and that caused a lot of excitement with our Warhammer players. Fans of Warhammer 40,000 are particularly drawn to Deathwatch, and it's got tactical style of warfare and customization options. We expect this release to have really strong appeal among Warhammer players, and it seems to be a big year for Warhammer. We're seeing a lot of excitement around this game. We've also announced today that we have a new owned IP CMS franchise. That's a new franchise that we'll be able to build on with future games, and we will continue our commitment to one new CMS game every financial year, and you'll see that as we're involved. I wanted to touch a bit on strategy and the focus areas that we're really going to focus on.
I have talked a lot in previous calls about our player-first strategy. We will continue to nurture our games. It's clear to us that nurturing our titles with content is the way forward and delivers the right content to the right players. We have to listen to our players and understand what they want, and that will increase engagement and retention for longer. I'll talk about players in a couple of minutes. Our CMS strategy is working. We want to build on this with a new IP, and the new Planet franchise that we just announced will really help that, as well as growing all our other franchises with new games. Our proprietary Cobra Engine and related technologies give us a unique position.
What they enable us to do is to create CMS games that offer players a lot more creative freedom, and we see this in the variety and the complexity of our player creation shared through Frontier Workshop across all our CMS games. We continue to invest in all our people to retain them, and to invest in them. This recent EBT share purchase is a really good example of that. We want our people to be able to share in our success. We also see the value in growing our talent, so we continue with our graduate program. That's really important for us to build expertise from the ground up. Now, let's talk about Planet Zoo. If you move on. Thank you. We thought you'd really like this chart. People often ask us-
The one-
Sorry? Okay. Yeah. Planet Zoo. I wanted to show you this chart. People often ask us, "What's the split between the PDLC and your long-term revenue?" Planet Zoo is a really good example of why it's so important for us to nurture our games to sustain revenue and engagement over a long period of time. When we get this right, our PDLC creates a compound effect across all our portfolio. It builds on the success of the game, but it also delivers more players and more revenue over time. As you can see from this chart, this is Planet Zoo, our most successful game to date. The base game sales have continued to grow through careful discounting and sales promotions, but at the same time, PDLC revenue is growing.
You can see it represents 45% of total revenue to date. This is really important insight into our player behavior. I wanted to share some more insights into our player base. We have identified over 6 million players on PC, Steam. This doesn't include console, but consider it a proxy for our wider player base. 6 million players on PC who own at least two of our CMS games or own one of our games but have bought over 50% of all available PDLC. Actually, in that group, over 1 million of those players meet both criteria. Interestingly, almost two-thirds of that 6 million players own games across multiple franchises. For example, they might own a Zoo and a JWE game or a Planet Coaster and a Planet Zoo game.
That shows the value of our CMS strategy to attract and retain players. We own our players here, and we work really closely with them to make sure we're delivering content that is engaging enough for them to want to play our other games. With our largest single cohort of the 6 million I mentioned owning at least two of our games, we really feel that that is a great basis for us to continue to engage with those players in the future. Our most engaged players are early adopters. They buy within 90 days of launch, and that is about over 10% of that 6 million that I'm talking about. They continue to play the game and buy PDLC throughout its life cycle. I wanted to talk a bit more about PDLC and content. If you go to the next slide, Alex. Thanks.
This slide shows our PDLC for Planet Zoo. It also shows Jurassic World Evolution. We approach each game slightly differently, and we look to see what kind of content our players want. What this is really showing us is that expansions are really important. The chart shows the impact of two expansions that we did for JWE 2. Those expansions generally typically generate about two and a half to three times more revenue than standard content updates. Importantly, they also help to bring people back in the game and they increase MAU. In the past couple of months, we've established a dedicated internal nurture team. Their focus is on long-tail content across all our games. They're made up of a combination of developers, publishing folk, commercial, and finance people.
They are working to determine the best time to release content, what kind of content to create, what allows us to retain and grow our players, whether we need to do an expansion, when we do that expansion. All our content, all our feature packs. It's definitely worth noting that in this fiscal year 2027, we'll be doubling the number of total releases. That's total releases across all different types of content, including our new games, compared to fiscal year 2026. A combination of new games, expansions, content, and feature packs and ships, and we'll be supporting all our games doing that. I'm just going to hand you back to Alex, who's going to talk more about numbers and the outlook forward.
Thanks, Jo. As you've seen in the RNS, we've had a strong start to the new financial year that began on the 1st of June. Jurassic World Evolution 3 came to Game Pass on the 2nd of June, and that monetizes with a fixed amount of money that we get, and we recognize that at the start. That's how that revenue get recognized. That's beneficial for this financial year, for FY 2027. We're going to build on all five of our franchises, as Jo's explained. Jurassic World Evolution 3, we'll see new content. We've got the Rebirth Expansion Pack coming next week. We've got a roadmap of updates, both free and paid updates, coming during the year. Planet Coaster 2 also has PDLC coming. We've got something to announce quite soon on that.
Elite Dangerous, the ship monetization has been really successful, you can expect that to continue. On the other two franchises, we have brand-new games. Planet Zoo franchise, we'll see Planet Zoo 2, and for Chaos Gate we have a brand-new game there. The board are encouraged by the reaction to the announcements of those two games, in terms of guidance, we've just said we're happy with the numbers out there. We're happy that we're going to be able to deliver in line with expectations. Back to you, Jo, for a wrap-up.
Just a quick summary. Our CMS strategy is working. We're keeping to the genre. It's enabling us to grow a player base that we can excite and retain with new franchises and new content. All our franchises are going to be supported with content in FY 2027 and moving forward, we continue to build our portfolio with one CMS game a year and creating new CMS franchises in the future, starting with FY 2028. We're really excited about the future, and we hope that that has encouraged you as well.
Thank you, Jo. We'll move to Q&A now. If you have a question, just click the hand up button, we'll do them in order. James Lockyer, we'll start with you, please.
Hi. Good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Two questions from me. Just on the new Planet game, it'd be good to remind us how you go about thinking about what to do for new franchises. Is it a case of you look at the community and see what they're asking for? Is there a gap in the market that you're seeing? A type of game that was released a few years ago, there's a gap now. Just remind us how you're thinking about that and when it comes to the marketing for that, how are you going to be-
Yeah
pushing that out to the community? The second question is on capital allocation. Obviously, you ended the year with a decent chunk of cash. I know you did a buyback last year, but just how are you thinking about that over the next 12- 14 months? Thank you.
I'm just going to jump in there on the first one because I think James is going on a little bit of a fishing expedition there. I think we're going to be very cautious how we answer that. We are enjoying the speculation and encouraging the speculation, Jo, do you want to say anything more without saying anything?
I want to talk about CMS games, that's actually our starting point. As I've talked about the players that we have, we look to see what's the size overall of CMS games, and we also look at affinity titles of what our current players, what are the titles that they're playing. We're looking across data that we can get from Steam, and we're looking wider than that. We start with the basis of CMS. We'll also look at our portfolio to see whether there are gaps and what that looks like in terms of complexity, in terms of maybe something that's more broadstream. Between that, we then work out where we think we have what we call a continuum of our audience, where we hope that we can move them across our games.
We have looked with this particular game, and we've seen where we think it best fits, then we look at what we would say are the extended audiences in that particular genre outside of CMS. It's a combination of the content matter and the CMS audience, and a combination of where that fits in our portfolio. Just to answer James's question about marketing, we have an audience that we can market to, then we look at the affinity audiences to acquire new players, and we look at competitive audiences to acquire players from there. It's a much of building a different group of cohorts that then we can target slightly differently each time.
Thanks, Jo. Hopefully, that hasn't answered the question at all. There's some useful information in there. We want people to keep guessing. Second question was about capital allocation. I think the share buyback was a very sensible thing to do. As you saw, if we hadn't have done the investment in our shares there, we would've been sitting with over GBP 60 million of cash. We are going to be investing cautiously in a few areas. We are increasing headcount a little bit. We need to make sure we can support the future roadmap, we will see operating costs probably move up a little bit, not just inflationary, but we are hiring a few people as well. We are exploring opportunities for expanding our IP, maybe some co-dev. We're not going to be going back into the sort of foundry model.
Clearly, that third-party publishing model didn't work out well for us. We're going to be careful, but we do see a few areas where we might be able to invest. Having said that, we clearly have a lot of cash on the balance sheet, you can probably expect us to be looking at more share buybacks. Likely that we will get through to post results in September and the AGM. We need to renew the authority there. I think share buybacks probably in maybe the second half of the financial year, or certainly in the sort of end of the first half. Will, up next, please
Thanks very much. Firstly, just wondering if you could give us a sense of pre-orders on "Planet Zoo 2." Obviously, no, you don't have to give us a number, but just relative to prior releases, how that might be tracking. Then secondly, Jo, you talked about expansions becoming more important or featuring greater. Just interested in the cost differential versus standard PDLC and is that already in-- I know, Alex, you spoke about it briefly just then, but already in budgets. I guess you talked about double the amount of content in FY2027 relative to 2026. Do you expect that sort of cadence to continue into FY2028 as well for the existing games?
Starting with pre-orders, again, look, I don't want to say too much. The bland statement we've put is that the board are encouraged or pleased or something in the RNS. Pre-orders, we've got a lot of history of pre-orders, so we kind of know what the curves look like. We are tracking it closely. Yeah, we don't have too much more to say other than to say, we're encouraged with the early sense. The big pre-order push normally comes in the last week. Sometimes it's the last three days. You tend to see a spike at the top, pre-orders goes fairly flat and then a very big spike just before, when people actually realize there's an advantage to pre-ordering at that point because they might get some additional content.
On the expansions, and some of the resource that we're putting in place, will support that additional content. For "Planet Coaster 2," we're sort of transitioning from lots of free updates into paid updates, so there's less of a need to increase the team there. It's more a move from free content to paid content, b ut yes, certainly the expansions are bigger. If you looked at the Rebirth video, you can see the scope for that is a lot bigger than it would've been for a pack of maybe three dinosaurs with some scenery. There is a bigger investment, but the return on investment actually percentage-wise is very strong there. I don't think the players won't be ready for an expansion every quarter or every month. Having that mixture on the chart that Jo showed, I think makes a lot of sense.
A mixture of smaller packs and expansions. I think your final one was, are we going to keep this content going? Well, absolutely, when it makes sense. Normally, the ROI over time on these things tends to move down a little bit. You sort of see that on the chart earlier with the "Planet Zoo 1" PDLC packs. At some point it makes sense to move on to other things. Often it's more of an opportunity cost looking at the internal people and what else we could do with them. For a Planet game, I certainly think three years is a normal sort of level of PDLC for the Jurassic games. Because of the tick of the games and the films, it's probably a little bit shorter, but that sort of period. Sean, you're up next.
Morning, everyone. Thank you for taking questions. I've got three if I can. First of all, totally makes sense to be focusing more on longer lifecycle PDLC, sort of monetize the back catalog a bit more strategy. Have you got any targets you're willing to give as to where you would like to get the sustain rate for sort of the longer tail of the games? Appreciate it's going to move around a little bit in the year after a major release, but longer tail, where would you like to get to? Secondly, I've had a look at some of your trademarks. I think there's been some speculation on social media as to what the next game could be. I know you won't give me any specifics, but you have got some focused on sports out there. Just wondering if you still think that's an attractive area post-F1 Manager.
Thirdly, Alex, you touched on potential to expand IP and going to co-dev. Is there anything more you're able to share on that?
Okay. A bit more fishing, I think. On the first one there, on the long life of PDLCs and sustain rates, our sort of best sustain rates tend to have been probably on Zoo, I would say. Where if you exclude the platform changes, because the first one, of course, we brought to PC, then we came to console later. If you just look at the performance on PC, at times we've got a 90% sustain rate, so that means it's only declined 10% year-on-year. I think 80% is a very solid performance. We tend to, with the shape of the revenue curves, see quite a big step down from the launch year to the second year, particularly for maybe a Jurassic game.
Think back to "Jurassic World Evolution 1" where we delivered something like GBP 70 million in the first year and it dropped to, I think, GBP 25 million in the second year, it sustained quite nicely at that sort of level. It depends on the franchise. I think an 80% sustain for us is a good performance. 90% is terrific. If it drops to 60% or 70%, normally that's because we've stopped supporting with content and that's where I think Jo mentioned that the sustain rate for "Planet Zoo 1" was really strong. I think you said 77%, Jo?
Yeah.
We haven't done any new content for that game for a couple of years. I think the excitement around Planet Zoo 2 probably helped with that one. On the trademarks, you're right. There's been a lot of speculation on Reddit and other forums because people can see what we've trademarked in the past and maybe what we've trademarked more recently. On sports, I don't have anything to say about that. There's a list of trademarks and the game in the future may or may not be one of those, but I don't have anything else to talk about on that one. Expanding the IP. Mobile potentially, Netflix, streaming services, there are a few opportunities that are coming up. We're cautious, but I think we do need to invest in expanding outside of maybe always just having premium price game on PC plus console.
There's an opportunity to get more value from our IP, I think, beyond those things. Jo, I don't know whether you want to say anything more on that.
Also, as well as revenue opportunities, it's an opportunity to reach new I've talked about nursery slopes before, new audiences, bringing them into the ecosystem of all our games. We've got to look outwards. In some of these cases, this will be a marketing opportunity, and in some cases it'll be a revenue opportunity. We're looking outside to see where we can expand our IP into other platforms.
Thanks, Jo. I'm just looking down the list. Anyone want to ask another question on our record numbers and exciting future? I'll give it a couple more seconds. No more questions. Thank you very much everyone for your time, and if you do think of anything, please feel free to reach out. If you haven't signed up already, sign up to the email distribution and you can get regular updates as we report news and results. Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, everyone