Morning, everybody, and welcome to this 5th Planet Games investor update call. It's great that you were able to join us this morning. It's still early in the year, so it's totally fine, I think, for me to wish you all a Happy New Year. I think most of you have been on these calls before, so hopefully most of you recognize me, but I'm Mark Stanger, and I serve as CEO of 5th Planet Games.
Hopefully, this slide won't be the most exciting or the most interesting slide that we present to you this morning, but it is a legal requirement that we present our disclaimer notice, so that's what you have here. It does, however, serve as a reminder for me to mention that this presentation and the other decks that you're going to see this morning are going to be available from the 5th Planet Games website in the hours after the show. We'll get them uploaded there as soon as we can, and you'll be able to visit the site and view the presentations again and indeed download them.
So this is the agenda that I've pulled together for this morning's meeting. I'm going to start off in a couple of minutes by going through two slides, and in those two slides, I aim to convey my sense of where we are as a business today. Then the second slide is some thoughts on where we go from here and how we move forward from here. I'm then going to hand over to my colleague, Chris Paulson.
Chris is going to talk in detail about Invincible and The Walking Dead, two brands and two games that 5th Planet Games has made significant investments in in recent weeks, and hopefully Chris's presentation will help you understand why we made those investments, and then we round out by a feature that we haven't done before. This will be the first time that we've done a Q&A with the 5th Planet Games board, and that'll be hosted by Hannah Cosgrove, so that's the agenda that we've got for you this morning, so in terms of where we are today as a business, this is where my thoughts have summarized, and they're summarized on three things. One is that we're now profitable.
We're routinely profitable as a business. We've been able to report a profit every quarter since Q3 of 2022. Beyond that, we're increasingly profitable. When I look back on the year ending Q3 of 2024, which was the last set of results that we published, we came out of that period, that year-to-date ending Q3, with an EBITDA profit cumulative of DKK 3.2 million. When I compare that with the same period the previous year, the first nine months of 2023, we achieved an EBITDA profit of DKK 1.7 million. Routinely profitable and increasingly profitable as a business.
How have we done that? I mean, in simple terms, we've done that by making the business more diverse than it's ever been before. As a direct result of that, we're more commercially robust than we've ever been before. In terms of diversification, we've significantly diversified the product portfolio. We've taken the product portfolio from only being mobile games some time ago to now routinely publishing on console games for all viable global platforms. More recently, we've added physical distribution capabilities to our mix in terms of our recent partnership with Nordisk.
And then more recently again, we've stepped out of the realm of video games and into TV and film with our investment in Sagafilm in Iceland. And what I can say is that right now, both myself and the board are looking at a number of other strategic opportunities which will continue to diversify the company and continue to give us potential for ongoing growth. As a result of all of that, I feel that we've come out of this post-COVID period in pretty good shape compared to a lot of our competitors.
It's been really well reported that the period coming out of coronavirus has been very challenging for a lot of companies in the video game sector, both developers and publishers. By contrast to that, when you look back at the top of this slide, you'll see we've been routinely profitable, and we've been growing significantly as a business. And I don't want to lose sight of that. In that respect, we've been kind of going against the tide of this period coming out of coronavirus and bucking the trend, and I'm very proud of that. Okay, so in this slide, I've identified my core thoughts on where we go from here as a business and some of the principles around that go forward thinking.
And the first point there I hope to never lose sight of, and that is at all times to run a profitable business. We now find ourselves in a position where we're routinely reporting profits, and we're showing growing profits on an ongoing basis, and that's great, but I never want to lose sight of that. That will always be somewhere near the very top of my list of priorities in terms of our go forward. I actively want to stay a light and agile publishing and investment entity, and the reason that I want to do that is because when these opportunities present themselves, I want to be able to react quickly.
J ump onto an opportunity when it comes along, and in that, I'm always looking to give 5th Planet Games the opportunity to punch above its weight, to use a boxing expression, to align itself, to invest in opportunities that on the face of it seem bigger than 5th Planet Games. And that's actually what I've asked Chris to come along and talk about with the work that he's doing around Invincible and The Walking Dead, and we'll come to that in a few minutes. But just to say that we're reviewing a number of opportunities, that will allow us to continue to grow and give us new opportunities to grow. And we'll be talking more about those in the coming weeks and the coming months.
All of that, in some way, has to support a growing catalog of high-quality content. And at the top of that, our desire to find games, to continue to find games of the very highest quality that we can, games from the best development studios, not just nationally or regionally, but globally. And that doesn't always mean long-established games development teams. That can be new teams that we feel are doing something really compelling, games that we can publish across the broadest range of platforms because that in itself helps to mitigate some of the inherent risk of games publishing.
And for me, the most important factor of all is finding these publishing investment opportunities that allow us to align ourselves with the biggest, most proven, most commercially successful IPs, not just in the world of video games, but in the world of entertainment. So with that in mind, that's a perfect cue for me to introduce Chris Paulson from Skybound, who's going to talk more about the work that his team have been doing around two key brands and the games associated with them. I'll hand over to Chris.
Thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here. As Mark mentioned, I'm Chris Paulson, our EVP and General Manager of Skybound's game division. I've been with Skybound since early last year, and I'm very excited to share a little bit of what we've been up to. I come to Skybound by way of Activision Blizzard, now part of Microsoft's Xbox division and the largest game publisher in the world. In my nearly 10 years at Activision Blizzard, I had the pleasure of working on some of the biggest games franchises in the world and have watched the games industry evolve dramatically in that time.
I've been involved with shipping some incredibly successful games, and I am absolutely convinced we can replicate that success at Skybound. So who is Skybound? Skybound is made of our IPs, some of the best in entertainment, and I'm going to talk about some of those today. We have created enduring franchises that have achieved great success in comics, film, television, and games. And unlike most other companies, we own all of the aspects and control all of the aspects of the life cycle of the IP. And I think games are a critical part of bringing great IP to fans in today's world.
I want to share a little bit of information on our most important franchises that explain why we are investing to continue to make great games. I'd like to start with our team. In addition to our fantastic retail distribution team, this last year, we have endeavored to transform Skybound's game publishing to a world-class development and publishing organization. Starting with our development team, Patrick Gilmore, our Head of Production, was focused on building an internal studio with the experience to build AAA games; Mike Willette, who is our Executive Producer, was the lead developer on the team behind one of the great fighting games of all time, Killer Instinct, and one of the best-regarded modern fighting games.
Double Helix was acquired by Amazon Games and worked for several years on the very successful New World MMO. I started with Skybound, as I said last year, and have brought in a hand-selected team that I've worked with in the past. We have led the publishing and marketing efforts behind some of the biggest hits in games: Call of Duty, Destiny, World of Warcraft, Skylanders. This core of the publishing team is the best of the team that shipped Diablo IV in 2023, which has now exceeded $1 billion in revenue. First, I'd like to start with The Walking Dead. We have the blockbuster comics that have sold more than 45 million copies, and it translated into the most-watched cable TV show ever created, and it's still on the top of mind of fans today.
The Walking Dead is the most successful original franchise created in this century, and it's still highly relevant amongst fans and building a new fan base. The Walking Dead is the most-watched cable TV show ever created, and its spinoffs have been continued to thrive on cable. But most importantly right now, it's the last year, the number one most-watched serialized show on Netflix globally. That means that people are re-experiencing the original franchise, but also critically bringing many new fans into the franchise. This year, we will surpass 1.3 billion hours viewed. Critically, where gaming comes in, The Walking Dead brand has generated over $1 billion in consumer revenue.
The Telltale series is one of the key highlights of that success. The series has sold millions of units worldwide, won several Game of the Year awards, and is on the best games of the 2010s lists. Fans of the Telltale The Walking Dead series are really the primary group of Skybound Games fans right now. They're highly engaged, and "When is the next season?" is one of their most common questions. We are actively working on several Walking Dead projects. I think this franchise, because of the success and the re-emergence of the show, is in a great opportunity to bring new Walking Dead game content to players. We don't have anything that we can share today, but we will be sharing more and announcing publicly some new projects soon.
Now I'd like to talk a bit about Invincible. Invincible is our latest smash success, but it comes from 15 years of development, so we started with Invincible as a comics giant, and over 15 years, it has evolved into one of streaming's most-watched shows. In fact, season three of the show is coming to Amazon Prime Video on February 6th this year, and the show is a big part of why we think we can build a great game company too. It shows that our fans respond to incredibly high-quality content.
The Walking Dead show, or sorry, the Invincible show, is one of the best superhero series on TV, is certified fresh Rotten Tomatoes with 100% and has won several awards. It's really a genre-defining animated series, and critics, fans, and partners agree, and this fresh take on the animated genre has given the franchise great momentum beyond the comic book origins. We are the number one most-watched show on 104 countries at season two launch, and we have seen tremendous growth from season one to season two, more than a 50% increase in viewership. We're with season three coming next month, we hope to see the same, and it was the number seventh most viewed show out of 36,000 series across streaming and linear TV, so one of the most popular shows in the world.
The audience is young and growing, and this is incredibly important for games. In our core demographic of men 18 to 34, Invincible is the number six most-watched TV show on streaming, and it has seen significant growth in that demographic of more than 70% from season one to season two. This has created great success for Amazon and for the business. During the launch year, we were Amazon's number one revenue producer. Since the launch of the show, Parrot Analytics estimates that we have delivered more than $450 million of top-line revenue. As I mentioned before, the audiences are very attractive and skew young. It's a diverse mix of male and female viewers and very strong in Gen Z, which is the future of where games will be.
Those audiences, because they're so popular among that generation, are also highly engaged. We have over two million followers on Invincible's social handles, and on TikTok, Invincible is one of the most popular shows on the platform, gaining over 6.5 billion views, which is five times more than competitive shows and comparable to the entire Lord of the Rings franchise, so this shows that the Invincible brand really resonates with a young, passionate, engaged audience, which is a perfect place to launch a game into because those players are going to talk about how the product to their friends, and when you look at the Invincible show audience, they are four times more likely to identify as a gamer than the typical TV show fan. As I said, this audience is highly engaged in the vocal, so we have thousands of interactions with players that say they want a game.
We have a project in the works right now that is going to directly answer their request, and we're planning to announce this one very soon, so stay tuned. The last IP I'd like to highlight is Impact Winter. Impact Winter is earlier in the life cycle than the two that I talked about before, but we believe it can be the next big Skybound hit. This Impact Winter was the most listened-to narrative podcast ever created and the number one bestseller on Audible, whose characters and settings were transformed into a hit comic series. We are in active discussions with partners and in on both TV, film, and game side, and we are actively in early development on game ideas. Thank you for taking the time to learn a little bit more about Skybound Games, and I'm very excited to, for the future, so thank you.
Okay, thank you for that, Chris. That was a really good update. Appreciate that. The next part of the call is going to be a Q&A session with the 5th Planet Games Board. And as far as I know, this is the first time that we've been able to do one of these Q&A sessions. We have members of the board spread geographically. We've been able to get them together for the next 20-25 minutes to undertake this Q&A with us.
The session is going to be hosted by Hannah Cosgrove, who's head of corporate communications at Skybound. What I did want to say is that any questions being submitted in advance of the call, all of them will get an answer from me. So if your question isn't raised by Hannah to the board in this session, you can look out for an answer to that question coming directly from me, let's say in the next week or so after this call goes out. So look out for that. But for now, I'll hand you over to Hannah.
Hi everyone. My name is Hannah Cosgrove. I'm the head of corporate communications for Skybound, and today I will be hosting the investor Q&A. Thank you to all who pre-wrote questions in. We'll be addressing them today with our panel, Skybound CEO David Alpert, Skybound Co-Chairman Jon Goldman, and 5PG board members Henrik Nielsen and Søren Jensen.
So with that, I will just start right into the Q&A, and Jon and DA, I will direct the first question to you too. It's the start of the year. How do you feel about 2025 from a Skybound perspective? What are we looking forward to?
I would say that, 2025 looks pretty awesome for Skybound. You know, what we have seen is that, one, at the end of 2023 and 2024, that Walking Dead was still a top three show globally around the world on Netflix. So a show that's been around for, at this point, 14 going on 15 years is still one of the three most popular shows in the world. We think that's hugely important and valuable for us as we sort of continue to mine, and commercialize the Walking Dead and the Walking Dead opportunities in other mediums.
In addition to that, in about a month, we have season three of Invincible come out, and all the information that we've seen about Invincible is that it's been the number one show in over 100 countries around the world. Season three, at this point, seems to be even more, tracking with even more enthusiasm and optimism with the audience. We're really looking forward to having a massive year for both Walking Dead and Invincible, and there's a tremendous number of opportunities and new projects coming down the pipeline. We really feel pretty great about what 2025 brings.
Yeah, I'd just add to that a little bit. Last year was a sort of blowout year for both our comics business and our TV business in general, not just the hit shows DA is talking about. We're producing shows all over the world, including in the Nordics and Japan. And our comics business doubled, including with amazing partnership with Hasbro.
And I'd say the other thing I'm really excited about for the future is the upleveling of the executive bench at Skybound that we brought in. Great CFO, great head of corporate development, built a great video game publishing team that will be a direct benefit for 5PG as well. So just a lot of building has gone into place that should start paying off over the upcoming years.
This is a great segue for our next question, which is, what do you see happening for Skybound in the next five years?
Skybound's been on a trajectory ever since, literally probably since I met DA in the early 2000s, that it's about companies built by creators that are going directly to their audience. And it's taken a long time, but we're now directly making video games instead of just licensing them. And obviously, 5PG is an important part of that. We're taking more control over the TV shows we build. We obviously have always had control over the comic books we published, and I think that's only going to get more important over these next five years as we hope to emerge as a truly sort of independent, you know, media and entertainment company that does it all ourselves.
Great. The next question will be for Henrik and Søren. As long-term board members, how do you reflect on the status of 5PG today and where you've come from?
I think there are two ways to view it. I mean, on the first, on the positive side, reflecting on the overall company, I mean, today we have a financially stable company. We have a profitable company. We have a growing company. And I actually also think we have a solid pipeline with great IPs in it.
At the same time, you saw with Sagafilm now, and we also can say we have a variety in our portfolio. And if you look back in the previous years, the company was very much dependent on hitting one or two games, and we are not that type of company anymore. So for me, that is very positive, actually, that we have this stable company.
On the other hand, if we look back to 2021, when we formed the partnership with Skybound, you can say we're still not seeing the revenue growth that we would like to see. A t least what I expected back in November or September 2021. I think we still have to see an even bigger spread in our portfolio.
I mean, my conclusion is that we have for sure managed to stabilize the company, and we are yet to see the growth and the further development. I actually think this company has a very positive future and a lot ahead of us. That's my reflection.
I agree. I actually have nothing more to add because it was very thorough.
Great. Jon, the video game market has been facing into some tough headwinds since the end of COVID. How do you and the rest of the board feel about the prospects for the market in the coming years?
So I actually think it's going to be continued turbulent weather. Historically, the video game industry has had these giant leaps when new platforms or new business models emerged. And I think we're in more of a steady state period where the business models and platforms are going to remain the same, for quite a while.
And I think what that means for us, both as Skybound and as 5PG, is that we have to make sure that we stay in a leadership position using our IP because it's going to be an industry for incumbents. And so I think that what we have, that is so unique is, as DA mentioned, world-recognized IP, and we now have a very experienced and seasoned, you know, publishing and executive team that could take advantage of these opportunities.
But I think the world has shifted, and the chance to be a small guy and hope for your little gem to break out is not a business strategy. It can still happen, but it's going to be a world where, you know, victors enjoy more of the spoils. And so we've got to be very focused and tough out there. It's not going to be an easy environment again anytime soon.
And we've talked about this a little bit for Skybound, but specifically for 5th Planet Games, maybe DA and Mark or whoever wants to jump in can talk about what they sort of see the five-year plan for 5th Planet Games is.
So I just think on the macro level, I think the idea is really this: is that we went from an era where owning access, let's say '80s, '90s, owning access to distribution was the key. We lived in an age of scarcity, which was whatever game got shelf space at the big box retailer, that game sold, right? Whatever movie was able to command thousands of screens, that movie sold.
Whatever got the massive promotion on your linear network television, that was watched. We don't live in that era now because we have Steam, right? We have Spotify. We have Netflix. So we're in an era where all content that's ever been created is available to us at all times. So it's a different environment. And I think the relationship between 5PG and Skybound is perfectly positioned to capitalize on this new era.
The idea being that we can find and underwrite projects and productions locally, right? Whether it's a combination of state-sponsored incentives, right? Small, really talented local teams in the Nordics, we can find ways to justify production budgets and distribution budgets in a small region, but when we find that gold, when we're sort of mining, we find that sort of thing that becomes a worldwide hit, we have a global infrastructure through Skybound that allows 5PG to sort of access that, so this ties into why did we go into Sagafilm?
We went to Sagafilm because, hey, this ties into our overall Nordic strategy: massive government subsidies from the Icelandic government and a multilingual staff with years of experience that we can allow us to sort of work out of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and even Finland, right? We can look at across Scandinavia as an opportunity for us to build film, television, video games. We can find those things, justify those production budgets locally, and then when we get that outsized hit, we have the Skybound apparatus that knows how to monetize and commercialize it in best-in-class and a global scale.
So that, to me, is really what we're set up for. I completely agree with Henrik was saying earlier, which is the most important thing is we stop the bleeding inside of 5th Planet Games. We set ourselves up and professionalize the company and clean up all the books for a bright future. And now we're in the position where we're starting to actually put those processes in place and look to harvest those returns.
And I just wanted to add on the back of that. For me, from a 5th Planet Games perspective, when we're given the opportunity as a relatively small publishing entity to align ourselves to these huge opportunities and brands that aren't just big in video games, but they're big in entertainment globally, that's so exciting, which is why I invited Chris to come on and talk earlier about the work that him and his team are doing with Invincible and The Walking Dead, because that's 5th Planet punching above its weight. And I think it's great when we're given the opportunity to do that.
Mark, why have you, can you talk a little bit more about the physical distribution that we've gotten into this year and kind of what the decision from the board was to do that?
Sure. Yeah, we signed a partnership agreement with the guys at Nordisk. We only signed that in June of last year, which meant that we were really tight against the start of the peak trading months for physical distro because it's obviously a seasonal business. So with that in mind, I was really pleased with the early results. As John referenced, it was a tough market, but we had our share of hits.
We had titles like Stray on Switch, which did just great, but I think there's much more to come, so we've got the benefit this year of starting the planning for our physical distro work with Nordisk. We're actually sitting down with them later on this week to look at the 2025 plan and start to put the distribution plan together around that, and I feel really positive about it. We know that overall, the migration of the business is towards digital channels, but it seems at the end of the physical period, there is still viable work to do, and with Nordisk, we've got a great experienced partner there to help us mine that, so yeah, early days, but I'm really positive with initial results.
DA, can you give us any update on the OTCQB market in the U.S. and where that's going?
No news at this moment, but we continue to look for opportunities to mine, an exciting opportunity. So, stay tuned, fans.
All right. One final question, if maybe each of you can just give a quick answer to this is, what are you most excited about coming up? We kind of have touched on this across, you know, these four different channels of physical distribution, The Walking Dead, Invincible, Sagafilm. Is there any, like, sort of little nuggets you can give us, so that we can be, you know, looking forward to announcements and hearing what's to come?
Sure. I'll start there. If you had a presentation from Chris Paulson earlier, that is what I think is the most exciting opportunity for 5th Planet Games in the upcoming years. It's not going to be 2025. It's probably going to be 2026 and 2027, but it's in line with what I was talking about earlier, that we all have to go bigger and fewer. It's not about quantity. It's about rising above the crowds. And I think that team, that project, that IP is going to help 5th Planet Games, as well as Skybound, you know, land in a leadership position in the video game business.
I will just add in that, again, going back to Chris's presentation earlier, the work that him and his team are doing on The Walking Dead, I think is incredibly exciting and based around, you know, just such a proven entertainment brand, across every type of media that's been deployed upon, I think is an amazing opportunity for 5th Planet. Super excited by it.
You know, I just want to point out just that, I think it's pretty massive in this era, as we talked about, to have a show like Invincible sort of coming out and seeing sort of all the opportunities there. So we are, at the time of this recording, less than a month out from the debut of season three. And what we've seen from all the public tracking has just been absolutely through the roof.
So the continued excitement about that and having the opportunity to mine and commercialize two brands like The Walking Dead and then on top of that, Invincible, we think the skies are really, really, just blue skies as far as we can see. And there's a number of other projects that are coming down the pike that are going to be exciting as well. We really think it's a fantastic opportunity here at 5PG.
Thank you all for participating today. That's all the time that we have. But if you have other questions, of course, always reach out, and we'll get back to you. With that, I'll hand it back over to Mark.
Okay. So that concludes this 5th Planet Games investor update call. I want to take the time to thank you all for attending this morning. Really appreciate you being here. I will follow up with any emails, any questions, as I say, that have been submitted for the Q&A that didn't get covered.
I'll make sure that they get a response. If anybody else has questions or comments coming out of the call, you see my email on screen now. And just to repeat, this presentation will be available on the 5th Planet Games website in the hours after the call ends. So thanks again for joining, and we look forward to updating you again soon. Thank you.