This meeting is being recorded.
As usual, you will be in listen and view-only mode when we do the presentation, and then you can raise your hand or ask questions in the Q&A box that we will answer when we get to the Q&A part of the presentation. I think everything looks good on my end, so I'll hand over to Vlad, and let's start this.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the presentation of G5 Entertainment's second quarter results. I'll start by giving you some of the highlights from this morning's report. Revenue was SEK 344 million, which is up 2% year-over-year, but down about 13% in USD terms. We delivered this result when, according to Sensor Tower, Match-3 market has declined about 10% year-over-year in USD terms, and the hidden object market also had a slightly negative year-over-year dynamic. There are some headwinds there, which we were working against. We also believe that the market has returned in full force to its pre-pandemic seasonality patterns, and we are facing weaker second quarter and third quarter as people spend more time outdoors.
We're gonna have a stronger Q4 and Q1 following Q2 and Q3. If you follow the company for a long enough time, you may remember this used to be the seasonality pattern before the COVID pandemic, and it looks like we are going back to that pattern naturally. This summer is very pronounced in this regard. The highlight of the quarter in terms of revenue development was Sherlock, which was up a strong 152% year-over-year. The game became our top game by revenue on Apple and Google during the second quarter, and we expect it to become our largest game by monthly revenue across all platforms already before the end of the year.
Our own games generated 69% of revenue, compared to 64% a year ago, and the new generation of games, which grew about 6% year-over-year in USD terms, stood for 57% of revenue. Jewels' family of games was responsible for 30% of the group's total net revenue. As I mentioned, Sherlock was the star performer. As you can see in the graph on the right, there was a substantial increase in the audience of the game, due to the boost, and there was very nice continuous development of the top line of the game, and it was responsible for almost 20% of our net revenue in the quarter, compared to 7.5% a year ago. We are still on track to release six new games in the year 2022.
We have released two, four more to go. We believe we are on track. No delays there. The gross margin was strong, 66%, higher than a year ago, and that difference is obviously driven by the increasing percentage of own games in the revenue mix and also store diversification and lowering of Microsoft Store fee, of course. Sequentially, gross margin was slightly down. It is due to the success of Sherlock on Apple and Google. We quite successfully scaled the game's revenue there, but as you know, Apple and Google are higher store fee platforms, and that tilted the gross margin balance a little bit, in the opposite direction.
If we look at what else is driving gross margin, the G5 Store continued its steady growth, and it's been growing since the beginning every quarter, and it continued, and it increased about 16% sequentially from the first quarter. As we communicated previously, we temporarily increased our UA spend significantly during the second quarter. Instead of the usual 20% that we were spending on user acquisition, in Q2, we spent 35%. And this boost was mostly spent on Sherlock, and it did well, and it increased the monthly active audience, it increased monthly paying users, it has increased organic downloads substantially and the conversions.
Sherlock really did respond well to this UA boost, and the money that we spent acquiring users for Sherlock is going to come back to us in the following quarters, and we will see the impact from this boost in the following quarters. You can see the effect that the boost had on Sherlock's audience in the top right corner of the slide. We also continue to have a strong operating cash position. We remain profitable and cash flow positive and debt-free as before. I'd like to underline that if not for the boost that we made in the quarter, if we were to spend on a 20% user acquisition reinvestment level, our EBIT margin would have been around 15%.
A healthy result for the quarter, considering FX pressure, and the headwinds in the quarter. This all sounds like business as usual, but of course, we've been through another special quarter and still strongly affected by Russia's invasion in Ukraine. On the next slide, I'll give you an update on our new locations in our operations there. The safety and well-being of our employees was and remains obviously our utmost priority. So far, we are getting close to having 125 employees in the new locations. These are either newly hired or mostly relocated from our existing offices. This number corresponds to 13% of our total workforce, and the pace of relocation has been gradually increasing in the second quarter.
While our largest office is still in Ukraine, there are five of these new development offices. This is Poland, Montenegro, Georgia, Armenia and Bulgaria. We also have up-and-coming new offices in Cyprus and Turkey. Our long-term goal is to grow these offices into large new development bases. I think it's working, and we are gradually moving towards this goal. While we are making these changes, we open offices in countries with comparable cost of living, with the goal of maintaining the same level of costs for the company. There may be slight increases over time, like adjustment in taxes and cost of living.
We also believe that we are more or less at optimal capacity right now, and we aim to maintain the same size of the team through the end of the year, around 960 employees. That you can expect that basically we're gonna be around that number through the end of the year. There are no plans to increase it. Now let's take a look at the financials. This meeting is being recorded. From Sherlock there. We're really optimistic about the prospects for the game. Our main growth drivers continue to be new generation games, of which Sherlock is a big part. This is now our biggest segment of the portfolio at 57% of revenue, and that was 47% in the second quarter last year.
Finally, monthly average gross revenue per paying user was a strong $64.1. Not a bad result year over year considering the FX situation, right? Because we have headwinds from all our revenue currencies other than dollar weakening. Our USD revenue and USD metrics get sort of compressed through that. To have a dynamic of -3% for the key monetization metric year over year when Match-3 market is down 10%, when there is the FX headwinds. That just tells you that our that we are making progress in monetizing paying users still despite all this. Now let's look at earnings and margins. Our gross margin was a strong 66%, substantial improvement year over year.
This is mainly thanks to higher share revenue from our own games and lower store fees in Microsoft Store and G5 Store. As I said, sequentially, it was down slightly due to the success of scaling Sherlock's revenue on Apple and Google. A really good thing considering that the company was deriving a lot of growth and success from Windows Store, and now we have some really good traction on Apple and Google with Sherlock. That is good news, but it also creates this situation where if the higher fee stores generate more revenue for the company, then the gross margin declines slightly. If we look at EBIT, we have 0.3%, and that's down from almost 13% a year ago.
While we did have some FX pressures during the quarter, and there is that. This drop is mostly related to the temporary UA boost, which raised our UA spend in the quarter to 35% of revenue. This money was spent on Sherlock. We're gonna get it back. In the quarter, we had this impact. In the absence of this spending, we would see 15% EBIT in the quarter. Fundamentally, the company remains profitable, able to go back to profitability, and that's what we will do. This boost is now over. It was over in July. As we have planned, we spent three months doing it, and then at the end of July, we resumed a normal course of operation where we reinvest certain percentage of revenue from Sherlock back into user acquisition.
Even though we kinda returned to normal levels, we also returned to normal reinvestment levels on a higher revenue level for Sherlock. We will still be spending more on Sherlock in absolute terms compared to three months ago, just because Sherlock went up in terms of revenue. We will be carefully analyzing the result of this boost and studying the cohorts of users that we have acquired and making sure that we do get our money back and also learning from this. We will be using this knowledge, obviously, to plan for future boosts and future improvements in our marketing and user acquisition strategy. In the meantime, we are back to normal user acquisition for Sherlock starting August.
This means that in Q3, there's only one month of the boost mode for user acquisition and then two months of going back to normal. The margin in Q3 should be substantially better as we go back to profitability and normal strategy of UA reinvestment and then even better. We intend to keep monthly user acquisition reinvestment level at the previously communicated range of 17%-22%. We're going back to that previous mode. Again, I'd like to highlight that we were still doing the boost in July, which is one month of Q3. Don't expect us to come back to expanding EBIT marginality in Q3. It might take a little longer because there was one month of UA boost in Q3.
Now, let's turn to the next page and discuss the cash flow and our cash position. We have a strong cash position thanks to our stable cash conversion. Capitalized development expenses impacted cash flow negatively with SEK 46.4 million. Overall, as you can see, capitalization was lower for a number of reasons, including that we have stopped capitalizing on some older games, as we put them in so-called harvest mode, and as we free up resources to work on the new projects and new game ideas. During the quarter, we paid the highest dividend ever in the company's history, a total of SEK 59.1 million, and that's corresponding to seven krona per share, which also weighed on cash flow.
Despite this, total cash flow was SEK 34 million, and total cash at the end of the period was SEK 226 million. Please note that our UA payments were delayed, and that impacted the cash flow in the quarter positively. Now let's turn to a brief outlook for the rest of the year. Starting with a brief comment on the war in Ukraine, obviously it's continuing, and we are continuing the relocation of employees to Poland, Armenia, Georgia, Montenegro, and we're starting with Bulgaria, and then we're also adding offices in Turkey and Cyprus with the same intention. We have also started hiring locally in these locations, and we are successfully hiring there. We are gradually moving towards a more distributed workforce across several countries.
Despite the relocations and uncertainties during the quarter, we are working at full capacity. Thanks to our great teams, work is ongoing on all active and new projects. We are not seeing any significant delays, and we are on track to deliver six new games here at 2022, of which two were already released. Once again, we believe we have reached the optimal capacity and we aim to maintain the team at 960, at least through the end of the year. Turning to the outlook, we anticipate that Sherlock is going to become our biggest game by revenue across all platforms before the end of the year, thanks in big part to the boost that we have just completed.
As planned, following the boost in Q2 and the first month in Q3, we intend to lower our UA spend back to the communicated range of 17%-22%. Accordingly, we expect the profitability to rebound in Q3 and even more so in Q4 this year. We also expect that the overall market is going to improve towards the end of the year in line with pre-pandemic seasonality patterns, which will be a positive factor. We expect that the FX situation is going to be better for our profitability towards the end of the year as well. Our outlook is underpinned by the fact that we have successfully transitioned to own games, and they will continue to increase as a percentage of revenue, resulting in higher gross margins and higher profitability over time.
The goal of the increased UA spend was to bring the group's revenue to a new higher platform to deliver even higher profit margins over time due to the inherent leverage of our business model. In coming quarters, it is time to reap those rewards. As we learn from the results of this quarter, and of this increase in UA spend, we will use these learnings to accelerate our growth. After paying the highest dividend in the company's history, we finished the quarter with a strong cash position. We remain profitable, cash flow positive, and debt-free. I am very grateful to all our employees for their hard work under these challenging circumstances, and I'm very proud of the strong accomplishments by the whole G5 team. This concludes my presentation and I'd like to open the call for questions.
Yes. We have the first question from Simon Jönsson here. Simon, I think we should hear you now.
Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Good morning, guys. First one from me here. Could you elaborate a bit on the development of Hidden City and what the trend in that game is right now? It is gradually declining.
As we have said, the game's older than 10 years now or getting very close to being 10 years old. Gradually, very slowly declining for a while now. It kind of made a, I think it was more or less flat development quarter to quarter, but year-over-year, you can certainly see the gradual decline.
We expect the game to continue gradually declining, probably with some rebound towards stronger Q4 and Q1, as it usually does towards the end of the year.
All right, thank you. I think you have talked previously about that game kind of almost flattening out or at least, the decline flattening out. Is that a trend you still see or expect?
For Hidden City to stabilize its level, you mean?
Yeah, exactly.
That's what we have seen with other games. For example, with The Secret Society, eventually it found a level at which it became really stable. It was still declining, but it was really a small decline, and it was virtually stable for several years. We do, you know, I would expect that Hidden City will find it at this level as well. I don't know where it is, unfortunately, so we'll see.
Oh, okay. Makes sense. Thank you. Also a question on Sherlock. Now when you kind of cut back the UA, will you optimize the UA investments for Sherlock similar to other, like, mature games? Or will you still sort of overweight the UA into Sherlock, if it makes sense?
Yes. No, we are on the aggressive side with the UA for Sherlock. We don't think the game has matured. We will certainly continue. I think the game can make more money per month than it does now. There's still opportunity to scale and improve. There's no change in thinking for us in that regard. We will monitor the results of this boost. As we get closer to the end of the year, we're going to have three years of the game's development in the data. You know, I wouldn't even. Basically, we may want to do this again, but we will make sure to communicate in advance and explain our thinking and why we think it's a good thing to do.
It's not like the boost is over and that is it. We are learning. We are trying to have Sherlock grow stronger, and we want to fully realize the potential of the game, so that our thinking has not changed in that regard.
All right. As you seem a bit unhappy with the response here for Sherlock, does this mean that you will look to accelerate investments into other new game development or anything of that kind?
Certainly it really doesn't have to do anything with Sherlock. I mean, we're just trying to give the game what it deserves and to make sure we're not missing anything in terms of the game's potential, right? That is our framework of thinking. We would still dedicate a lot of resources to creating and soft launching new games. That's what G5 is about, having a portfolio, having existing games, making sure these games fully realize their potential, and we're not missing any opportunities to scale there. Making sure we do everything that we can for this portfolio to develop well, and at the same time dedicate a lot of resources to generating new ideas, creating new games, soft launching them in the market with a goal to, you know, going into global launch with one or two games a year.
Again, the results of the boost of Sherlock are positive. Don't get me wrong. It's just an early morning. Maybe they fell short of some really rosy expectations. Also against the backdrop of seasonality and the decline in the market overall, it just, you know, it just doesn't look like a lot of change right now. It's a long-term investment, and this is always how we invest in user acquisition, with the goal to get that money back in the next several quarters.
The boost is done, but the results of this boost, we will experience over the next few quarters, and there will be a lot of learning, and we will make adjustments to our UA strategy, based on this in order to continue giving Sherlock everything we can to realize its potential in full and drive the game's revenue as far as we can, while at the same time paying a lot of attention to new ideas and new games that we're launching in the market.
Okay, that makes sense. Just a last one from me here. Now when you will kind of pull the brakes on the UA spending, this short term, will you look to increase buybacks or dividends instead?
We may, right? We have the mandate from the board to do the buybacks, and we will look at the market and decide on that depending on the opportunities. With regard to the dividend, we always aim to at least maintain and ideally improve dividends year-over-year, so that may happen as well.
All right. Thank you. That's all for me.
Thank you, Simon.
Thank you. We have Anja Soderstrom from Sidoti. Anja, I think we should hear you now.
Yes. Hi, Vlad. Hey, Staffan. Good morning.
Hi, Anja.
Thank you for taking my question. I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts around the timing of the boost that you guys spend, given the second quarter was a little bit softer due to seasonality, we think. Would it have made more sense to do it later in the year when it's a stronger sort of period, maybe?
Yeah. Well, it's a yes and no. You know, it's never an ideal moment because everything is changing in real time, and we've just had two years of data of how players play Sherlock. We've just received that in the first quarter this year, right? This is when we started preparing for this boost, and it took a little bit of time to prepare and plan, obviously. Something like this needs to be planned out. You know, I don't know what's worse, buying when the spending is muted and sort of therefore expecting that the spending will be muted in the future just because of how model works or buying when the spending is amplified and then going into a slow season when your expectations with regard to how well users will monetize is not true.
It is a hard question, but the important thing, as you say, is that yeah, maybe towards the end of the year is going to be a good time also to acquire users. Yes, usually it is, and we are being aggressive enough with user acquisition for Sherlock to continue doing that. Are we going to do like the boost thing in order to drive even more organic users into the game towards the end of the year? We will certainly consider. We will look at that, and we will look at how the revenue and the audience develops over the third quarter, and we'll make that decision. In any case, we will tell in advance and very clearly explain our thinking.
I would not exclude the possibility that we will do more boosts in the future for Sherlock or other games.
Okay. Thank you. I understand you kept that boost in July. The EBIT margin in the third quarter is gonna still be softer. In the fourth quarter, what should we expect there? Because hopefully the fourth quarter will be much stronger in terms of revenue, and then you have that lower spend on the UA.
Yeah, Q3 really depends, right? It's just one month, and we may make up the difference in the next two months, or maybe we decide that we shouldn't. We'll see about the third quarter, but of course, we start the quarter with one month at very high spending. The other two, it's not very high, but it's, you know, higher than normal. We were already kind of tapering spending from the first two months of the boost.
Q4, as long as we decide that we're not doing any boosts and we're just sticking, just staying with our strategy for user acquisition reinvestment, then it can be a good, really good quarter in terms of profitability with a pickup in revenue, with, I believe, certain improvements in currency ratios towards the end of the year that will boost our profitability, and with the normalized user acquisition spend, this Q4 can be a very good quarter in that sense.
Okay. Thank you. Just one last one. You've been a bit capacity constrained due to the war in Ukraine as you've been taking care of your employees. You communicated before that you've been on time to release the new games anyway, but maybe put off some of the updates on games. Where are you now in terms of capacity and those updates?
We are at full capacity, so our Ukrainian employees, they are in parts of Ukraine where the situation is more stable, and they're able to work full hours, or very close to that. As we have said back then, we quickly returned to working at normal capacity, and we remain working at normal capacity.
Okay. Thank you. That was all for me.
Thank you, Anja.
Thank you. We have Jesper Birch-Jensen from SEB. Now you should be able to talk Jesper.
Yes. Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes. Good morning, Jesper.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Just first off, you mentioned the Sensor Tower figures here, the Match-3 genre and the hidden object genres. You know, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts of what's driving the declines. I mean, is it mainly, you know, regular seasonality and perhaps some type of COVID normalization, or what's your thought on, you know, where the market is heading from kind of from Q2 going into Q3?
I think these are the same drivers that I have listed. First of all, again, the strongest USD in years in Q2, right? Against euro, against Japanese yen. You have sort of when you look at the market in USD terms, the part of the market that originates in other currencies sort of compresses in USD. You have, by my estimate, for the G5's mix of revenue, we lost six percentage points of growth in comparison, six percentage points just on FX in the second quarter. Then, you know, for example, we removed all our games from the Russian App Store, and a lot of other developers did as well, and that cost us about 1.5% as well. You've got 7.5%, right there.
If you look at the overall market dynamic, it's -10%, and you take into account the seasonality, and there's all this rebound in travel and COVID normalization. I think that is what's driving it. As we are going back to maybe more normal relative currency exchange ratios, and as we go back to more, you know, quarters where people spend more time indoors, we will see the activity, the monthly active users, and the organic downloads go back to higher levels as people will search for some entertainment, for some free entertainment as well, right? Depending on how you view the economic outlook for the second half of the year.
That will make things better towards the end of the year, as it did in previous, you know, years before the pandemic.
Thank you. Just, I mean, even despite the market headwinds, or so to speak, I mean, your increase in UA here for Sherlock, you must have gotten a feel for, you know, how that kind of boost compares to your other successful games. I mean, how would it? 'Cause you mentioned in the last report that you could see Sherlock becoming larger than Hidden City over time. How is the increase in UA, you know, compared to when you've done it for earlier successful games in terms of metrics?
I think overall the market is more competitive today, right? When we went through this fast growth trajectory with Hidden City back in 2016, I think that was a little bit more dynamic process. The competition was much less in the market for hidden object games. Now, obviously, we are up against some larger games, and overall, there's a number of really high quality offerings in the market. Yet, despite all this, Sherlock continually advances, wins new audiences and brings in more and more revenue. I think it's just a more gradual process, but the boost was definitely positive. We're definitely getting our money back.
We definitely have attracted a lot of users in addition to the ones which we bought and from which we will recoup the money that we invested in this user acquisition. Overall, very positive and profitable over time, over the next several quarters. This will also provide a lot of learning that we can use towards the end of the year and in the following years to continue realizing the potential of Sherlock. I don't know, I still don't know how big it can get, but I think we can certainly take it higher than now.
Thank you. Just lastly, on scaling Sherlock on the Microsoft Store, is that something you see, you know, reaching levels similar to your, the rest of your portfolio throughout the rest of the year? Or what kind of process is that and what's gonna be, you know, the main driver there to achieve it?
Well, it's certainly something that we will be discussing. Microsoft Store for casual games is slightly smaller than Apple and Google, and so there is more opportunity to scale on Apple and Google when it comes to acquiring new users. Windows is a bit more challenging. Maybe it will be a little bit more organic process on Windows than on Apple and Google, and that's why there's difference in dynamic. We've also had this really good progress on Windows Store organically, and so we will work on how can we do this for Sherlock as well. That's the difference in dynamic. With Apple and Google, it's much easier to kind of you know put the money into really scaling your audience and achieve progress there.
With Windows, it's a bit more gradual and organic process as there's not so many users and the store is not that large in absolute terms.
Great. Thank you. That's all for me.
Thank you.
Thank you. Let's see. We have Hjalmar Ahlberg from Redeye. You should now be able to speak Hjalmar.
Thank you. Just a question on Sherlock and a bit on the. You showed this graph, so the monthly users and the monthly paying user, which looks pretty good. How is the kind of monetization been on this? Is this like normal? The second question then would be, do you think you can kind of increase the monetization of these users in Q3 and Q4?
Yeah, the monetization looks normal and we have good revenue development from the cohorts that we have acquired. Certainly we are working on bringing new features into the game with the aim of monetizing the existing user base better. Obviously it's a bigger user base now with more paying users, with more active users and more opportunity to monetize them down the line. I think when the user activity picks up around the holiday time and when we launch big new features that we have in the pipeline towards the end of the year, that may have a substantial effect on the game's revenue development because the user base to engage with these new features and improve monetization is gonna be larger.
That is certainly our hope is that through the continuous improvement of the game as before, we will be able to increase the monetization, but now also for all these newly acquired users.
Great. Thanks. Now another question on seasonality. You mentioned that the market's moving back more to normal. Should you look maybe at previous years if you kind of look at what we should expect for you in Q3? Of course, I'm adjusting for maybe higher UA in August or sorry, in July.
Yes. Well, so usually we had a step up in the improvement in the activity already towards August. September would be kind of an in-between month with really strong October around Halloween and kind of colder weather already. There's usually kind of very stable November and then strong December, followed by strong January, weaker February, but then usually very strong March. That's the typical kind of rhythmical pattern that we've observed over the years. Unfortunately, I don't have specific numbers for you, just, you know, what increase in revenue to expect, so to speak, from the seasonality, and we'll see how exactly this unfolds.
Just sharing the thoughts on basically what we observe in the market when the organic downloads go down, when your engagement KPIs of the user audience go down and they do in unison across all games, except the ones where you're really pouring in new users, that just tells you that overall in the market the activity is suppressed. Then you just couple it with, you know, what you see out of your window when you go on vacation and how many people are there and what happens in the airports, and you just understand that maybe.
Mm.
You know, people are taking a break from their games, but eventually it's gonna get colder.
Right. A final question just on the kind of FX impact on costs. Can you give some kind of percent number or anything to understand how much that impacted the quarter-over-quarter?
It is a very volatile situation there because it's a mix of currencies and, you know, some moving in different directions. Then there were recent changes in the Ukrainian currency exchange rate. There are certain tax incentives we are pursuing, you know, that certain countries do on the, you know, for the IT spending and them, and we do that in the new locations as well and in the old locations too. I think that overall, when I look at the overall picture, it should get better towards Q3 and Q4 especially. To me, this is my gut feeling is that towards Q4, we're gonna be more or less in the same situation in terms of the pressure from the effects on our spending.
It's gonna be about the same as it was last year. We're kind of, we went through this stressful quarter, but we are moving back to more normal situation towards Q4.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We have Rasmus Engberg from Handelsbanken. Rasmus you're on. You're muted.
Thank you. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can. We can hear you.
Morning, Rasmus. Morning. Morning, Vlad. I wanted to ask you, was there ever an alternative to continue to push spending through Q3 as well? You know, if you could elaborate a bit on your thoughts about, you know, why do you push and then stop and then open up for maybe spending again? What are your thoughts on those issues?
Our models show that we should be doing that, right? The resulting effect on the company's top line would be very strong though, right? Because we are talking about spending a lot of money, and, you know, becoming not very profitable and not very cash flow positive for a prolonged period of time, and what kind of message it sends to the market. Even if fundamentally it is a good thing to do, we have to use caution, and we have to make sure that we obtain the results that we are hoping for when we set out to do something like this. I'd like to be extra cautious in that regard, and I'd like to make sure that whenever we do such a boost, we can afford it.
We don't always have to be this aggressive. In this particular case, we were trying to be as aggressive as we can to see how much additional positive development we can gain from it. You know, the level of aggressiveness in user acquisition is, can be adjusted between our normal level and the level of this boost, and we may choose a point somewhere in between and revise our normal range of user acquisition reinvestment. We will be learning a lot from this boost and deciding on what's the optimal way forward so that we can be profitable, cash flow positive, stable, sustainable business, and also doing our best to drive growth going forward.
That's our overall thinking, and I think it also is important to show to the investors that we are in control. We can spend more, but then we can come back to normal levels and we'll continue developing the top line in any case. That's our thinking.
All right. Thanks. That's very clear. I was a little bit relative to my numbers, the non-Sherlock, the new games that are not Sherlock, did they suffer because you sort of took the money and spent it on Sherlock? Or, how are they trending? I think they're trending a little bit down, aren't they?
Yes, but we did not take away from them to spend on Sherlock. It's just we've seen a substantial decline of new organic downloads across the portfolio and the, you know, the activity of existing users suffered quite a little bit. We've seen that quite pronounced already sort of April, May, and for many games. We can see that August already is shaping up better. That is again consistent with the seasonality pattern, where July is kind of a low point. As you go into summer, things are kind of tapering, and then everything starts coming back in August. Again, that's why our thinking about the seasonality pattern is coming back because the pandemic is done, right?
Virtually anywhere except Lufthansa flights.
Yeah. Just a final question. To avoid being surprised by the effects, which currencies should we look at? I mean, it's obviously the ruble, but is it the Ukrainian hryvnia as well, or what caused this increase in this quarter?
We have some rubles, we have some euros. The ruble spending is decreasing. We have some staff that are paid in euros. The mix of currency is now quite different because we're also paid in Armenian currency, in Georgian currency, and then in euro, Montenegro, Poland, Bulgaria, they're all in Eurozone. The mix is getting more complex. Then there's Ukrainian currency situation. Then also, you know, employees there are stressed enough to have them suffer due to the changes in the Ukrainian currency, considering, you know, the financial, obviously, and the war situation, the financial situation in the country. Our decision was to kind of peg Ukrainian staff salaries to dollar through the end of the year.
Ukrainian currency is not going to have a big effect. There are other tax incentives there that we can use, and that can have a positive effect, but we'll see about that. Probably it happens towards the fourth quarter.
All right. That's clear. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Thank you. We then have some questions in the Q&A box. In the meantime, while we answer those, if anyone else wants to ask a question verbally, you can just raise your hand, as indicated on the slide. Vlad, do you have the Q&A open or do you want me to read them?
Well let's do this. You read, and I answer, so that I don't skip on the questions that I don't like.
All right. The first one is from Frederick. I know Sherlock is your major title now, and most hopes are on this title, but you plan any other major releases upcoming months or smaller, easier, cheaper titles?
We do have 4 more games that we want to soft launch before the end of the year, and these will be in our existing genres, but then new genres as well. Some genres that we never tried before or we tried and we failed. Again, we have spent the last year. Well, there was a break obviously with everything that was going on in the first quarter, but really over the last two years, our focus was on building out the process of how do we think about new game ideas, how do we test them in the market even before we start making games?
How do we shape the concept of the game and what kind of research we do in order to understand exactly what kind of game is the best chance of success for us? We are filling this pipeline with new ideas, and these new ideas, they go over this pipeline, and then when they're finally tested and we don't see red flags, we see good potential for the game, they go into the development, and within six months we're gonna have a version that we will soft launch. We've been working a lot on that, and there are some really interesting games in our pipeline on different stages of completion towards the soft launch. It's not like we just have the games that we have.
There is a large chunk of the company dedicated to making new games that we haven't launched yet, and we'll be getting to launch all these games.
All right. Frederick also asked, have you looked into other platforms like Android TV, WhatsApp game platform, Netflix games, TikTok games, et cetera?
Well, we did look into TV some time ago, and unfortunately the controls we deemed not perfect for our users and for our types of games. We are looking into some new platforms as well. It's a little too early to talk about it, but we do look at new platforms all the time, but we only try with new platforms when we think it is a good fit and we see good potential there. You may expect over time that G5 will try to launch games on new platform. We haven't done in a long while, so we are thinking about it, certainly. When it comes to Netflix, I think it's a subscription service, and they just buy games for a fixed fee.
That's from what I read about Netflix business model in the press. I don't know if there's really a platform for distribution there. We are really interested in some of the new platforms that are in the market and that give developers the opportunity to make a lot of money and to keep a large portion of what the user pays. We are obviously going to be working with these platforms we can, when we can, where we can retain a large portion of revenue.
All right. Ole asks, well, he's referencing the comment Sherlock will become your biggest game by revenue across all platforms before year-end. Is this dependent on declining revenue from Hidden City in Q4 compared to Q2?
No, it does not depend at all. We are bringing in new audiences into Sherlock. I would say, you know, if you look at Sherlock and you look at Hidden City, those are not the biggest hidden object games out there. There are bigger games out there that we are competing with for the audience. I think the characteristics of the game and the ability and our ability to bring in new users is the most important factor. I don't think these two are really connected.
Any comment regarding payback time for the Sherlock UA boost? Is it reasonable that we're talking about something around between 12 to 18 months payback time now?
It is reasonable to think this way. So when we acquire users, obviously we expect to get the money back from the users that we have acquired over a period of time. In order to be able to bid high enough, you wanna look at a certain, you know, large enough horizon to be competitive in the market. When you have data for that amount of time in your game, or at least a good extrapolation that players will spend that much, you can do that. Also you get this organic uplift, basically users that you can certainly attribute to your increased spend, the users that you didn't pay for, but suddenly you're getting more such users. That's the organic uplift. You're bringing extra revenue through that, and that helps you recoup the investment earlier.
I think you have a very good range there. That's a good framework to think about it.
I think we touched upon the next one earlier. Would UA be more appropriate in early high season in Q4 and Q1?
It may be certainly. At the same time, I mean, it's better to get the recoupment earlier. Also you have to keep in mind that when everyone thinks that this is the best time to do it, then probably prices are not ideal. So there's this working against the market, and it is a very dynamic situation also with a lot of head-to-head competition between different games doing different things. You know, in reality, when, like in the beginning of the year when we're thinking, oh, we should do a boost, you know, we have data, we really wanna do it, the last thing you wanna think is like, okay, let's wait another nine months, right? If you keep postponing things until the next year, you may end up wasting years, right?
There's only so many Q4s in the game's lifetime, so to speak, to work with, especially, you know, before it matures and before it's been in the market for a long enough time. I think we've done the right thing. We did the boost, but we will be looking at the results of this boost and adjusting our strategy for the upcoming quarters, of course.
All right. We have the last one here. Do you have any means of hedging the FX market? If not, does it make sense for you to work on that? I think I can take that question and-
Please.
You know, of course, there are always ways of hedging, and we've looked into that historically quite a bit, and we have concluded that cost-benefit wise, it hasn't made sense depending on how the currency flows look. If we talk about the current situation, of course, for hedging is not perfectly functioning in all jurisdictions where we have operations. I think at this point it would also be almost impossible to hedge all kind of FX movements that we get impacted by. Certainly something that we look at from time to time and take help in reviewing and see if we should do something in that area.
Currently, because I think the question is kind of targeted to the Q2, I think it would have been almost impossible to do any meaningful hedging to protect us from the movements that we've seen.
I would add that we are kinda hedged just through the structure of our revenue, right? We have revenue in different currencies, we have spending in different currencies, and most of the time it works quite well for us. But you know, not in every situation. Our goal, again, is not to be fully immune to currency fluctuations, but to not be too vulnerable to fluctuations in the currency exchange rates. I think we are accomplishing that. We are able to withstand currency fluctuations, but our results will be affected of course, but fundamentally, we continue functioning as a profitable cash flow positive company nonetheless, and get through it to a more normal situation.
For me, that is the most important thing.
We have no more questions in the Q&A box, and no one has raised their hand. One of our longest earnings calls ever as well. If no one else has a question I think we can start to wrap it up. Vlad?
Thank you everyone. Thank you for your questions, and thank you for your interest in G5 and following us. Have a very good day.