Welcome back to ABG Investor Days. Next up, we have the pleasure of welcoming Stefan Wikstrand, CFO of G5 Entertainment. With that said, I will leave the floor to you, Stefan, for a presentation, and then come back for Q&A at the end.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, and thanks for having us here once again at ABG Investor Days. As stated, my name is Stefan Wikstrand. I'm the CFO of G5 Entertainment. G5, we continue to do the same as we've done for a few years. We are a developer and publisher of free-to-play games for mobile devices, tablets, but also PC. We make casual games for all platforms.
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We make casual free-to-play games published on essentially all platforms today, coming primarily from tablets and smartphones, but nowadays more and more revenue coming from the PC side of the business. We make puzzle games in various shapes and forms. Our main categories are hidden object, match three, and mahjong games, or match two. Mobile gaming today is a very big market, so over $90 billion. I think it's $95 billion projected to be in 2024. We serve a female audience of women over 35, which is our core audience, but I will come back to that in just a bit. Just a brief look at the mobile gaming market. It has been a growth industry since, well, essentially since the launch of the iPhone. It had very rapid growth. It's now the biggest segment of the gaming market.
We had a very strong growth during the COVID years here, 2020, 2021. And for obvious reasons, people were at home and had still money to spend and played a lot of games. We've seen a bit of a reset after that, so coming down in 2022. But now kind of coming back to a more stable underlying growth of the market. So, low single digit in the coming years. But just by visually looking at the kind of screen, you can almost see that the growth, well, especially if you look at, as I do, I look at these numbers year to year, we're kind of coming back to the underlying growth that we should have expected, kind of in 2020, if not COVID had happened.
So, we had a bump, we had kind of coming down from that, and now we're back on the same kind of growth trajectory. So, a very healthy market, still growing amount of players, but the market with the kind of best paying audiences are quite saturated today, like the U.S., Japan, etc., while growth of users comes from kind of more emerging markets, India, Southeast Asia, partly Latin America as well. So, G5 over the last years, this is done from 2014. G5 has existed as a company since 2001, so it's been a few years. But since 2014, we moved to the main market here in Stockholm. And this is also roughly the time where the transition to free-to-play was completed.
So, we had a premium offering, which was games that you bought up front and you played through that game, and then you bought a new game, and that was the kind of process of that. We moved into free-to-play. We had our first free-to-play game launched in 2011, our first big success in 2012, and started investing more and more in the free-to-play segment of the business. And that transition kind of got completed in 2015, and since then we've only focused on free-to-play games. Hidden City, our biggest success so far, started growing in 2016. The game was actually launched in 2014, soft launch, so it took two years to kind of refine the game before it started to really grow. And Hidden City is still our biggest game in the portfolio.
In the following years, 2016- 2018, we invested a lot in our development capacity and focused quite a bit on our own development of games. And 2019 through 2021, we released quite a few games to the market, where the two, probably the most successful ones, prominent ones are Sherlock and Jewels of Rome, which are our second and third biggest games today. In 2022, we shifted our development process a bit, and I will come back to that, so I won't bore you with that twice. But that meant that we went down from quite a few releases in the years before to going for a target of having one game released per year. But I'll come back to the rationale for that. One of the big positive items in the last years is our G5 Store, which is our direct-to-consumer offering.
So, instead of going through the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, etc., we have our own store where people can download the games directly from us. The main difference here is that for Apple and Google, you pay 30% in store fees, or for Microsoft, which lowered their store fees a few years ago to 12%. For the G5 Store, we pay a single-digit % in processing fees and related services. So, a lot better unit economics for the G5 Store. And we actually see as well that the players that actually download games from the G5 Store tend to have even better unit economics than the one that we get from Apple and Google, etc. So, they're more loyal, they pay better, etc. So, very positive performance. The store continues to grow.
It has grown month to month since launch, with a few exceptions, but you can see that quarter to quarter, we have seen sequential growth since launch in 2020, yeah, Q3. So, coming back a bit to the target audience and the game genres, if you follow G5, you've seen this slide before because it hasn't changed that much. So, we still focus on a target audience of women over 35. It is a very loyal audience. It's a good paying audience. So, we have an average spend on our paying user base of, in Q3, it was almost $65 per month in the user base, which is very strong. We focus on three main genres. Hidden Object has been with us for quite a while. Very strong niche genre that fits really well with the target audience.
Like we said on the first line, it is puzzle adventure games. So, the puzzle part here is the hidden object where you actually find objects on the screen. And then the adventure part is the storyline that you play. Here, the game is represented by Sherlock, which is based on multiple books. Then we have the match three segment, which is a very big niche in the market. We have our historical setting with Jewels of Rome and other titles that kind of follow the same logic. So, match three is very big. We're a relatively small player, but it has huge potential. So, there we continue to invest as well when it comes to our development. And then we have Mahjong Solitaire, which is an older type of game that we have in the portfolio.
It's still relevant to us, but in terms of investment in new games, it's probably the category where we invest the least, but we still have Mahjong Journey, which is very strong and profitable, and then we have the new games genres where we ongoingly invest in new types of games and see if we can find a foothold in adjacent genres, so still puzzle games of various sorts. We have Wordplay here that we launched a few years ago, which is a word game, obviously, and merged with kind of a related category to match three games, and all the games we release have a social network built into them, the G5 Friends network. This means that you can play on multiple devices. That also helps serve the G5 Store.
So, you can play on your phone, go to your PC, you can play there, and you can also pay through the G5 Store and continue playing on your phone when you go to cinema, bus or whatever it is. So, important part. And also introduce a social element to the game, of course, that people can chat with each other, they can befriend, they can help each other forward in the game, etc. And it's been a feature that we've had for quite a while, but with the G5 Store, it's even more important. As I kind of alluded to earlier, we in 2022 told the market that we're going to change a bit how we develop and release games.
So, going from many games released every year, we had five, six games per year before this, to be more selective when it comes to the global launch of the games and aim to release one game per year, one to two games is what we said. These are all steps that kind of were done before as well. But the difference that we now do is that we test the games ongoingly in the development phases more thoroughly, and we also don't let the games advance unless they meet certain KPI criteria that we've set for them in each step. We break this down even further when we do it internally. So, the development funnel starts above this. So, we have roughly 30 game ideas that we process every year that we test and see if we think that the audience will like them.
The best ones get promoted to going into pre-production, which is where we develop some sort of minimum viable product that we can test in the market and see that people actually react to the characters, the initial description of the storyline that we get kind of some sort of results from there. If we see positive results, they go forward to produce a proper kind of soft launch version where people can play, and then we extend the content slowly but surely through these steps, and in the final ones, the number five there, we make sure that they both play, they're interested in the game, they stay for a long period of time, they pay, and that we can scale the game in select markets and actually test that it works as it should, and then we prepare for global launch and take the game globally.
So, that is the difference, and then with the aim of having one to two games released per year, so in 2023, we had one release. In 2024, we haven't had a release, but there's of course some sort of stochastic element to when you have a game that makes sure that it proves all stages and gets through the global launch, so currently we have seven games in various stages, and we expect to run through seven games through this, or five to six, five to seven games through this funnel every year, so in Q3, we had one game that didn't perform that was taken out and discarded, and then we had a new game that we put in, kind of, in the top of the funnel, and that should process through, and hopefully that will go to global launch, but we'll see when we get there.
The outcome of that is, of course, that we want to expand the offering that we have in the market and continue building on the portfolio approach that we have, which has been a part of the strategy for G5 since going into mobile and also going into the free-to-play space of mobile. We intend to run multiple games. We don't rely on one hit because we don't think that that is a very sound strategy. And if you look at the active games here, which are owned games that we own ourselves, we also have licensed games. As I said, we are a publisher of games, so not all games we have are our own. So, licensed games, we pay a royalty to the developer, but they support the game.
But between the active and the licensed games here, we have roughly 90% of revenue coming from these games, which are actively supported. It's roughly six games that we can tie into these two categories that have a significant amount of revenue where we support them actively. And that is what we mean when we talk about the portfolio pros. We need to have multiple titles because we also know that they grow, they pass some sort of peak, and then they become more mature, very profitable, and we're very good at running games effectively in that stage of more mature portfolio. And then you fill up with new games that will bring the growth back. So, just a few words on the financials.
We have roughly 70% of revenue now coming from owned games, which is a major difference than before 2019 when we really started releasing our own games. That is a very healthy level. That shift, which you can't see here, but before 2022, we had a very significant ramp-up in owned games. Revenue helps, of course, with the gross margin as we don't need to share the revenue with the developer. One other part here is, of course, that G5 Store being growing very successfully lately, that also impacts the gross margin that you see there in the middle positively, given that we have much lower store fees for the G5 Store than we have for others. That has been a very strong trend the last years, the gross margin development.
Currently, we have a bit more mature portfolio in the games that we support and that we have in the market. So, we see a bit of a revenue decline, and we work obviously as hard as we can to get new games to the market to come back to growth, which is where we want to be. But in the meantime, as I said, very strong margin improvement on the gross margin side, and we keep a healthy EBIT margin as well. Good cash flow from the operations, which supports our very strong balance sheet where we don't have any debt. We have almost SEK 250 million in cash at the end of Q3. So, a very healthy position to be in while we're looking for the next hit that will bring growth to the company. And just a brief on the kind of outlook for 2024 and 2025.
As I said, we continue to work really hard with the new games development funnel, improving that, improving the games that we have there, and looking for the best title that we can that meets all the criteria that we've set for the games so that we can take it to global launch. We're certainly keeping busy. In Q3, we did 14 iterations, which means that we have made changes to the games that we have in various stages of development. We've gotten them to the market and tested them and to see if we can get KPIs that beat our own benchmarks. A lot of work going into that. We want to make it even faster and work really hard on improving the velocity of the pace in development. At the same time, we are a very healthy company. We have good solid margins.
We have a strong cash flow, so you know, we feel very confident in doing the work that we do and working hard on getting the new games out there to boost profitability going forward. G5 Store being a bright spot, and that continues to grow, and we see the same going into Q4. Q4 is also interesting where we see in October, we have gotten back to the normal seasonal pattern that we've seen before the pandemic, where usually we tend to see a revenue uplift after the summer season, which is weaker for us, so we tend to be stronger in the winter months where people are a bit more indoors and play more games compared to summer, so we saw that uplift in October, which we highlighted in the Q3 report, which was positive.
That pattern has not been seen the last years, which is probably partly due to first the pandemic boost where people were at home the whole year round, and then they kind of revert back from the COVID boost, which impacted numbers negatively, and people probably rightly so spent a bit more time with their families, etc., whilst now we hopefully see kind of a normalization back to historical seasonal patterns. Yeah, I think that was, I think I squeezed it in.
Yeah, good job, Stefan. So, a few questions from my side. Maybe we can start where you ended on the sort of outlook and market development and sales development you saw in October versus September.
So, maybe elaborate a bit more on how you think this could translate into the full Q4 quarter, and that means that you're seeing like an acceleration in growth as well, or is it more that the summer was weaker than usual and October better?
I would say that it looks, October looks very much as it did before the pandemic. We tend to see, sometimes we saw a bit earlier traction starting already in September, but I would say that kind of normal pattern was that we saw coming out of the summer season, September, and then going into October, we saw a significant or noticeable uplift in revenue per, and we measured this in per daily sales to kind of take out the calendar effect of days in the month. How that will impact, let's see if the trends continue as it did before.
Pre-pandemic, we usually saw strong October, November kind of puttering along, sometimes a bit weak, sometimes okay, and then end of December tended to be really strong, and we're not in end of December yet, and it would be foolish of me to give numbers beforehand, but that was the kind of pattern we saw, and hopefully we get back to that because I think that also assessed that the market has normalized a bit after the pandemic, and it's kind of easier to foresee what we're going to get from it, so I think that would be good in any instance, and hopefully we get a really strong Q4 for sure.
And I also think if you talk about the sort of fifth quarter, as some gaming companies like to talk about the last days of the year, I mean, Christmas this year is well positioned for having more days off. Is that positive for you?
It should be. It should be. It's interesting though that when we kind of look back on that, yeah, you never know. It depends as well on the updates you send to the market and other stuff that happens that you really can't foresee all the time. So, it is tough to kind of have a really strong expectation of what's going to happen, but the more days off, the more people have off from work and spend at home, it tends to be good for us. So, I would assume so.
Got it.
I want to talk about the new development funnel, and it sounds like you're still in the middle of the transition to be up and running and releasing one to two games per year. So, I mean, how long do you think it will take before you can be fully up and running? I know you're fully up and running on development, but fully up and running on also releasing new games. It's still a transitioning for you right now, I believe.
Yeah, and I think one part of that is, of course, we were quite impacted by, or well, I think we were impacted by the war in Ukraine. We didn't really see it, and of course, it impacts these processes, and especially when you're doing kind of change management in a quite difficult situation for everyone in the company. So, it might have taken longer time.
It's tricky to measure, but it might have taken longer time to make this transition fully. Also, we realized along the way that we could improve certain steps of that funnel, improve them further. So, that is an ongoing work. I think though with the kind of global releases, there is an element to having a target of one per year. All of a sudden, you have a year where you get everything just works and you get three, and then this year it might be zero.
So, having that as we set the KPI to ourselves, so I'm not blaming anyone else, but it is tricky to have one-to-two releases per year and measure the function of the funnel based on that because there is a bit of uncertainty to that element, and we do not know when we put the games in the first stages of that kind of pre-production stages. Even though we, of course, wouldn't put games there that we don't believe in, there is still uncertainty that will make through, get through all the stages of development. And one part of that funnel is also to minimize the cost of testing these games while to kind of reduce the investment that we do and that we also can quickly churn out games to test more games in the market and really find the best ones.
So, kind of a non-answer to the question, when do you expect it to happen? But we certainly see positive trends, and I think, yeah, I think we have games in all stages that look promising at the kind of KPIs goes in the right direction. So, that's good, but when that will kind of yield an outcome, I will pass.
All right, I understand. G5 Store, I mean, is highly accretive for margins, especially sort of cutting out the middleman, and as you mentioned, also good for retention. I mean, how big can it be in terms of sales for you?
Well, now it's 70% of sales, which I think is very strong. We've said before that when it was around 10, I think we said that we have peers that do 25% of their sales through their direct-to-consumer channel.
So, why wouldn't we be able to get to that point? I don't see why we wouldn't. But also, taking that further, we're still a relatively small player in the kind of total casual gaming space. So, and we find we can attract new users. There's to a certain extent also, we have users that move from other platforms to the G5 Store. So, then that has no impact on top line, but of course, helps the gross margin. But we get new users into the store, and given that we're still a relatively small player in the casual gaming space, why wouldn't it be possible to have G5 Store taking up 60% of revenue? I don't see why not. There's no kind of law of physics that would hinder that.
If it continues to grow like this, let's see, but I certainly don't see kind of a cap, and I think also capping ourselves in % of revenue or thinking in that way is a bit strange given our size and the size of the market in total. 60%.
One final from me. Capital allocation, I mean, you have done buybacks currently or not? You have a strong cash generation and strong cash flow. Is it still part of your strategy? For sure. For sure. We like buybacks. We've done them, I think, fairly good over the years. We started in 2020, I think, 2019. We think it's a good part of kind of the capital allocation. We pair that with the dividend that we've paid the last years as well as kind of investing in the business.
So, I think we like it as one tool that we have, and I think we've given back quite a lot of money through buybacks to the shareholders over the years. So, we certainly like it. Then we haven't committed to a volume that we do, and we've done it opportunistically over the years. So, it's certainly something that we'll come back to even though we haven't done that much in the last quarters, but yeah.
Got it. Thank you, Stefan. That's all we had time for, and thank you, Dorian.
Thank you.
Thank you.