Hello, and welcome to the presentation on MAG's Q3 report. Here today in Present is me, I'm Daniel Hasselberg, I'm the CEO of MAG.
Magnus Wiklander, CFO of MAG.
This is a bit of a special quarter, as a lot of the exciting stuff actually happened in June, so it's starting off Q4 rather than during Q3. We're going to talk about both the quarter, obviously, but also some of the events that happened in the last few weeks. Highlights from the report, when we talked about Crosshair in the Q2 report, we said, okay, we're leaving Soft Launch now, and it's time to go and scale up the game, which for us means gradually increasing UA, and as we see data come in, double down when we see that it's working. It's gradually been growing through April and May, and really at increased speed late May and going into June. Very excited to see that momentum.
Another highlight is the ARPDAU, so the average revenue per user across the entire portfolio is up 14% compared to last year. I think this is a much bigger uplift than you usually see in a single quarter. Also, given that we're talking here about a million DAUs, it's huge to make that kind of uplift. It's primarily Quizduel, our biggest game, that has done a lot of really good things during the quarter in terms of how we run the events and so on. That's led to this great win. Thirdly, we have a really interesting pipeline of new games we're going to talk about in a couple of minutes. Let's start with Crosshair. This is, of course, our new game. It's a PvP crossword game, and it's currently available in all English-speaking markets.
We're scaling it up quickly, as we mentioned in the report, already now in June. It's the third biggest game in the portfolio. It's only Wordsea and Quizduel that are bigger than Crosshair at this point. If we can keep the momentum, so numbers continue to look good, and we can invest at this pace, it's going to be the second biggest game before the end of Q4. Super exciting momentum. I think given that we had a really pretty stretched out soft launch for the game, I'm happy to see that outcome. We went into the soft launch with a really strong product in terms of daily engagement and so on, all the things we want to see to take a game to soft launch.
During this period, we doubled the ARPDAU and made it into a product that can really scale with UA. I am super proud of this, and I think the team is super happy to see this result and see the next big game come out of MAG.
All right, so we'll have a look at the product mix. On the right-hand side, as always, we have the older games where the higher revenue ones are taken care of by our live ops teams. There are a few things we can note with the net sales numbers we show in this part of the portfolio over the last years, so the year-over-year comparison, but also in the last few quarters. Of course, we have the currency effect with the drop in dollar during the spring of this year. We have the divestment of Prime Time, of course, beginning of this year. In conjunction with the release of Crosshair, we moved that out last quarter and put that into the growth section of the slide.
Yeah. On the growth part, of course, great to see Crosshair there being part of building that revenue piece. Also, as we mentioned, a lot of the growth, it is in June, not in March to May, but still it is part of the 46 million. I also think on that topic of exchange rate, the 46 million here would have been north of 50 million if we had the same exchange rate situation as we had a few months ago. A bit of growth is actually hiding here behind the fluctuations in currency. On the new game side, we have two more games coming out to test during Q4, both in the word category, both really interesting concepts. We are excited to see those come out.
I also think the fact that we're now building on this modular platform gives these games a lot of stuff for free. This can make us much faster in getting more new games to market. We expect a higher pace going forward as well. I think another component of this way of building that's important to understand is that when we build a new game, since they're built in modules, we can take a core mechanic and actually run it as an event in one of the live games. We can start seeing a return on investment even before we get a game to an eventual global launch. I think this is a really valuable way in how we work now.
One of the games we have in testing since a while back, which is a tile matching mechanic, is going to run live in Wordsea later this year. That is one example of how we can take things from the R&D side and actually start producing revenue even before potential launch.
Look at our audience KPIs and then after our financial KPIs, as usual. We see user acquisition is up slightly from a low level a year ago. There is some effect from the Crosshair scale in this, but most of the scaling is post-quarter, in June again, to be clear about that. DAU is down somewhat year over year, and we already noted the all-time high ARPDAU of $7.1, and that is, of course, in dollars, so not affected by the currency per se. The increase in ARPDAU is from improving the live games and primarily from the Quizduel work in the quarter. That is that. On the financial KPIs, we have net sales down 10%, so that is $7 million year over year. That translates more or less into our adjusted EBITDA on the right-hand side here.
However, looking at the US dollar net sales, we see an increase of 1% organically year over year, so that shows the stability we have in the portfolio. We also note that post-quarter in June, the rate of UA we're running at is more of a natural hedge on the US dollar, so we have income and costs more or less balanced in USD. That mitigates some of the risks in a potentially moving dollar going forward. Overall, healthy underlying cash flow in the quarter, and we ended with 94 million SEK in the bank.
Yeah, and here we see this picture showing the dynamics of increasing UA leading to growth in revenues and short-term push down on the profit margin. This is because payback times for user acquisition is more than a quarter, but you recognize the cost immediately for the investment you do in UA. Given what we see right now in June, if this momentum continues, we continue to see great numbers, we can invest in UA, we're going to see a similar pattern again. Growing revenues, but also pressure down on profit margin. This is just the natural dynamics of how it works when you invest and have a payback window. Of course, the money we have in the bank, we want it to be out and working and generate a much better return than it does on our bank account.
We're very happy to see more money actually out there working for us and generating future profits. That's our goal, to just lean in and invest as much as we can in profitable UA going forward. This dynamic is likely to be repeated, as you see in this picture.
Yeah, and having that said, it's great, and we're happy to see all the growth engines being at work here. Crosshair out on the new game portfolio expansion area, supported by UA, of course, as is other games in the portfolio at the same time. Improving the LTV and ARPDAU of our live games as a final component here on the growth engines.
Yeah, and if we just take a look ahead here, where we stand right now, when we were going. Of course, scaling up Crosshair is a huge focus for us. That means both, of course, investing more where we see that it works. This is both iOS and Android, primarily in the US, but also in other English-speaking markets. We also have, of course, a lot of other opportunities in terms of expanding to more languages. We're going to localize the game to all the major European languages and potentially beyond. As we've seen with our other games before, you can continue for years to expand on games, both geographically, but also adding new events and features to the game. I think we're only at the very start of this journey.
In the next few months, it's primarily doubling down on the English-speaking markets and then gradually starting to add more languages as we go during 2025. More new games to market tests, as I mentioned, it's really exciting to see our pace heating up and more new interesting word games coming out. I think we showed historically we're really strong in terms of innovation in the word game space and also kind of the polish levels of the products that we release and so on. I think very exciting year ahead of us in terms of getting more new games out to testing and see how they can take on the market. Especially as we see how well it works now with Crosshair, like running it with user acquisition and scaling it up, it gives us more confidence in our pipeline as well. Finally, team play.
We have been testing. We mentioned that in the previous report, we had a beta test of an early version of Team in the beginning of 2025. We have now iterated on that. A more complete version of what we want Teams to be is rolling out in a few markets. Sweden is one of them. As of 2 days ago, you can play Team play in Sweden. I think if you download the latest version of Quizduel, both iOS and Android, you can form a team with your friends and play this summer. You are going to see that it is a really fun way of engaging with Quizduel.
But also, if you think about it as a games company and how you operate a game, you can also see how there are a lot of interesting ways we can promote parts of the game that we want the players to engage in by giving activities for the teams to perform. Both a really fun, engaging mode for the players, but also a great tool for the operations team at MAG. I think it's super fun. I think you should all try it out. I know the team is very happy with what they shipped this week. On the further plan for Quizduel, when we have kind of fine-tuned it during the summer, of course, the next step is going to the German-speaking markets, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, which is the core of Quizduel's business.
I think by that, we're closing off here and see if we have any questions that are coming in here live during the video presentation. As usual, we also answer any questions online throughout the day. This quarter, we also have an account set up on BlueSky. If you prefer that platform over X, we're also responding on BlueSky. Let's see questions that come in now during the video stream. First off, great that you see nice development in Crosshair and that we'll invest heavily in UA. When you mentioned there's a good chance that we'll be number two in the portfolio end of Q4, is that without launching Crosshair in other languages? Yes, I think we can achieve that without going to further markets.
We will see, maybe we will still within Q4 get to another market or not, but there is enormous room to scale in the US market and English-speaking markets overall. We do not put any of that into account that we will have further markets. That is additional. Do you see any cannibalization between Crosshair and Wordsea, even though they are slightly different games, but within the same genre? We cannot really see that. As the question writer notes here, they are a bit different, but the genre is also big. There are a huge amount of word game players in the US market and in the Western world in general. We do not see this as a big challenge for Wordsea's user acquisition that we scale up Crosshair, for example. We do not see them cannibalizing each other in that sense. That is not a concern of ours at this point.
Next one is Crosshair, when compared to other games, the best performing title you ever released at a similar stage? Is Crosshair ad or IAP driven? I'd say when you look at things as playtime, which is one of the key things we look at, it's one of the top games we ever released. I think it's in tight competition with Word Domination. Both of these games, we see players spending about an hour or slightly more than an hour a day on average. ARPDAU-wise, it's by far the best game we've launched. That's why we're so excited, and maybe that's why it's so competitive in 2025. Is it ads or IAP driven? It's both.
I think that's also part of why it works so well currently in the UA scaling phase, that we have both a strong ad monetization component, but also a really healthy in-app economy. When we run UA, different types of campaigns can both work, both with more IAP or blended focus or ads focus. I think that's one of the strong points for this game. Do you have any other games in the pipeline that show exciting key figures? Yeah, we have a few games that are already out in market testing. Some of them show very interesting numbers, I'd say. We have two that are not in testing yet, but where we conceptually think that it's the right thing to do. As we have done historically, we continue to do the same thing.
When we see this is so solid, we believe it's likely to be a new scalable product, we will start talking about them by name and presenting more what the game actually is about. I can say that we're in general excited about the pipeline. You mentioned a target of 500 million SEK and 20% EBIT. Can you give an approximate picture of what you expect for UA as you get closer to your target, assuming you don't accelerate for further growth? Is it about 20% of revenue then? Maybe that's a question for you, how to think about modeling the business.
Exactly. I think that's a short answer, and that's more or less, yes, that's a reasonable level to as maintenance type UA if we get to a flat position with these numbers. It's a good level. The longer answer is written down, and I can push again for our Medium article published a few years back, going through all the dynamics with the UA supported, including a maintenance type level of UA for the business. That should give more details.
Okay, then we have, is Crosshair pretty much finished as a game, or do you have a lot of things to add to further improve ARPDAU? Ad revenue has been weak for a while now. Is it a conscious shift to get higher IAP purchases, or is it just because the dollar is weak and the number of players has shrunk? I guess this is a, yeah, it's a two-part question. Is it pretty much finished as a game? Definitely not. I think Crosshair is still a very kind of clean experience in terms of it's hugely focused on just the core experience of playing opponents and playing, have multiple games running at the same time, something that we see strengthen the long-term retention. We have a few relatively simple events in the game, but we have a lot of stuff that we haven't done yet.
For example, having various side cores, so events in the game that's using different game mechanics, having different types of mini-game, word games, and so on to tie in closely with advertising and so on. There's a lot of things on the roadmap for Crosshair. I think it's going to continue to develop for at least the next couple of years in a pretty significant way. It will both improve ARPDAU, but also a lot of the stuff is about building a foundation for a game you can do interesting live operations on for the years to come. That's where you want to have a lot of variation and events you can run that tie into each other and so on. It's a long path to building something that's closer to Quizduel, for example, in terms of variation and complexity.
The ad revenue has been weak for a while. I think this addresses the entirety of our business, that the ads, IAP has stayed more stable than ads, for example. I think ads usually correlate pretty well with DAU, as you have a certain amount of ad exposures per daily player, and there is a limit to how far that can go without punishing retention. No, we do not have a conscious decision to say, let's have less ad revenues and more IAP. We want the games to be dynamic enough to both have a strong ad monetization for players that do not engage with the in-app economy, but also have a deep in-app economy to allow for extensive spend and a good experience if you want to spend money in the game. We are not going in any specific direction here.
We believe you need to have a hybrid economy to be competitive. The last one, what's the rough split between ads and in-app purchases in Crosshair? That's one we actually haven't shared. We'll give that a think if we would share it or not. It's slightly sensitive in terms of competitors and so on. I'm not sure we're going to go down that. What we can share is that there's a significant portion of ad revenues in Crosshair as well as in-app. I think that's part of its strength. By that, I think we wrap up. Thank you for all the interesting questions. We'll continue online to see if there's more stuff to answer throughout the day. Thank you so much for watching.
Thank you.