Hello, and welcome to the presentation of MAG's Q4 report. Here to present that to you today is me, Daniel Hasselberg, the CEO.
Me, Magnus Wiklander, CFO.
So, as usual, we talk through the highlights. Since it's a Q4, it's also gonna be a little bit about the full year and some context around that. And at the end, we'll have a Q&A session, and for questions that don't come up or we don't have time with, or things you think of throughout the day, we're gonna be available on the X platform as well to answer any questions you have throughout the day.
So, to Q4, in terms of highlights, the big thing here is we talked about this when we presented the Q3 report, that we had a big update coming in QuizDuel, so that's the biggest game in terms of daily users, and we have an event in that game that we now made a permanent feature, and we've got a huge uplift in terms of both engagement and ARPDAU. So that's the big thing on the product side that came out and delivered on our expectations.
Yeah, and we're summing up a strong profitability quarter with a strong contribution coming through to EBITDA and EBIT, and also cash flow, as we'll see throughout the presentation.
So just wanna mention a bit about this new feature. So, we've run an event throughout the year called Question Streak. That's been the most successful event type of the different events we're running, kind of continuously in the game. And now with the Question Streak Leagues that launched in early July, this is a permanent feature, and you play in a leaderboard with 100 players, but at the end of every week, the top 20 gets promoted, or the bottom 20 gets demoted. So it drives a lot of engagement, making sure you end up in the right spot, and we can see that engagement then result in increased play time, which is our kind of measurement of are the players having fun?
But also we see that the in-game economy works in terms of increased spend of in-game currency, so on, which also drives ARPDAU. So it's a really fun game mode, and it's great to see, like, the launch was in July, and we're in October, and it's still performing really well. So it's a great new addition to this game. So encourage everyone to try it out if you haven't already.
Yeah, we're closing the year, as mentioned. We have a record revenue of SEK 362 million, which is up 16% if we compare to the game revenue of last year, because we have a non-recurring item that we adjust for in that.
Mm-hmm.
We have an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 58 million, 16% margin, and that's not a typical number for us. It's been very fluctuating, as you have seen throughout the year, where we earn more on the 30% level, but the year is 16%. That's strong in itself.
Yeah. And of course, like, on the downside for us, when we look back throughout the full year, we had a goal to launch a new game this year, and we didn't do that. So that's kind of, w e're really focused on making that happen now. So like, at least we end the year with two games that are in advanced testing phase and where we can kind of over-the-air update and be really fast in iterations and so on. So we have a better start of this year, but we're not happy with the fact that we didn't launch a new year, a game last year, which was a big goal for us. So this year, we'll make it happen.
Yeah. So our audience KPI is next, where we see a weakening DAU and ARPDAU on the back of the lower level UA that we've been performing in this quarter and also the previous one. DAU, however, as we'll see, is relatively flat and stable over the last four or five quarters, and ARPDAU is still on an historically high level, and we continue that journey, I mean, going forward. That's our aim. As mentioned, the user acquisition on a third from a year ago quite low, and it's our intense focus to do everything we can to bring that up again to higher levels.
Yeah. So let's take a look at the kind of sequential trend of user acquisition. So it's quite a rollercoaster, as we see here, going up from around 15 to over 45 and down to 15 again over the less than two-year time period. So this, of course, has a huge impact on a number of things, as we'll see throughout the report. So, and this is based on kind of the same set of games. So a lot of this user acquisition has been targeting Wordzee and getting players into Wordzee , and that game is still performing equally well. So this is the market dynamics and our approach of always being kind of ROI-driven. So we want to have a certain profitability profile on our user acquisition, and that drives our activities, not a scheduled kind of marketing budget.
Then you get these kind of results. And so far into Q1, we are unfortunately still at this kind of low user acquisition level. When we talked about Q3 in June, we saw some signs of volumes coming up again, but unfortunately, like when it went back down in July and August, and that's how it's continued. So very, very important, as you say, like, it's a focus for us, and we still have the same strong set of games. So we just wanna like, we need to find some more oxygen in the market. Could be, like, really great new ad creatives or just that it opens up a bit, and then we can go back to bigger volumes again.
But the important thing and the message from us is, like, we focus on making sure we make money on the marketing investments. That's really, really important. Here we see the DAU trend over almost two years, and as you see, it's very, very stable for the last five quarters. So what you see fluctuating is, like, there's quite small volume of players that we're getting through user acquisition, even in the high volumes because they come in with it's a very high monetizing profile for these users, and also come in at a relatively high cost. So there are a few, but they still push the averages in terms of ARPDAU, and they're definitely visible in terms of top-line revenue. But the overall DAU is pretty stable, which is, of course, good news when you look in the long term at the potential for us.
Yeah, and on the financial KPIs, we have a bit of a lag here. So on the financial KPIs, we already saw how ARPDAU and DAU are slightly weakened year-over-year, and that translates into net sales being down to SEK 80 million. And on the flip side of that, we have contribution, which is strong and one of the strongest we've seen. And that translates then into an EBITDA of 30% in the quarter, and an EBITDA of roughly 10%, and strong cash flow, and we end in the quarter at SEK 122 million on cash balance.
Yeah. So it's great to see how we generate quite a bit of cash. Yeah, it's a bit of a lag with the screen here, but hopefully you see the same thing as I do. So what we see here is the kind of longer-term development of revenues and profit margins, and they fluctuate quite a bit, as we see in this picture.
And I think when we kind of put in the user acquisition in the same picture, it's really clear how this correlates with increasing spend, short-term pressure on profit margin, decrease in spend, profit margins bounce up again. And now this quarter, around 30%, the kind of historically high for us, and of course, that this is where we want to operate, but with a higher user acquisition volume. This is a long game for us to continuously, like, kind of move the business to a better and better place, so we can run UA and have good margins at the same time.
Yeah, we'll have a look at the product mix, as we usually do, and on the right-hand side here, we have our slightly older games with sort of no marketing support usually, and on the top side of this, we have live operated games, where we have Live Ops teams, which is profitable operation on these long-term and stable revenues, and we turn around roughly SEK 100 million per year in this side of the portfolio.
Yeah. And on the other side, the growth side, that's where we expect future growth to happen, but it's also where you see, like, when we have these kind of pretty fast shifts in UA volumes, that's where the revenues also go up and down. So that's where we see a bit of a push downwards this quarter compared to the previous one. But this is also where the focus is for the marketing team to invest user acquisition behind Tile Mansion, and Wordzee , and QuizDuel.
On the new game side, as we talk about in the report as well, we've done a lot of market tests throughout Q4 and also into Q1 for two games are in the most advanced stage, so our, our aim here is to, as soon as possible, to get at least one of those games into a soft launch. So, maybe worth spending a, a minute to talk about that. Like, what is a soft launch to MAG, and how do we communicate that? Because we know that there is a lot of people following the activities, even of the games that are not officially launched under the MAG account. So I think it's, it's important to get that across.
So when we get to a state where we feel like, okay, the metrics are solid enough that we believe that this game could be scaled with user acquisition, if we have just more content in the game and so on, we will send out a press release, so everyone knows that now we, we have a different view on this product. We are also gonna launch it under the MAG Interactive publisher account. So it's gonna be super clear when we decide, like, this game is now ready for soft launch versus being tested in one or, or more markets. Because these new games we have in development, they are played by thousands of players throughout the testing in various markets and so on, because we wanna learn more about how the game works. But soft launch, we'll press release, just so that's super clear.
Yeah, and this is our strategy in one slide. So all these cogs need to be there and work together to create growth for MAG. So in terms of the first one, expanding the portfolio, it's this dual thing that we can see throughout the years. We both focus on internally developing games, but also look at M&A opportunities.
Yeah, and user acquisition, as always, is trying to maximize that at a profitable level. And that usually applies to new games, but it could also be for several years after a release of a new game. Could also be for acquired games, of course, and even for older live games every now and then, but always a focus to find marketing gaps to capture-
Mm-hmm
... for us. And as always, we work with improving our live games, metrics, and LTV, and we have recent examples there with QuizDuel in this quarter affecting our metrics and finances.
Something that I mentioned in the report, and we talked about this for the last year, that we're going into more and more kind of modular way of building games. So the new games, they both are new games in themselves, but they also serve as kind of templates for future games. We build a lot of stuff now that we can reuse in a better fashion. Also, the core mechanics that we build in these games can be plugged out and run as events in the other live games.
So it's helping each other in a better way, I think, and we know that investments we make in kinda creating new core mechanics and so on will bear fruit across the portfolio, as well as in the new games, which I think is a really, really good step for us in terms of efficiency.
Okay, so zooming out and looking at the last five years of revenues, we see a growth throughout these years of average 20% CAGR in these years. We also note that we have an overall profitability in this during this period, and in the last three years, we also have individual profitability per year.
Mm.
That's something to see.
Yeah, and when you, like, think back to the previous slide we've shown, this is really those engines at work in terms of we have both acquired companies and games, and we have launched internally developed games, boosted LTV and then user acquisition according to our kind of profitability requirements. That's how we've been able to kinda double the size of the revenues while remaining profitable and generating cash. So it's a combination of all these three.
Yeah.
So if we wrap this up and look a bit ahead, like Q1 and onwards, we're super excited about the potential for QuizDuel, both in terms of what we see the Question Streak Leagues features have brought us, but also the stuff that's happening from that team. It's working really fast, and something we also touch on slightly in the report, so we tried different kind of core mechanics in the game as well, which I think is really interesting. So in this kind of, in several of our games now, we're testing with time-limited events, where we have a different core mechanic from the one that's in the main part of the game. That's both to provide variation to the players, but also to enable higher monetization in a game like QuizDuel.
So we tested with a kind of more match three-like puzzle mechanic in QuizDuel in the summer, first with a few thousand users, to see, like, will they accept playing a different kind of gameplay? It looked really positive. So last month, we tested with several hundred thousand players in the game, and there we can see, similar to the Question Streak Leagues, that both time and ARPDAU go up in the game. So this is really encouraging in terms of what we can do in both QuizDuel and, and in our other games. Mm. Yeah, I guess we'll expect to run at higher profit margins going further as well.
If the user acquisition doesn't change radically in the next couple of months, probably gonna be in this 20%-30% EBITDA margin region for a while, until we can get things moving again on the marketing side. And of course, a lot of excitement around the new games, and hopefully we have something we can share with you in a not-too-distant future in terms of soft launches. So with that, I think we'll check if we have any questions coming in in the Twitch stream. And as I mentioned in the beginning, other questions you can also, like, post throughout the day on X. Trying to get used to calling Twitter, X. Yeah. Okay. So here are some questions that have already come in from Twitter, so we can take them here in this forum as well.
So what's your best prediction for when UA will ramp up again?" It's multiple questions. I, I can take it one by one. So this is the annoying thing to me with user acquisition in the industry we're in. We can control some things, so working with the games to make sure they have a higher LTV. We can work with kind of the early funnel, how we can optimize the storefronts, and how we can optimize our ad creatives, but we're also dependent on what's happening around us in the industry. If there are huge game launches going on at the same time, it will kind of blanket the market for a bit until that kind of goes away.
It's kind of unpredictable, so we try to focus on what we can impact, which is kinda product quality and finding new type of messaging in our ad creatives, but it's hard to predict. I think that's partly why we chose to look at these kind of multi-year trends and see, like, over time, it works pretty well for us, but it's very hard to know what the next month looks like and so on. We hope we'll see some more oxygen coming in soon, we can ramp up. Second part here was: "Has the model been changed since the last push?" So I guess maybe that refers to kind of payback time and so on. So it's...
We're still. We wanna see the majority of the money back within the first six months, and then we've had a little bit of, kind of, do we wanna see 80% or 90% and so on? It depends a bit on volume, and now when we have lower volumes, like, there's no reason to really compromise on the return profile. When we had this huge spend, that's when we talked to everyone about that last year. Like, we see the opportunity so big now, we can actually make a bigger amount of absolute profits by letting the margin go down a little bit, like extend the payback window. "Will the next UA push coincide with profitability different to the last UA push?" So this is... This depends, I guess, on the volume.
So say that we can expand somewhat, but not as much as last time we increased UA, then it's pretty likely that we'll both increase UA and continue to show a good profit margin. If it really opens up, it's gonna look more like last time again, like revenues grow really quickly, short-term profitability will suffer, but it's gonna be for a good reason, because we're, like, investing money with a good profitability profile over time. Okay. "How's the UA venture with QuizDuel in the U.S. gone?" So this is someone who's been looking at some of the Sensor Tower of mobile games. So we have done some tests in the U.S. market with QuizDuel. Really exciting in terms of we saw ARPDAU numbers that are way higher than we've seen, for example, in the German market.
We recognize that from our other games, like the U.S. consumers have a tendency to spend both more easily and bigger, in bigger numbers, and it's great to see that QuizDuel can unlock good monetization potential in the U.S. market. So what we're working with now is to make sure the game can retain players as well. Like, of course, we have amazing content in German after being 10 years now in Germany. So we need to work with kind of the content and how we present the game to a U.S. audience to get the retention profile to a better place, but the ARPDAU looks really promising.
Next one is, "You have a team of about seven people working on older games," so I guess that's kind of the live ops that we talk about, "and three working on Apprope." Okay, it's actually two. "How many are the rest of the developers? I think the company feels big compared to the games you have and release, and so on." So roughly, over the last few years, it's been between 15-20 people working what we talk about as new games, or you can call it a general company, you can describe it as R&D. So say SEK 15 million- SEK 20 million of costs for that activity on a turnover of SEK 360 million, I think it's not unreasonably big.
But of course, you should expect that that activity generates new products that come to the market. That's our expectations as well. What I think I talked about in a few reports, maybe half a year back or so, is when the game does come out, it tends to generate enormous values, paying off maybe five, five or even 10 years of investments in making new games. You know, it's, it's games that will generate hundreds of millions in revenues and, and with a good profitability profile, it easily pays off the R&D. So I think to me, it's, it's a twofold thing. One is the lead time is very frustrating, and when you have. We want to launch new games every year, and then you have a certain hit rate, so maybe 15, 20 people is actually not enough.
But I think we try to balance growing profitably is kind of our tune that we try to follow. So that's when we think this is a, this is a size of new game development that we can handle in a good way. "Can you provide more details on the new puzzle mechanics being tested in QuizDuel and its potential to increase ARPDAU?" So this is a really, really exciting thing for us. So as I mentioned, we tried with different mechanics and see if the players kind of would accept that, and that looked really positive. This kind of, w e call it Tile Blaster mechanic. It's kind of a match-three style gameplay. Those games tend to have $0.50+ ARPDAU compared to our average of $0.07.
So if you can get a big part of the audience engaging in that kind of gameplay on a relatively frequent basis, it's a huge potential to kind of up the overall ARPDAU for QuizDuel in this case, with, of course, a big goal being able to then increase user acquisition behind QuizDuel. So we're gonna work intensely with that and see where we can take it. So I think, that's it for now. So again, if you have further questions or you want to follow, like, the answers to other questions that have already been posted online, so check out the X account for MAG Interactive, and we'll answer those questions before the end of this day. Cool. Thank you so much for watching.
Thank you.