Hi, and welcome to today's web call with Zordix. with us we have the CEO Christina Seelye, and Peter Daboczi, Deputy CEO and CFO for Zordix. my name is Ludwig Sjöström, and I'm from Finwire. With that said, I give you guys the stage.
Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us as we go through Zordix Q2 results of 2022. Really solid performance that we experienced in Q2. Our first half of the year has been one of integration and foundation building, coming off of last year being incredibly busy with all of the different acquisitions. What you will see here is that in our first half of the year, we are showing really stable growth and EBITDA margin, and our pro forma growth for the first half is 3.8%. We have strong operational EBIT, and really we had some great highlights this year with integration of the studios. We also saw Merge and Dimfrost announce our own IP, Bramble: The Mountain King. Lots of announcements, lots of exciting things.
We added an investor relations person, Jacob Fahlander, as Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. We've laid the foundation for a great growth opportunity for Zordix in the years to come. Let's start by really focusing on our games and our own IP, since we are in fact a video game company. We are going to talk a lot about video games today, and specifically the ones that we are building internally as Zordix Group, both from a publishing standpoint and from a studio standpoint.
Maximum Football, we're very excited about, is coming out in 2023, and in this past quarter, we did a development update video that we put out on YouTube, and those are really interesting because it gives the community a nice way to see how the game is progressing, and to continue to get excited about it, and look forward to its release in 2023. We had a really strong result with that, with lots of engagement, lots of Twitter talk, and I think what we're most excited about is that the like versus dislike on YouTube is, like, 99.5%, which means everybody's really excited about this game and specifically the community, and the gamers who really wanna engage in a sports simulation game for American football.
In addition, we talked a lot about Bramble: The Mountain King this past quarter. This is one of the first collaborations between the acquired company that Zordix has done over the past year and a half. Merge Games was acquired in 2021, and Dimfrost Studio was acquired the year prior, and those two have collaborated to bring Bramble: The Mountain King out in 2023. Bramble was featured in the featured games showcase this past quarter, and is off to a really great start. We also are launching Smalland, which is our own IP from Merge, and this game is really blowing up on Steam wishlists, with over 250,000 wishlists right now. The community remains really engaged and excited for this upcoming game.
We also have reinforced our commitment to live service games, and Super Animal Royale had a launch of season 4 with big uptakes both in daily active users and really revenue overall for this live service game is up quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, and we're excited about the future and continuing to make those community of fans really happy with future seasons of Super Animal Royale. We also didn't announce, now it'll be announced at Gamescom, but Them's Fightin' Herds, the 3.0 update was released on PC, and we saw a really big uplift of sales on Steam, and the user review score is in the 98th percentile, so fans really love this piece of IP, Them's Fightin' Herds, which is from our own internal studio, Mane6.
As you know, within the Zordix Group, we have a very balanced approach to how we look at the games that we're launching. We have a combination of our own IP as well as published IP from partners and from studios around the world. This past quarter, we launched Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel, which is from a studio in Brazil that we are partnered with. That game released this past quarter in Q2 with really strong Metacritic reviews and also Steam user reviews, very positive, and a very successful horror game that launched this past quarter.
We also opened the PC Gaming Show with Soulstice, which is a game that will be launching in Q3 of this year, and we had over 1 million organic trailer views, and the fans could not be more excited about this hack and slash game that's coming in Q3. Very excited about this one. Time on Frog Island also released, and this one released in July on Switch and all consoles, on all console platforms. This also was very well received by gamers and had a lot of support from first parties, including Nintendo. Transmedia and partnerships and lots of different ways that we engage with our gamer fans and with the IP that we are entrusted with, both our own that we develop and our partners.
We continued our focus on collector's editions and varied ways to bring IP to gamers around the world. We launched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge in a physical signature edition, both through Merge's direct-to-consumer store, as well as across Europe in July, Middle East and Australia, New Zealand. We also expanded our relationship with Carrefour in France with 15 different Switch games in an assortment in the Carrefour hypermarkets with really big sales and a successful positioning there in that retailer. We continued our focus on merchandise and collectibles with the Among Us collector's editions, the Ejected and the Imposter edition, and we also had a record quarter in vinyl releases. These are vinyl records of video game soundtracks and we had a record quarter with 49 unique releases in Q2.
I'm going to throw it over to Peter to talk a little bit more about the financial performance.
Thank you, Christina. Turning to the numbers, the Q2 revenue came in at SEK 231 million. This is slightly below that of the Q1. For the first half of the year, revenue amounts to SEK 467 million, and this is 4% better than the same period last year on a like-for-like basis, and 400% better if measured against the actual revenue in the first half of 2021. Just as a note, the comparison period does not include Maximum Games and only includes one month of Merge Games figures. EBITDA for the Q2 came in at SEK 21.2 million. This is broadly in line with the last quarter and also in line with the period last year.
For the first half of the year, EBITDA amounts to SEK 42.9 million , which is 4% ahead of last year on a like-for-like basis, and this is also consistent with the revenue growth. The quarter ended with a gross profit of SEK 83 million or about 36% margin. This is stable compared to the previous quarter and also ahead of the same period last year, and the margin expansion is explained by a favorable product mix. Fixed costs that are made up of personnel and general and admin expenses have increased as a proportion of revenue due to higher headcount. Among the asset categories, intangible assets are the largest, consisting of about a billion SEK of goodwill, and this is the result of the acquisitions made to date. On the Swedish GAAP, goodwill is amortized, which has a significant impact on the group's EBIT.
Intangible assets also contain capitalized development costs, which is an accumulation of the investments made in games, and this stands at SEK 127 million as at end of June 2022. Cash balance at the end of June stood at SEK 62 million. During the first half of the year, cash has been absorbed by working capital in investments in games and settlements of liabilities. Our investment in games continues as planned and according to our roadmap. Lastly, provisions of SEK 447 million is the currently anticipated value of earn-outs to selling shareholders. This amount is to be paid in cash and shares over the coming years up until and through 2025. During the Q2, the first earn-out payment to Just for Games was made. That concludes the financial update and also the presentation.
Thank you. We're going to move on here to some questions. The first question, what were the key highlights for the quarter?
Yeah. It was really exciting for us to see all of our recent acquisitions come together and really execute against strategy in the Q2. We're building our own IP. We're creating diverse channels to engage with video game IP through transmedia. We had really well-received launches. We had strong catalog sales of our overall portfolio, and we had great announcements of future games, laying the foundation for a really successful 2023 and beyond.
Perfect. Could you tell us more about the integration of your studios?
Yeah. When I came on board at Zordix, I saw the talent that we had in our group of studios. We knew that putting some efficiencies in place would create a really cost-effective path to more of our own games with our own studios. In a very short three-month window, we organized the studios in the group to be fully utilized across every single studio within the group.
Strong efficiencies with cross-functional support for each studio and every studio is now building a game that the group is going to bring to market in 2023-2025.
Yes. What do you think about the transmedia and why is it important for Zordix?
Yeah, people love video games, full stop. Offering more ways for our fans to interact with the games they love is an obvious expansion for us. We've already built such an incredibly strong global infrastructure that we can easily launch merchandise, collector's editions, and more into both physical and digital channels. This is a big growth area for us, and also it's really fun.
You mention an upswing of your live service games. How are you thinking about this space in the long term?
In order to continually create magic for your fans and consistently provide a way for them to engage, it's really important to focus on the longevity for each of our game franchises. That means supporting these games for more than the, quote unquote, launch. Not only is it commercially really beneficial to continue to sell your game over a long period of time, it's a great way for the gamer to be able to stay committed and engaged with an IP that they love. As we look at our own IP roadmap and the games that we're creating for 2023 to 2025, we are really focused on creating a lot of ways for gamers to consume the content that we're creating, and we want them to be able to consume that content for a long time on a regular basis.
Live service for us just means a commitment to a franchise and to our fans so that they can commercially engage in our IP and our games and create revenue for us over a long period of time, and not just through a launch window.
We move on to the last question here. You are attending Gamescom. What can we expect in terms of announcements there?
Yes. We are here in Cologne and really enjoying being in person. The schedule is brutal, but it's really good to see everybody live. We have so many announcements that has to do with our own IP, Them's Fightin' Herds is coming to console. We have lots of demos of incredible games, specifically Soulstice is going to have a demo that's going to be released to the world prior to its launch in Q3, and then we also have some press kind of insider demos that are taking place with Smalland and more. Lots more to come for Zordix Group. Thanks for listening.
We thank you for the presentation, and we wish you all a pleasant day.