Hello, and welcome to our Capital Markets Day. It was a while ago since we actually met in this setting, so we're very excited to have you with us today. With me on stage, I have my fellow colleagues, some old faces and some new faces. On the right here, I have Lasse, our CFO, Arnd Benninghoff, our EVP of Gaming, and then also Christian, our group CMO. Together we will spend a good few hours with you and tell you more about MTG as a pure- play gaming company. This is the agenda of the day. There's really three things that we want to focus on today. First thing is, what should you expect from MTG as a pure- play gaming company? Second part is, why do we believe that the gaming market is so interesting?
I think the third, and quite most importantly is, why do we believe that we are greatly positioned to capture growth within this market? Normally, actually, you bring the stars on stage, and the stars in our group is really the game makers and the entrepreneurs. But what we wanted to do today is actually to bring you the big picture perspective of what we want to do. We're actually already planning later on this year to actually have an on-site event where we bring the game makers and entrepreneurs, and we would love to host you also in person, and not a streamed event, where you can go behind the scenes of making games and understand also the great portfolio that we're having today. Let's then kick it off.
I will start with our vision and the strategy, but before I go into this, I actually wanna look just briefly in the rear view mirror, because I think it's quite important to also see what have we actually done the last six months, both because we're actually very proud of our strategy execution, and also it puts us in a significantly better position to drive and execute on our strategy ahead, and that's why it's important. We started the year quite exciting. In January, we actually announced the merger between our esports asset, ESL, and FACEIT, and together thereafter, the sale to Savvy Gaming. Through that sale and the valuation of our assets of just north of $1 billion, we actually created the first esports unicorn. Why is that important? Well, for many reasons.
First and foremost, we love our entrepreneurs and our companies, and for us, it's important that we work closely with them and drive value creation together with them, and also create a great new home for them, which we did in this instance with Savvy Gaming as a new strategic owner of our esports asset. Second of all, for our investor, it provided them a 2.5x return on invested capital. For us as a company, it provided us with a crisper and cleaner equity story as a pure- play gaming company with a very strong balance sheet to drive further growth. The transaction was closed here in the end of April, and since then we also stayed equally busy. So far we have returned close to SEK 3 billion of what we promised SEK 3.2 billion communicated return to our shareholders.
We did this predominantly through redemption program that we voted through now at the AGM, but we also launched now our second share buyback of SEK 200 million. We also then simplified our internal shareholder structure through the roll-up of EHM. Many of you probably know that we co-own the gaming vertical together with the founder of InnoGames. We have now also started the process of elevating them to become shareholders at MTG AB. Finally, and I think most exciting is, we've also spent a lot of time to really refine our strategy when it comes to gaming, how to become even more relevant in the space we operate and become a better home for entrepreneurs, and that's really what we wanna talk to you today. Why gaming? It's quite fascinating. I've actually been with this company soon 20 years.
I think ever since I started, we have always talked about the relevance of entertainment and to drive the future of entertainment. When I look around myself now, whether it's to see how my kids, nine and 11, are actually interacting with their friends around games, both as a social feature, as an entertainment feature, or whether I'm commuting on the bus and seeing travelers playing games on their phones and business travelers on the plane, I see the same thesis across the board. Gaming is going from niche to mainstream, and I'm convinced that gaming, and mobile gaming, is the future of entertainment. When you look at the data points, they are all pointing in the same direction. There are 3 billion gamers out there, and 50% of those actually spends money regularly.
I think that is one of the misconceptions, that actually a lot of gamers don't spend money, but they do, and it's micro-transactions. If we look at our relevant audience reach, we have pretty much the middle-aged target group. Actually, 43% of adults actually play regularly. If you look to the future and the digital natives that are coming out as the next generation gamers, the data point is even more fascinating, that actually 97% of teenage boys and 83% of teenage girls are actually playing. For sure, the data trend sits there and are extremely interesting and exciting. That, of course, also plays to the part that gaming has really gone from small industry to become not only one of the most relevant ones, but also one of the most sizable one, approaching soon the $200 billion mark.
If you look at the mobile gaming, where we are operating, that is actually close to almost $100 billion mark. You can see, of course, the last two years that, yes, COVID did boost the trends that we're seeing and the overall market growth. I think that's fair to say, and I think there is also some great things with it. 'Cause what happened during the COVID, of course, gaming grew as a relevant form of entertainment. People have more time at hand, so there are two things that we actually experienced. The number one, we saw the engagement level increase quite significantly. The second thing is that you accelerated gaming as a move to mainstream.
You had more gamers coming on board to the games in general and our games specifically. When you look at now coming out of the pandemic, of course, the engagement level is coming back to more normalized levels. The exciting part is that the gamers are still there. That is also something when you see then look in the future, what to expect about the growth within gaming going forward, because that's really what makes it different from us nowadays. Now we have [Newzoo] and looking at actually our addressable markets. We're actually having the Western and North American mobile in-app purchases. As you can see, our 2021 is of course on an elevated level, but we do expect together with Newzoo so that the market is set to grow 5 percentage points in the years to come.
Another interesting data point is also in what we feel is a very relevant strategic important areas of growth for us, the advertising revenues within the gaming space is actually expected to grow double-digit. When we take those two factors together and also add the fact that we do have still, in a positive way, a strong browser model as well within our business, we do believe that our estimated market growth is set to grow around the 5 percentage points in totality when it comes to the addressable market. In this bigger scheme of things, how do we see ourselves building value and what's our ambition? We want to build one of the leading European free-to-play mobile operators.
The way we want to do this is to gather very selectively strong entrepreneurs and game makers underneath the same umbrella, or village, as we tend to say, and you can also see this graphically illustrated on this picture. What we want to provide them is with a setting where they can really thrive and accelerate their growth by both sharing best practices and capabilities, which makes us stronger together and much more relevant together. I think the interesting part is that this is something that is really resonating well with our entrepreneurs. What we see today is there is a massive both pull and push effect to make this happen. Taking one step down then and looking at what is the portfolio that we actually have today.
I think looking at this chart, I mean, it makes me really proud because we've done amazing progress just over the last sort of 12-18 months. We stay very focused on the casual and mid-core segments. If you look at this, we have five great companies today. InnoGames is actually the first acquisition we did already dating back to 2016. All these companies are all category leaders and having IPs, evergreen franchises that are some of the best in the genres that they operate in, whether it's InnoGames in the strategy builder simulation game, Hutch in the racing game, Ninja Kiwi in the tower defense, Kongregate in CCG, or PlaySimple within the word game genres. All of them are bringing great games to the table, which is really the foundation for future growth.
As a group then, we are delivering in total around SEK 5 billion of revenues the last 12 months. We have now had three quarters of growth together. The value, in order for us to continue to drive long-term sustainable growth, there are three things that we really focus on, both when we assess new companies and how we build and operate with our existing companies, and that's something you're probably gonna hear us talk over and over about today. It's really about evergreen IPs, the relevance of reach, and the diversification of revenue streams. That's why we're very excited when you now look at the combined portfolio that we're building up. We are in total reaching 7 million daily active users and 35 million monthly active users.
We have grown our mobile share to account for 70% of our revenues, and we also started to diversify revenue streams, bringing advertising into more relevant revenue streams and in-app purchases account for only, but still very strong, 63%. I think one of the most important part is also by bringing all these strong games into our portfolio, we are growing the number of games. We have now over 50 games in the portfolio. We're growing all our top games, but they are reducing as a total proportion of our revenues. If you look back a year ago, the top three games actually accounted for over 70% of our revenues, but today they only account for 44% of the revenues.
These three drivers, evergreen IPs, the relevant reach, and the diversification of revenue streams, the successful execution of that is what can help us drive sustainable long-term growth. Drilling down then on our evergreen IPs and the franchises, when we look at the five companies, they really depict and distill into four different categories, strategy simulation, word games, tower defense, and racing, and then we have a bucket for other. This is also how we're gonna start now to actually report our revenues going forward when we break it one level further, and lastly we talk about later. Why we're so excited about the evergreen IPs and the franchises is when you actually have a core game, you can actually build so much behind it. I usually say making a successful gaming companies really have two elements to it.
One part is the creative part, where you actually create the game. The other part, which is a much more complex part, is the monetization behind it, and we're just illustrating here two very simple or clear examples, one from InnoGames and one from Ninja Kiwi, how you actually can build on back of a franchise, back on IP, and a very strong evergreen IP. Take for example here the Bloons IP. It was launched already back in 2007, and that company has been consistently evolving that IP and build that into more franchises and build it more as a games- as- a- service. If you look back on the recent launch with BTD 6, the company is actually having its most successful year this year, 15 years later from the first launch of that IP.
That shows the power of strong games. We are on a journey, and I think that's really exciting part that even though we believe on one end that we come actually quite far on our journey, the exciting part is there is so much more potential based on where we wanna go. If you look in the rear view mirror two years ago, as much as we like InnoGames and Kongregate, we were really operating them as standalone gaming studios. Great IPs, and especially in InnoGames case, really strong capabilities, but we didn't have enough companies and IPs to leverage the capabilities upon, which means we were running a strong company on a subscale operation.
Now we build a diversified group, which means that yes, we are creating reduced risk for the group, but also better platform for accelerated growth by bringing more games in the portfolio, diversifying the studios we reach, diversifying the revenue streams, and most importantly, accelerating our overall reach. When we look at this, we still would like to add great game makers, great IPs, and great capabilities to really drive the acceleration platform and build the strong village that we are aspiring to. What does that do for you? If you actually have your strong IPs, and if you actually have that audience reach, you can really create a flywheel where you're accelerating your own success. That's really something that Arnd will talk to you about later as well.
How does actually unit economics and the game mechanics work behind the scenes, and how do you create a successful long-term franchise and gaming operating model? As a part of us looking at our strategy and saying we're now becoming a pure- play gaming company, how can we add the same value to our gaming companies as we did for the esports? Because that's ultimately our job. We want to become a good owner. We now bought five companies. We wanna make sure that the sum of these five companies are much greater than any single unit. The fantastic thing is that the starting platform we have with the companies are great. We all bought the companies because they have fantastic IPs, strong management team, really creative process, and also really strong capabilities.
What we are now doing together with the gaming companies is really to say, what are the areas where we can all leverage on the skill set? As I said, one part of gaming is a creative part. That is always gonna sit local with the companies and are unique for every company, whether you're focusing on racing games, tower defense, and so forth. There are other things when it comes to the monetization, creating that flywheel we just looked at, where we can actually share a lot of synergies and best practice, and together become stronger. That's why we're introducing the Flow Platform, which is for us, a really great acceleration tool. The good thing about it is we're not really building anything new. We are actually elevating the things that already exist in the different companies and that we know is already working.
The starting foundation of this is really the BI and analytics platform, which is something that InnoGames has spent the last 10 years developing and refining. Now we're moving what worked for InnoGames one level up, and we're allowing other companies to hook into it. On the back of that, we have then focused on three different areas on how we want to drive both overall group improved performance and also provide support services. That becomes marketing and UA, cross-promotion, and ad mon. I don't wanna go too much into the marketing UA side because we have Christian Pern on stage who will do much better justice to that. Just to briefly talk about this, why do we believe it's so important?
Well, as you will look at later today, the whole funnel within free-to-play is all about onboarding new customers, bringing new cohorts on board that you later put into your marketing machinery. We spend on average between 35% and 40% of our revenues back into marketing. Imagine if we as a group can do a little bit better there, which means that we can either spend a little bit more and onboard more customers or actually bring that incremental margin down to the bottom line. We will significantly then improve our position. Also, as the world around us is changing when it comes to the marketing side, we are also sharing best practices and learnings, so we can also act on market changes in a more fast way.
The other two areas which for us are extremely important and relevant is cross-promotion and ad monetization. Of those areas, PlaySimple is actually our champion in both of them. I wanna walk you through briefly on why cross-promotion can be so interesting for us and also provide such a great opportunity for us. If you look at PlaySimple, and Arnd will talk more about this later, it is really a hybrid between a tech company and a gaming company because they are so data-driven in the way they operate. What they do is quite amazing. Of course, they spend a lot of money on marketing to onboard cohorts into the games, and they focus predominantly on anagram, crossword, and PVP games within the word game genre.
Within that universe, as they have the customers on board, they are really strong on utilizing their inventory to also cross-promote their own games, which means that when you look at their installs, they actually have up to 8% of organic installs in the customer base. Imagine if we now take the next step and we're saying, what if we apply that learnings within our other franchises that we're having, tower defense, racing, and strategy simulation, what can be the effect that we actually see then? Taking it one step further, what if you start to actually look between the different franchises? Of course, we know today that there's not a perfect affinity between all our different franchises. A jump from a word game to a racing game is probably too big.
Over time, also, as we are continuing being acquisitive, we can also see where are the gaps in our sort of different franchises to create better affinity, so we can also within our universe create a customer journey, which could also for us then, of course, be a nice upswing on our organic installs and therefore also improve either our bottom line margins or again allow us to do more marketing. The third thing I want to mention on the Flow Platform is the ad mon part. It's still early days for us, and today, our biggest ad mon revenues of course come from PlaySimple, but it is a strategically very important area for us that we want to grow. When we then look at the Flow Platform, there's really two things that we want to focus on.
The first thing is, of course, within PlaySimple, how can we take a greater control of our own inventory and control the margins there and potentially even acquire capabilities to do that even better? If you look at the group, how can we leverage the know-how that we have in PlaySimple within the other companies to actually go from, in some companies, even 0% ad mon revenues into actually bringing at least a substantial part of our revenues as a group from ad mon? In totality, we firmly believe that by bringing this platform to life, yes, each company, as you see here, has a really strong standalone organic growth profile, but bringing the Flow Platform to life, that can actually accelerate that even further.
The other exciting part, both about the Flow Platform, but of course also with the portfolio we're having, we still want to be acquisitive. Organic growth is always gonna be the key driver and the value creative driver of what we do. As I said, we are on a journey, and on that journey to build the gaming village that we believe is gonna be the most successful in the future, we want to fill that with more great IPs, entrepreneurs into that portfolio. On a good note, I firmly believe that great entrepreneurs attract other great entrepreneurs. We do have, which Arnd will talk to you about later, great criteria and very clear criteria on what we're looking for, and we also have a very strong balance sheet that will enable us to do acquisitions.
It's important to stress that while we want to be acquisitive, we want to be a driving force in the industry consolidation that is taking place. We are gonna continue to be very selective in the type of companies and also the type of people that we onboard. Culture for us is extremely important. People for us is extremely important, and that's also why we're so proud about the portfolio we have today, is that we have people that want to be part of it, that want to build the village together with us, and that's also what we want to find, more people that wants to move into our village. The last part, which is also equally important on how to drive long-term sustainable growth, is the sustainability aspect.
As a listed company, we have of course worked with corporate responsibility for years and years, and it becomes a natural part of what we do and how we operate. The great part is, even though we just recently onboarded three companies to the group, it equally actually comes natural to them because that's the era they've been brought up to. We all want to be a good corporate citizen, and we do it because we know we owe it to the people we have, to the gamers that we reach out to, and to all our other stakeholders. If you look around the different companies we're having, they have a lot of different local initiatives. As a group, in order to also make sure that we have a structure around it, we have three targets that we believe can help us be a better company.
First one is we have only one world, so to become climate- neutral for us is a given. The second one is, and I mean, I've been with the gaming companies now for quite some time, and I think it's one of the most exciting industries to be in, but we need to make it more inclusive, and we need to make it more welcoming. The last part is also we've been in a listed environment, so we know the importance of governance, but that is also something that we're now spreading across the board to also increase that throughout all the companies.
If we are successful on all of these criteria, we do believe that that will not only give us a better sort of digital footprint on the world, but it will also help us to be a more sustainable company that will also create more sustainable revenue growth. Take it all together, as you probably heard us also at the Q1 reports, we're so happy about the portfolio we have. We do believe that the IPs and the game makers we have are great, which sets us up for a good growth, which means that we will beat the market. We said in Q1 that the Q1 numbers were indicative for the full year, which then leaves around the 10% growth mark.
If you extrapolate in the next coming three years, we do believe that we will continue to grow in that range between 7%-10% as a company. That's gonna be on the back of the existing IPs, on the new games that we have launched, and of course, the successful rollout on the Flow Platform. To accelerate that, as I said, we do have great opportunities on the M&A side. If we successfully then conclude some of the discussions that we're having and finding the targets that are operationally, strategically, and financially value-creating, we have a very exciting future where we see that we can easily double this company within the next coming years.
With that said, I would like to welcome Arnd on stage, who will then take it to the next level and talk to you about what it takes to win. Welcome, Arnd.
Thank you, Maria. Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining us on this live stream. As much as we enjoy these days video calls, I can't wait to meet you in person later this year when we host our Capital Markets Day with all the gaming entrepreneurs in person. Now after you've heard why the time is now to invest in the future of gaming, the future of entertainment, which is gaming, and how attractive the gaming market already is, I would like to change a bit the perspective and bring you closer to the free-to-play business model and explain a bit why it's so compelling. There are three things I wanna do with you in my section. Number one, I wanna deconstruct the free-to-play business model.
Number two, I will introduce you to the magic formula of free-to-play gaming, and then we do a little tour through our global games village. First, before we look at more slides, let me give you some flavor from our newest game, the city builder game, Rise of Cultures, and the gameplay. Let's watch a video.
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As you can see, fantastic game quality and really fun to play. Let me take you through a free-to-play user journey, which you can enjoy here on your mobile phone. On the top, you can see the activity of a typical player. In the middle, I show you the KPIs, how we measure the activity. At the bottom, you see how we grow the game. Let's start. You download the game, Rise of Cultures. You get the onboarding, you start playing the game. We measure it in number of installs, and the CPI means what is the cost per install. We measure how many players who have downloaded the game play it at day one. You come back because you enjoy the game, you engage, you invest more time, you start building your cities.
We measure the engagement after day seven, day 15, day 30, where you typically get a mid-core game like Rise of Cultures. You have something between anything 5%-8% retention. Okay, you're committed because you're really hooked. You come back, you play more, and your city is growing, and you go on quests, and you even decide to buy items, energy, digital currency. That's where we measure the conversion from typical players, active players to payers. In a mid-core game, this is around 4%-6% of players who pay. You're into the game, you become a loyal fan. You participate in events where you have special offers, you consume fresh content, and you keep on playing for many years, and that's where we determine the lifetime value of this player and the long-term retention.
Now let's change again the perspective. Let's take the perspective of a game developer and look at the game's value chain. There you see that games are one as a service, so pretty close to SaaS businesses, actually. Yes, it's a creative business, and as you can see, there are three main phases in the value chain. There's the development phase, the publishing, and then the monetization phase. It all starts with the first ideation. What is a cool game idea? In the positioning test, you try to find out what is the right setting for the game. In an early retention test, once you've found the game loop, you try to see is it sticky? Is this the right audience?
Once you enter the soft launch phase, where you might launch your game in a certain region in the world to really prove the marketability, can you spend marketing in a positive, profitable way? You scale further. You go up, and you go into full commercial launch, where you scale marketing profitably. Starts the Live Ops phase, which is pure craftsmanship. You work with the players. You've learned so much based on the data you're generating. You offer them fresh new content, new features, you keep them engaged, you cross-promote the players, and you further scale profitably marketing. Now let me reveal the magic formula. This is now the key slide to understand the mobile games business. Any key takeaway, then this slide. Ultimately, it all comes down to lifetime value versus CAC, customer acquisition costs.
That's here where the creative storytelling meets tech, but in the end it's all based on data and BI. The input factors for the LTV are user retention, how long they play, how intensively, how many convert from the players into paying customers, and how much you spend in a game. This constitutes the LTV. On the other side, the price for an ad when you acquire a user is one input factor, and then how efficiently you run marketing. At the bottom is the magic formula. Once we've acquired a cohort, after 30 days, you already have so much data that you know that player and payer behavior. Then you see how many of these players start paying for items. That gives you a lifetime value after 30 days.
Multiplied in the middle with the factor lets you predict this for three years, the three-year lifetime value. InnoGames is able to predict with a 95% accuracy this lifetime value. If you now deduct the cost per install, that gives you the return on ad spend. Okay, so far, so good. That's a formula, but that's a theory. Here comes the proof. Let me show you the average revenue per active user in one of our most successful games, Inno's Forge of Empires. What you see here on the slide is how nicely the ARPDAU is building up. The green color is the core game. Through LiveO ps, InnoGames keeps this game relevant over a long time period, now 10 years. That's the base revenue. Then you add new features like guild features, new buildings, digital packages, and on top, you run events.
Several times through the year, thematic events like soccer event, Halloween event, and the players keep on spending on this new, fresh content. When we look across our key franchises in our portfolio, the picture is pretty similar. The revenues are nicely stacking up over a long time period. Don't forget, the free-to-play model has only been around since 12, 14 years now. On the left side, you see on this graph, Inno's strategy simulation games, nicely growing since 10 years now. In the middle, one of the pioneers of tower defense genre. That's the Bloons IP. As you also can see, we can even go back to 2007, but here you see the last eight years nicely growing. Then our newest member, PlaySimple, has become already a leader in the word game genre. Their games also run like franchises and nicely growing.
Now it's really time to invite you to our global games village and give you a tour. As you will recognize in a second, each game studio has a different strength USP, so it's a great foundation to learn from each other, to support each other, and build something much bigger together. We've a nicely diversified game village in terms of revenue streams and games genre, and each of them is really set to become a category leader in their respective games category. Let's start the tour with a game company which has been the first building block of this nice game village. It's InnoGames from Hamburg, started as a browser games developer, specialist for strategy simulation games. They have now 10 live games in their portfolio and two in development. They contribute more than 40% of our group revenues.
The most successful game has been the city builder game of Forge of Empires, with more than SEK 9 billion in lifetime revenue so far. As you can see in the red graph, that's the cumulative revenue, and below you see the ad spend. Based on this predictive model, we're able to further scale profitably the game over the years. There are already three new games in soft or full commercial launch, following the same tradition, really going deep into the strategy simulation genre, benefiting from all the learnings over the last 15 years in InnoGames. These new games are already showing very promising KPIs. As you can see here, this is the growing revenue coming from the new games. This year, these three new games, Rise of Cultures and Sunrise Village, are already in full commercial launch.
Lost Survivors is still in soft launch. They will already contribute up to 15% of InnoGames' revenues this year. The good news is, there's even further upside potential by monetizing the eyeballs through ads. Please remember, 94% of the active players are not buying digital items. In early tests in the new games, InnoGames has included ads well perceived by the players with a great gaming experience still. If you look at the right, you can see there's the control group at the top, and at the bottom you see the test group. We have in tests, after two months, realized an upside potential of up to 60% in the payout. This will definitely go down over time, but it's a very important fact that there is room for further ad monetization in the new games.
It might not be as feasible for the existing portfolio since there is a loyal fan base, but we'll definitely integrate ads in the new games. Next on our village tour is PlaySimple from Bangalore. The newest member in our family. It's a leading word games developer with seven live games and five games in development. Fully focused on the word game genre, building franchises, running the games as a platform. Out of the five games in development, three are already in soft launch. They contribute more than 25% of our group revenue. Based on an agile development approach and being highly data-driven, they've been able to gain market share fairly quickly over the last three years. Already up to 10%-20% market share in the word genre.
If you zoom in into the subgenres like anagram or crosswords, you see on the right, they're already at 25% anagrams and 70% crossword, and this is just the beginning. With a fast and agile development process, they're able to get to market within six-12 months. Another interesting data point is they're capturing, through their analytics system, 5 billion data events per day in a genre where differentiation and innovation is really limited. There's another key strength in PlaySimple's business. It's their in-house ad stack. Their technology, which enables them to run a highly efficient cross-promotion business and improve the ad monetization. By moving the audiences around between the games is a really sophisticated system which we wanna leverage for the group. Through these cross-promotion activities, they generate already 3% of free installs.
More importantly, these 8% free installs through cross-promotion contribute 25%-30% to the bottom line. That's pretty simple, but the next one is our leader in mobile racing. It's Hutch from London, one of the most beloved games employer, highly innovative. They are constantly reinventing the mobile racing genre. In fact, they're combining different concepts, so it's more a strategy racing game. The three live games are F1 Clash, Rebel Racing, and Top Drives, and they have three more games in development. Coming from a console PC background, you can see they have a very compelling game design, and they're super strong in developing these games. They contribute roughly 14% to our group revenues. Through this really stellar game design approach and fast time- to- market, they've been able to establish them as one of the category leader.
Their concept is really combine different game mechanics, license strong IPs from automotive companies, and then focus fully on the strong community to build the biggest automotive community. Also here, I wanna give you some insights how nicely the game design looks like, and let's watch a short video from the gameplay from F1 Clash. Only encourage you to play the F1 Clash. It's a great thing to do watching also Formula One season. If you take into account that there are more than 440 million viewers, Formula One fans in the world, and F1 Clash has seen so far 8 million downloads, then there's a huge upside.
The proof that there is a high strategic value for Hutch and that their recipe for success is working is they rank as a leading mobile racing game developer. Number 2 after Zynga with two games in the top 10 grossing charts. Now let's go on in our tour to one of the pioneers of the tower defense genre, Ninja Kiwi. Headquartered in Auckland, but also with a studio in Dundee, Scotland, they've created the fun and stellar Bloons IP. More than 15 years of games development experience all goes into this Bloons IP, which has become one of the most beloved paid games in the world. They are ranked high in the charts since many years, even in some local app stores with two Bloons games at the same time in the top 10 charts.
Being up in the top 10 for such a long time without any paid marketing, only viral marketing, but focusing on the community is quite an achievement. As you can see here, on the left side, there's a screenshot from the Swedish App Store, two games, two Bloons games, under the top 10. After four consecutive years, they are ranked as number two paid game in the U.S. in the App Store and on Steam ranked as top 17 rated game of all time on Steam. Let me show you how the revenues from Bloons correlate with the amount of Twitch streamers, because that's an interesting graph. On the top you see in red the gross revenues, and then you see the numbers of Twitch streams.
More than 500 million views based on the Bloons IP gameplay excitement shared in the community on YouTube alone. There are more than 32 million hours watched, streamed hours on Twitch with the Bloons IP. I can show you many slides. A video tells you more than my words. Let's look at all the emotions generated through gameplay in Bloons. Here's a streamer who has really a good time. Let's watch this video.
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Great. Now we come to the company who has moved into our game village as a second game studio, which has built a great reputation with indie developers. Their initial business model was publishing, helping indie developers publish their game. That's how they built their legacy and their reputation. Nowadays, Kongregate has two business pillars. One is to focus on their own CCG games based on strong IP licenses from Fox and working on more CCG games. They have 19 games in total in their portfolio and four in development. They’re very experienced in licensing games and delivering great value based on this IP with Animation Throwdown still growing as a game. The more exciting future lies for Kongregate in kind of reinventing this publishing model and applying this to blockchain gaming.
Yes, this big buzz of blockchain gaming that Kongregate is set to become a front runner here because for us it's a new infrastructure layer for gaming. It's a bit similar like free-to-play has done to the paid game system back then in 2008. We're looking at blockchain gaming as a new and next level for gamers' experience. Their three initiatives in blockchain gaming are, number one, they build, develop, and launch their own blockchain game with Bit Heroes as the first one, and then they want to become the discovery platform for blockchain games, for high-quality blockchain games. Again, they will support indie developers and help them to be discovered. At the bottom, they have launched just together with Immutable, a $40 million token fund, which supports the efforts of the indie developers.
Over time, they will also explore to launch their own token. That's the future of Kongregate to become really a leading blockchain gaming platform. Let me summarize our games portfolio, map it out, all games, our 50 games across all phases. We have a well-balanced portfolio from early production, introduction to the harvest phase. 12 games alone in development, four in soft launch. This gives us great potential for further organic growth. How we support this organic growth with our Flow Platform will be explained after the Q&A session by Christian, our new colleague. He will give you more insights, go even deeper into this magic formula and show you that games is all about live services and data. Now we are happy to take your questions.
Very good. Thank you very much for that. Before we start with the questions, I want to remind everyone in the audience that the questionnaire form can be found below the stream. If you scroll down, if you haven't seen it already, you will find it there. Let's move on to the first question, which comes from Tim Jack. When we look at the pictures, after the earn-outs will expire in a couple of years, you will have citizens, CEOs who do not own their houses anymore. How will MTG incentivize these people, and what will the incentive structure look like to keep them on board?
No, I think that's a very fair question. There are two things to look at there. First of all, one of the most important parts when you actually go into this sort of M&A discussions is to come with a long-term alignment. What do you want to build together? I think that's what resonates well with all the founders. The second thing is then how you structure the deals, and I do believe earn-out is a very important component of that because it both adds further potential for the entrepreneurs, it adds an alignment to the companies and a long-term horizon. They're also all getting shares as a part of the proceeds as well, which means that all our entrepreneurs are also shareholders in MTG AB.
If you take an example, for example, I talked in my part about the roll-up of EHM into MTG AB shareholding. Their earn-out actually expired quite some time ago, but they're equally committed on driving the performance of InnoGames and equally excited as I am about launching the three new games. I don't think excitement and commitment needs to stop with an earn-out. I think many of the game makers, especially all the game makers we have, actually have a fantastic passion for the games and that's what we want to work with. At the same time, there's a dialogue you need to have with them as well, because at some point there is probably an end of journey for most of us, and then you need to have a conversation about that as well.
What I see right now, there's a long-term commitment and also as being a shareholder of MTG, it adds another dimension to it.
Thank you, Maria. Moving into a slightly more tactical territory, the reviews in Forge of Empires Online are suggesting that MTG has started to monetize the genre via advertising. Can you please elaborate a bit on this? As Arnd just stated that we do not plan to monetize older genres, how does that work?
Do you want to take that, Arnd?
As I've just shown on these slides, these are early times, more trials, how we can integrate ads without disrupting the game experience. It should not in any type dilute the game experience. It should rather be a value add since players are happy to watch an ad if they get something in exchange. It will be really a smooth integration, and we first focus on the new games where you start fresh and it's a natural part of the game experience. The game experience comes always first, and the community, and now we only add another avenue of monetization, which is also beneficial to the user where you can earn digital currency.
Thank you. A follow-up question then on Bloons TD 6. You've shown that Bloons TD 6 is the largest revenue share of Ninja Kiwi. As the game is pay-to-play rather than free, what's the game's in versus upfront revenue? What's the share mix in the game?
Yeah. I think when you look at that, it is predominantly a premium game, but I think we do have a healthy mix between upfront versus in-app purchases. I think that is also how we have successfully been driven the game and sort of similar as Arnd discussed, ad mon in the InnoGames games is calibrated for the user experience and also balancing our revenue mix.
Thank you. A question maybe that we will also address later, but how much money do you believe you have available for M&A today?
I don't wanna ruin Lasse's and Arnd's part, so maybe we save that one for later to be fair. We have a strong balance sheet, and that's what we're excited about.
Thank you very much. A question that focuses more on the responsibility territory. While the work itself that we're doing, one of our guests writes is quite impressive, everything can be more or less useful if players recognize the real amount of data that we have about them and their privacy security and how that can be affected through our marketing strategy. What would happen, for example, to our market value if our users would have their lives affected because of the abuse of the data that one of our companies have about them? What are we doing to address that?
I think data privacy is something that we take very serious about, and I mean, we love our players, and we want to protect them to the extent we can. That's again why we believe our overall CSR and our IT InfoSec work is so important. I think trust is a powerful word, and trust is something you earn. I think by doing good business and by making sure that we create the right framework, hopefully we continue to deserve their trust, and that we continue to do good business.
Thank you. Also a question that we'll probably address later, but we mentioned that we will start reporting five different segments, so which metrics will the reporting include?
Again, I feel like I will spoil many other parts of the presentations to come, but I will remove one of the cliffhangers, and we will report the five different sort of franchises that we talked about, strategy simulations, tower defense, racing, word games, and other. That is what I showed, and then in Lasse's part, he will also then drill down the three other metrics that we will further break down our reporting into. I will leave that for his part, so he gets to present that part.
Stay with us.
Makes sense. Thank you very much. Just a gentle reminder for any further questions, please write them in the chat, and we'll take them, and we'll give our guests just a little bit of time to do so because we don't have any further questions at this moment before we go into break. Okay, it doesn't look like we have any further questions at the moment, so thank you both very much. Oh, no, one more question. Given the new segment reporting, is it fair to assume that future acquisitions will fit into one of the categories?
I don't think that is a requirement at all. I think in that case we would gladly find an additional category to the five that we have started. I think as I said in my part, and that is something Arnd and Lasse will talk further about, is when we look at M&A, I think the affinity to the existing genre is more important rather than actually fit into the existing ones. We wanna make sure we create our own audience reach, and by leveraging that, we can actually create that positive flywheel that we talked about. We'd be more than happy if we find a relevant company that adds a sixth category into our reporting, even though it will change our segment reporting.
Makes sense. With that, we are now going to take a short 10-minute break before we proceed with the other parts of the presentation. After the break, the day will continue with Christian Pern, MTG's Chief Marketing Officer, talking us through a deep dive into digital marketing and performance marketing. Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome back from the break. Thanks for dialing in today, and I hope you enjoyed the presentation so far. My name is Christian Pern. I'm the CMO of MTG. Actually, I just kind of started recently, but I've been with the company for quite some time, as I was working as the CMO of InnoGames for more than eight years, before joining MTG, managing the whole mobile transition with the company and also doing the mobile marketing from scratch. As I'm kind of new to the table, also a bit of a background information to my person, the CV in a very brief nutshell. I studied information technologies and also hold an MBA.
Prior to working for InnoGames, I was actually working at Zalando, so also there quite a performance-driven background, and I had the chance to work as a consultant in the area of CRM and marketing prior to that, having seen a couple of different industries. Today it's my pleasure to give you an update on marketing. Before we actually jump in with more, so to say, background on me, because whenever I'm actually asked what I'm doing from people that are not with our industry, and I tell them that I'm actually working in the gaming industry and that I'm working in marketing, it feels a bit like people actually think that is pure fun, right? That must be so good. We are just doing what we actually like, what we love. We are super passionate around it, and that's not wrong, admittedly.
We are an industry that is having a lot of fun, and I guess we all love our games. I'm a gamer by heart for my whole life. Actually, it's also a lot of hard work. We do have a lot of data. We are digital- native industry, so we basically can see, or we can analyze a lot of the features that we do have in the games, and we can also analyze a lot of the campaigns we are running, right? When I think about some former employers I had, I would say once the product was out, we didn't really knew what people were actually doing with those products. That's different for us. We learned earlier around the formula for success.
For us, it's about the data-driven or data-informed development of games, including all the services around it, talking about CRM, talking about community management. Adding on top of that performance marketing to get the users in the game and get the game growing in the end is leading to the desired economic success. My part today, marketing, that's why we will have a slight shift of the, let's say, usual financial perspective. For us, it's also about some kind of a return on investment, but it's about the return on ad spend. What we actually need for that formula is the user's lifetime value and the cost per acquisition, the cost per user.
Talking about that is not something we just take a look at on a whatever monthly basis and say, "That's the spend we had that month, and that's the lifetime we've been generating." We look at that for every single campaign we're actually running, and there's a ton of campaigns we can actually do. There's different partners, as you are aware of. We can run different countries with that partner. We can also run different campaigns for the different devices, be it iOS, Android, or browser. We can use the targeting that the partners are actually providing. By all means, we can also have different creatives that are running in those campaigns. Last but not least, for sure, there's also a lot of different placements that can perform better or worse for our games.
We can also optimize the single campaigns that is running in this setup at a certain partner in a different country, at a different platform. We can also take a look at the single campaign when it's running. We are actually looking, do we have the traction? Do we actually get the inventory? Are the ads actually shown, and how many are shown? We already get a good idea on how big the campaign can potentially be. Once we do have the ad impressions, and usually that's pretty fast, within just a couple of hours or days, we can already get a first impression on the click-through rates. Are people actually engaged by the ad? Are they clicking on it?
If they do click, they usually end up in the app stores, get some more information about the products, decide, hopefully, to install the product and run them, so then we can observe the conversion rate. All those different steps in the funnel can have a certain bandwidth, so we know that the conversion rate might be a bit better or a bit worse, but usually we know that it should be in a certain range. We are going into the game itself. If we have targeted the right audience and found the right players for our games, then usually we should also see a good retention rate. People are sticking with our games and fundamentally also start paying in the game, which fundamentally leads then to the lifetime value. Now, the math around the CPI is pretty easy.
It's basically the ad spend we had on the campaign and the amount of registrations we've been generating with this campaign. When it comes to users' lifetime value, that's a bit more tricky, and here's a bit of background information to it. What we see here is an example of Forge of Empires of InnoGames, which are actually using a three years period for lifetime values. Statement here, not all companies use three years. They can be one year, two years, or three years, and we will also see why three years is very reasonable for InnoGames. As you can see here, the course of the first half year of 2019, and to prevent from that question maybe later, it's not that we picked 2019 because that looks so stable.
We've been actually taking that data because at three years also we can compare it to the predictions we've done. As you can see, the slope of the curve is pretty equal for all those six monthly cohorts. We can easily, and that's a simplified version here, do an average of it. If we do so and predict the lifetime value from day 30 to day 1,080, so basically up to three years, we get an accuracy in this model of ±5%. That's super important for running marketing because if we spend money, if we spend EUR 1, we want to see something more than this EUR 1 coming back to us, right? If we can do the math right, we can identify very fast if the campaign is actually working, right?
We have the funnel, we end up in the monetization, and then we can do a pretty good estimation where the campaign is coming out. Again, that is a very simplified version. We are always benchmarking the system in itself, and whenever we see changes to the factors, we can actually apply them whenever we have the knowledge to the respective period. It's a front-loaded curve. You can see that 40% of the payout of the lifetime value of the 100% is actually coming in in the first half year. If you add the next 20%, in total 60% is coming in in the first 12 months.
Again, that's very important for us in marketing to get this math right and to get the right predictions, and that's also a matter of size because we need the installations and the racks to do so. When talking about finance, then usually we have a monthly perspective. We talk about the ad spend that is coming in one specific month, and we might compare it to revenues that are actually happening in that month. The next couple of slides have the basic idea to flip that perspective by, let's argue, 90 degrees and take a perspective of marketing because we usually take a look at the lifetime of a user and actually see the ad spend, so to say, as a starting point. If we do so, then we can, for instance, just pick the cohorts of 2012.
In purple, you see here the cohorts that we actually acquired back in 2012 and their net revenue over the different months. Two things pop into our eyes. First of all, it's kind of increasing. That's natural because within that year we are stacking up the cohorts, right? There's more and more users being acquired in 2012. We will have the kind of natural behavior that people start playing the game, some stick with the game for just a short period of time, some for a bit longer, and some even for quite a long time. You can see, for instance, that there are still revenues coming in at the very end of the chart, which is basically March 2022. Here's the interesting part.
If we now see the first three years, so to speak, as the lifetime value of the respective installs, we also see that there's even revenues coming in later. If we stack those cohorts, I think that's a very powerful picture because that is telling us so much around the free-to-play business model. As we go, we are increasing and acquiring the users for the game, and the cohorts are stacking up here, and the kind of top of those bars is actually what we will see in the financial perspective, right? That's the revenue we will actually have in a balance, so to say, and the cohorts we will actually bring in here is the marketing perspective.
Trying to condense that even a bit more and talking about the revenues, the net revenues of 2021 and where they are actually coming from. Around one quarter in light green is actually the revenue in 2021 that is coming from the users that were acquired in 2021 itself. Another close to 50%, so nearly half of it, is actually coming from the two years prior to that, and around 1/3 in purple is actually coming from years of 2018 and earlier. Again, I think that's telling a lot about the robustness, about the sustainability of that business model because we actually invest long term in the growth of the game, in revenue, and also in profit. What is our approach in running marketing then? We basically have a 360-degree approach.
It starts all with the planning of the campaign, as we've seen earlier, around the dimensions. Which partner is it? Which placement is it? Which targeting can we apply? We do the conception around the creatives to make the best fit for the audience. We do the creation of the asset itself, and we will talk later a bit more about the importance of assets as well, the creatives. We go into the execution, right? That's not a one-stop thing, right? While we do the execution of those campaigns, we can already see things are working out or not, right? If there's a country, for instance, which has KPIs below our thresholds, then we can already pause that campaign there, right? If we see something is working better, then we can maybe also steer in that direction.
Fundamentally, it's going into the reporting, into the lessons learned, and we go into the next iteration of all that and capitalize on the knowledge we actually gained along the way. We built up a platform at InnoGames, that is also having some tools, to provide services around it, and we are applying that also to different companies in the group. It starts with the user acquisition. Basically, the users are going into the game. We can then also track the features of the different games. We can store the information in our central BI systems. We do have the MAPI, the Marketing API. Again, I will tell you a bit more about that tool in a couple of seconds. Which is basically the link to our marketing partners, Google and Facebook, for instance.
It is connected to CAT, the Creative Administration Tool, because we're literally talking about hundreds and thousands of files that have to be managed when considering all the different partners, all the different formats, sizes, resolutions, and so on, statics, videos, whatever you have. We have the closed loop, the tracking via the MMP. The data can also be stored in the BI system, and we do get the reporting in our systems. Last but not least, we can also close the loop in terms of cross-selling. You've heard earlier about the idea that we can also cross-sell from the different games in our portfolio, and we can, of course, also make use of the data that is available to us in that scenario. Talking about the tools, the Creative Administration Tool, it's basically meant to make the handling of campaigns easier.
Basically, both CAT and MAPI are designed for that. We want all the marketeers to spend their time optimizing the campaigns. We don't want them to spend the time in handling the campaigns. Whenever you set up campaigns and you have to do clicks and clicks and clicks in some of the tools and upload files and so on and so forth, that's just a lot of time-consuming tasks. That's what the tools are for. There's a central information system which basically stores all the assets, all the creatives.
It's also connected to the Jira ticketing system, so if a category sees that another category has a best performer or identified a new best performer, they can basically just request the asset in the tool, and of course, also the artist and everyone around can do by one click the evaluation of the performance of that creative. Here's a little video on how that is actually looking.
Basically, we can search the different assets. I'm not sure if we right now have a little technical issue, or am I still online? Good. Okay. Fantastic. No worries. What we've seen is basically the tool itself. You can go into the tool, you can search the assets you want to have. Don't be misled. If you see one picture, there can be a lot of files behind that. We can go by one click to the reporting of the assets itself. That's a very condensed dashboard for the artist to get a very fast view on the current performance of those creatives. Here's a bit of background information why we think that creatives are a very important piece of the whole puzzle. This in red is coming from that creative.
That was an innovative idea to have those hands involved in this little creative. This original version delivered more than 100,000 registrations and a net payout potential of more than EUR 300,000. Net payout potential basically is the amount of installation times the lifetime value, so the money we expect to earn within three years of time. If we have a best performer, and by the way, this is one channel to make a very good comparison here, just one partner. If we actually want to capitalize on that success of that creative, then we can consider having different variations of it. Here's another version of it, and you will see that some of the elements in this video is actually pretty much the same or a slight twist in it. You see the ad fatigue in red.
Basically, the kind of results are going down. The more often the video is shown to the users, the less people actually click on it. We introduce a new version of it, and as you can see, more or less, we can extend the creative's lifetime by around 100%, which in itself is a great result and again, shows that we are performance-driven and seek to kind of repeat our success at best. Then we have the MAPI, the marketing API, as mentioned. This is connected to our partners. We can create and edit and analyze the campaigns in a very fast and easy way. Also, the whole tracking is also with the system, so we don't have to take too much care in terms of quality around that.
We can pull the data from our partners into our central BI system, and it also holds some functions around campaign automation. Marketing is not only supporting in terms of bringing in registrations to the games. We start very early on today, and I wanna highlight a bit on how marketing is actually supporting during the product development processes. In the very early stage, it's about evaluating the genre and the setting to understand the business case. There's a lot of data out there that we can actually take a look at, so we can come up with a business case, and we can also run some creative tests to see if they actually resonate with the audience/we will see the click rate, which setting might be best for a certain game. The game goes into the production.
We already have some content for the players to play, and we go into a retention test. That means that we actually wanna prove that people, that players we bring into the game are sticking with the game. It's about the day three retention, for instance, day seven retention, or maybe even the day 30 retention. Next stop would be the soft launch. Here, we wanna prove that we actually can match the business case, which first of all means we need to be in a position to make profitable marketing, means the return on ad spend should be estimated to be higher than 100% at that stage. The positioning test might cost just a couple of euros.
The retention test can be a couple of thousand or a couple of 10,000 euros, whereas the soft launch can easily be a couple of 10,000/ 100,000, depending on how long it's actually running. Last but not least, we will have the commercial launch. This is about scaling the game internationally. We wanna see a return on ad spend which is significantly higher than 120% while we scale our efforts up. Of course, there we would want to see ad spends higher than EUR 500,000, higher than EUR 1 million, soon. The whole process basically is also designed to save and to reduce costs, because from the left to the right, not only the marketing is stacking up if we invest into the UA test, also the product development costs are stacking up.
The earlier we actually find out that something is not working, the better we can react. It's fair to say in our industry that sometimes we have to kill products, that something is not working with the game. Of course, by all means, we can iterate and see if we can fix it and do another, for instance, retention test or soft launch. But at that stage, it's better to kill kind of early on than to have the high costs that we will face until the commercial launch. All that I've shown you actually is what we want to provide within MTG. As Arnd already mentioned, we are setting up an internal agency to provide all the services.
Most of the companies or all of the companies have things they are actually extremely good at, and we wanna capitalize on that experience and bring that to other companies as well. In terms of user acquisition, we are, for instance, right now running tests with Ninja Kiwi to see that we can build up the UA there. The creative production, you've seen how important ads are, most of the companies are working with externals, and we also wanna provide services and also have the experience and the knowledge in this internal creative production to support the companies there. Tech and tools, MAPI and CAT, I've shown earlier, right now implemented at Hutch and on the way for Kongregate, and looking for more companies to come.
Last but not least, we are also building up a group BI system, which is going to hold the different data of the companies to provide easy access to group-wide reporting, benchmarking for the different companies, and also analytical resources to provide access to deep analytics. So far, my part, and I'm keen to hear if we have questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Christian. We have an initial question following your presentation. Can you elaborate what the target return on ad spend is in the one- and three-year period? How has this changed during, let's say, the last couple of years?
That's a couple of questions, I would say. Let's try to close one after the other. Basically, if we speak of a lifetime value that is one, two, or three years, that's depending on the product. Some products might just have the longevity of one year, and that's perfectly fine. But then we would also assume that we see a reasonable ROAS after that one year. If a company has two years, then we would also want to have the two years. It's fair to say that it matters from a financial perspective, the longer the period is actually taking. But from a company perspective, the question is, and that's also the second part of the question, which ROAS we actually have. I think it's maybe also something which needs to be highlighted.
If we speak of a return on ad spend, then this is always blended, right? There's some campaigns that might run on a very high ROAS, whereas other campaigns are running on a lower ROAS. As I stated, we wanna have ROAS significantly above the 120%. Usually, it depends on the scale we wanna have in the end. It's not this one ROAS that we can actually just point out that we wanna have, but all games in their respective lifetime needs to deliver a positive ROAS.
Thank you very much. How does the data from the 2020 cohorts compare to the 2019 data that you've shown? Is there anything you can say on that?
Let's see if I got the question right. The comparison in terms of lifetime values, I would assume is meant. To be entirely honest, I would need to look it up. It's a bit of a detailed question, but I would say the development basically of the lifetime value and the cohorts is again, it's kind of always this 100% graph, so it's equal as far as I know, to my best knowledge. Again, I would need to look it up. It's a bit detailed in that regard.
Makes sense. What's the average time for returning on ad spend across MTG, or for any of the specific segments? Is there anything you can comment on that?
Again, that depends on the lifetime value of the different companies. One-year companies obviously break even earlier, two-year companies a bit later, and obviously, a three-year companies can also afford to break even a bit later. Again, it's about the total ROAS that we can actually achieve.
Makes sense. How many games as a proportion or percentage make it to the commercial stage?
That's a dangerous question, I would say. It depends on where you start counting. There's some companies out there that kind of count every idea and tell a lot about how many products they kill. I would say that's usually not what we are doing in the group. Usually we come up with a different test, and once there's a really established product, then actually we try to test it and to bring it to the market. This again, it depends on what you wanna count.
Makes sense. Thank you. In terms of driving lifetime value, how dependent are you on performance marketing to reactivate users as opposed to reactivating organically or through CRM?
Again, trying to cut it in different topics. If it's about the reactivation of players, it's not a too big topic, admittedly, because if people decided to play the game and then they quit, I guess that's what we are referring as reactivation. That's a minor part of the whole model. I guess the second part is the cross-selling, and I think the answer to that was already in the presentations.
When it comes to the whole marketing machine, what elements do you think are the easiest and most impactful to implement across the group to generate synergies?
The easiest, to be entirely honest, which in itself might not be the easiest one, but is the performance-based culture to kind of think about delivering a value to the business. That's something all companies are doing, but if you have the right tools and the right reporting, then the decision can be taken pretty fast. I think that's a big topic. All the companies do have the data, all the companies can apply it, all the companies can pull those reports, and MAPI and CAT are basically capitalizing on top of that because we wanna have very fast campaign management. And as I mentioned earlier, the basic idea is to free up the time for the marketers to drive the performance instead of handling the campaigns.
Makes sense. I don't know if this is too granular, but what do you think of the upcoming changes to the something called the SKAdNetwork from Apple and also the potential policing of fingerprinting?
Let's say that question came a bit expected. The recent changes is still something we need to digest, right? It's not out for so long. We still need to see what it actually is. I would say, in this case, so to speak, Apple has been taking out a lot of transparency in terms of marketing, with the first versions of ATT and SKAN, and now it seems like they're giving us a bit more data. I guess still this is subject to be seen, but I guess, in our terms, we are kind of big companies.
We do have a lot of data, and the kind of fuzziness that is actually being created by ATT and the SKAN reporting is something we can sort out on our side because we do have the different companies. We can compare the results of the different companies. We also have the scale because there's still also the opt-in users that we can track as before. We can also do some projections around the SKAN reporting.
Thank you. We don't have any further questions at this time. We're gonna give our guest just a couple more seconds. No, I think we'll end this Q&A here. Thank you very much, Christian.
Thank you very much and h ave a nice day.
Thank you very much. I will now hand the stage back to Arnd, who will talk about M&A and M&A-driven value creation.
Thank you, Anton. Hi again. Now comes the fun part. How are we gonna spend all the money? Let me first recap a bit. Since I started already eight years ago with MTG, we were pretty much the first to articulate a buy and build strategy when we built this new digital entertainment portfolio, starting with esports and InnoGames. Over that time, we had one key principle, and that's also a principle I very much enjoy. It's always people first, because if you work with great people, you learn. If you enjoy what you're doing, the results will be stellar and very convincing. That's why our whole M&A approach has always been highly selective. We're very picky because in the end, it is about the people you work with.
What also still strikes me after having worked in all these digital businesses is the amount of passion in this industry. I mean, we talked about valuations and money, but honestly, what really drives my colleagues, these great entrepreneurs, and also us here as a team, is the passion about making great games. Over the years, we looked into so many companies. We had the pleasure to meet all these driven entrepreneurs across the world, and they all impressed me. Very smart, passionate people. We also walked away from many, many deals. When we talk about M&A, sure, we look at our small but global game village we have already built.
As you can see here, there are some empty plots where we'd love to find the right teams, the right visionary, long-term committed entrepreneurs with an affinity in their audience for existing genres. There should be cultural fit, and then we're happy to onboard them, bring this into this beautiful game village. Actually we are in a pretty good position now. It's a good starting point, because our concept of building a best home for entrepreneurs, not just a new corporate structure, no, really a best environment where they can grow, learn, keep their independence, what they appreciate, where we support them same time, where they can learn from each other. This preferred home for entrepreneur concept resonates with the entrepreneurs we are looking for, and we spend some time on discussing the operating model with the entrepreneurs.
On top, and it's even more important these days, we have a very strong balance sheet after the divestment of ESL, and that gives us really good starting point in this environment. Let's probably just look at our last 18 months, what we have accomplished, because we have proven we've been able to pick the right entrepreneurs who can deliver great value. When we evaluate a company, honestly, it's not about the upfront valuation. I mean, yes, we wanna be fair. Value the company. I brought here the three recent cases to share some numbers because I know you're keen to see some multiples. Honestly, what we see in the company when we spend more than three, six months, sometimes it starts, in Ninja Kiwi's case, four years earlier, where we build a relationship because it's about the people.
We get to know them. We look at things like how they develop games, how they think about innovation, how they drive Live Ops. There are so many components we look at, and in the end, yes, for you visible, we summarize this in an upfront consideration. Here I brought as one calculation the current upfront consideration. When you take the last 12 months on the left in the green bar, the last 12 months of their performance, and then I can calculate a multiple, which doesn't really reflect the true value, the strategic value of each company. Like in a marathon race, you have some who have a great start, are pretty fast in the beginning. You have others who rather catch up later.
For us, it's important after a very careful and long diligence process to align on strategic goals, growth plan, how they can benefit from our Flow Platform. Then together we agree on a growth plan and the key drivers, and based on that, we value the company. If we do the math here, upfront consideration PlaySimple Ninja Kiwi. They've clearly outperformed in the first year our expectation. That's why you see on the left side a fairly low upfront consideration. If you now factor in the earnout consideration as it stands today over the next years to come, then you end up somewhere between this 11x as total consideration and 7x in Ninja Kiwi's case.
Hutch numbers are higher, but again, the strategic value is really the hidden value, and some companies like Hutch might use a bit more time, and that's the nature of the games business. That's why we have a diversified portfolio. Not all game launches work. I mean, look at InnoGames. They needed some time, but now they have three new games ready to launch. Hutch has still growth potential with three live games, and we know their strength, and they will launch and scale new games. We have a high confidence that in the long run, and it's a long-term game, they will deliver the value. Please take this only as a snapshot. We look much deeper at really the assets of each company. We have seen a great revenue growth. We have bought in attractive audience where we can cross-promote.
Having said that, our M&A activities follow a clear framework. As I said, it's all about the people. The cultural fit and the strong entrepreneurial team is what count most, and that's why we need to spend time with them, and that's why I'm happy that we're back to physical meetings, game conferences, and can develop these relationships. We want to find profitable, growing businesses, no turnaround cases. We want to see growth in the businesses as standalone businesses. That also means after you've heard about how games are run as a service, and we want to build franchises who can last for decades. That's why we prefer game studios with iconic IP, evergreen IP, and who have proven that they can launch successful games in a row.
During this process of due diligence and relationship building, we have an honest and open conversation about our operating model, how they prefer to run the business, because the independence is key. That's how you also motivate them to stay for a long time, and where we can identify operational synergies which we're gonna leverage over the years. This is our M&A framework, and that has led now to a highly attractive shortlist of companies. We're in active discussions, and as much as I would love to share all the names, please be reassured we are highly active. We found an interesting pool of now 15 companies where we engage with. On top, we have the VC fund. We are constantly screening even more companies during the year. Some might also end up in our portfolio funnel, but we want to stay picky.
We will be selective because over the next probably 12-24 months, we rather do two-three standalone acquisitions, not six or eight, because otherwise our concept will not work out. Which is also important to keep in mind in this M&A approach is that relationship building takes some time, and then our entrepreneurs will become a magnet for others, so they take reference calls. In the end, we want to build a really beautiful game village and help them to thrive. This is a plan not only for next two, three years, rather for the next decade. With having said that, I'm very happy to hand over to Lasse, our new CFO, who will talk about the financial management.
Thank you, Arnd. With that, I'm gonna try and put a couple of numbers to some of the things that are being said today, and I think I'll leapfrog a bit on Maria's comment on doubling the size of MTG towards 2025 and giving you some details around how do we actually expect to achieve that. My section basically has two important components. One is giving you a more detailed update on the trading performance, including also some new data disclosure we have when it comes to revenue per major game franchise, when it comes to UA spend, when it comes to cash conversion, and also some new adjustments we're doing on our EBITDA. That will feed into our long-term outlook for the years from 2022 to 2025 in terms of revenue, profitability and cash conversion.
Also you could say some sensitivities on M&A based on the balance sheet they'll be able to have in terms of driving M&A agendas. With that, I will start with some of the historical data here. Over the last nine quarters, we've seen strong double-digit pro forma growth from the portfolio of our current five studios. Latest, we delivered 10% in Q1, which we also stated was indicative for the full year of 2022. This is despite the fact that the market has actually been contracting lately in terms of, you say, some declines after the boost from the COVID-19. You should really see the fact that we do expect the 10% growth as a strong testament to the performance that we're seeing in the studios.
The growth is still, i t is both driven by some of the new studios, some of the new titles in our organic part of the studios, but also stabilization of some of the mature titles. On profitability, after we've had elevated margins over the last two years, we've seen stabilization towards more normalized levels now at around 25% adjusted EBITDA margin. This normalization reflects three overall trends. One is that we've actually started now significantly more commercial scaling of games in 2022 versus what we saw in 2021 and in 2020. We also see coming out of COVID-19 that it was a very beneficial market with less competition on the advertisement market, and that gave very attractive investment opportunities from a marketing point of view. Then we're also seeing now the full impact of the IDFA regulation that Christian talked about.
We were also indicated in Q1 that the 25% adjusted EBITDA margin was indicative for how we expected the full year of 2022 to develop. Of course, you will always see some variations across quarters, but nevertheless, I think that's still a good anchor point. We'll also include in our new outlook and guidance, basically adjusted EBITDA, where the run rate LTIP cost will not be adjusted for anymore, but I'll come back to that later in the presentation. Again, still looking at the historical performance, we've talked about now the gaming franchises for a while, and as part of our new disclosure and reporting, we're introducing these franchises. The franchises reflect an overall category of games that have a shared engine or theme in terms of development, as Maria already walked you through.
Hence, most of our studios, or if not all of them, are fitting into one specific franchise. Due to quarter-by-quarter fluctuations, we are focusing the reporting and commenting on revenue last 12 months, so total trading revenue, which gives a better understanding on the underlying performance trends. As you can see, our revenue is composed from a diversified set of franchises, with strategy and simulation continuing to be our biggest, but with word games catching up fairly quickly. I'll put a couple of words to each of them and their latest development. For strategy and simulation, we saw a significant boost under COVID-19. It was especially driven by the browser revenue from Forge of Empires. As you can see now, we have almost flat sequential development.
The declines post-COVID-19 has started to wear out, and it's especially the browser decline that we are starting to see coming back to more normalized levels. Also at the same time, we do see quite significant revenue uplift from some of the new game titles, especially Rise of Cultures, that's compensating some of this decline. We're gonna visit that also on the next slide. I know Arnd already showed some of that on his previous presentation. On the word games franchise, we've seen a very strong sequential growth the last many quarters here. It's really also been both benefiting from having just very strong titles in a growing market, but the in-app advertisement market has also been boosted a lot on the COVID-19.
That has returned to normal growth, but that growth rate is still significantly higher than the in-app purchase market, as Maria went through. Hence, we are seeing here still some growth, but as you can see, the sequential development has also come down in terms of growth rates and probably coming closer to now normalized levels. When you're seeing such a jump, of course, we're doing everything we can to stabilize at those levels and then investing in LiveO ps and new games to ensure the future growth in the coming quarters for our word game genre.
It's somewhat the same story with the tower defense franchise, whereas you can see also, and we're not going all the way back, but on an actual basis, we're almost doubling in 2021 our revenue, and of course, coming into 2022, everything is around how do you actually keep those kind of elevated levels, especially because it was a lot to do with BTD 6 that got a lot of attention when it comes to streamers, a lot of attention when it comes to Apple features, and basically, we could boost a lot based on that. But good thing is, despite those, you could say, what looks like one-off boosts, a lot of players are staying around, and that means we are stable at these levels.
As we are investing in new games and also scaling some of the new games, Battles 2, which is a new game in this category, we do expect also to see growth in the years to come here, of course. Last franchise I'll touch upon is racing. This is, of course, Hutch who's developing games for that. As you can see, it's been a fairly flat development the last quarters. Of course, this is not what we had expected in terms of seeing more significant growth. It's also fair to say that these games are the ones that has been hit the hardest by the new Apple regulations on privacy.
The reason is that their marketing mix has been very skewed towards Facebook, and Facebook has been one of the, you could say, big losers in this new data privacy when it comes to marketing channels. Now, Hutch basically needs to, you could say, redirect their marketing to other channels and build that. Christian and the team is working together with them to do it. Of course, we're still very optimistic and believe in the potential of these games, but it is about, you could say, rewiring those marketing efforts. The rest of the games are captured here in the other smaller franchises. As I mentioned, this is gonna be new data disclosure that we're gonna give every quarter.
From Q2, we're of course adding another LTM here to the graph, and of course gonna comment on that also to give you more transparency on how the game performance is actually going. Last cut in terms of the historical performance is focusing a little bit more on the new games and on some of our larger top five titles, as we call them here. Maybe just focusing first on the new games. New games for us is Rise of Cultures, is Sunrise Village, is Lost Survivors, is Battles 2, and Crossword Explorer. Basically going across three of our companies. If you look at the top five games, it's Forge of Empires, Word Trip, Word Jam, Daily Themed Crossword, and BTD 6.
Maybe starting with the new games, we've seen a very significant growth under the commercial scaling that has happened, with especially Rise of Cultures being the biggest contributor. Looking at fresh data from May, we have now reached a yearly run rate on gross revenue from the five new titles of almost, as you can see here, SEK 350 million. Of course, based on the recent trend, as you can also see here, we do expect to see sequential growth month- by- month in the time to come. For us, this is a very strong achievement because as you also know, especially driven by InnoGames, they have not launched a game for a while.
I think one of the questions previously for Christian was how many games that get scrapped, and InnoGames is one of the, you could say, studios that really want to see everything work before we hit the commercial engine, and this is really one of the proof points of that, especially with Rise of Cultures. On the top five games, we're also happy to see the development here. Almost sequential growth from every quarter, but at least a fairly clear trend. Of course, different things are happening here. You have the word games that all of them have more or less been growing sequentially every quarter.
You have Forge of Empires, which basically has seen on mobile a flat development in the latest quarters, on browser a decline, but again, more than compensated by the word games and the BTD 6 game that has been growing fairly well under this. Despite the fact that these are mature games, many of them are still growing quite significantly. Of course, basically, if we look at the potential we have from the new games, the potential we have from our top games, how we expect the market to develop, that's what goes into our financial outlook and basically educates us on what we estimate for the future. Looking ahead, to give some indications on how we estimate the future to look like, our ambition is to outgrow the market.
I think you've heard that quite a few times, both today and previous quarters, but I think it's important to stress again. As Maria also mentioned, we estimate the market to grow at about 5% yearly, so our target addressable market. Basically, we estimate that we'll be able to outperform it, delivering 7%-10% organic revenue CAGR for the next four years. This is based on constant FX. By applying that, we would deliver somewhere between SEK 6.3 billion and SEK 7 billion revenue in 2025, again, organically. If you then look at the revenue mix in 2025 of these SEK 6.3 billion to SEK 7.0 billion, if we start from the bottom, you have basically 80% of that is expected to come from the established games.
If you compare this level with where we're exiting 2022, it's fairly in line. Basically, not a lot of growth is assumed. If you then look at what is in that 80%, you have on the right-hand side that 70% of that is the top five games that I commented on previously. Four out of five of them are growing, with Forge being the one that is not, but still stable on mobile, just not on browser. With the additions of in-app advertisement on Forge, we actually believe a fairly stable development there as well. On top of that, you have the 15% that we expect to come from the proven new games. 15% here is about SEK 1 billion.
Compare that number to what we talked about just on the previous slide, that these five games are at a run rate of SEK 350 million right now. They basically need to triple. If you look at what has happened the last 12 months, we feel comfortable in the estimate that that can actually happen. Then on top of that, we do have a pipeline of 10+ new games. Of course, we do expect those to actually also have a revenue contribution. Here, we've put in about SEK 350 million, which is the 5% in 2025. Again, 7%-10%, you're gonna hear me say a couple of times, but it's an important outlook that we are basically putting down here.
Of course, the market is always uncertain, especially in the short term, but in the long run, we do see quite strong market growth drivers that we expect to continue. If you then also look at what kind of revenue is this, we are significantly increasing our diversification of revenue. That is on a couple of different, you could say, metrics, one of them being the IAP versus IAA. Basically, how much is in-app purchase versus in-app revenue. As you can see, we have already diversified a lot from 2020 to 2022 by adding PlaySimple to the mix. Now, with the growth of PlaySimple, but also adding advertisement to our other studios, e.g. InnoGames, that we've discussed today, we do expect to see even more in-app advertisement revenue.
The good thing about that revenue is that it delivers some kind of hedge, because then you could say the advertisement market both becomes your cost when it comes to marketing, but also a revenue driver. Basically, when it's high, it hits your marketing negatively, but it hits your revenue positively, high in terms of cost. On top of that, if we look at the platform revenue, we're also seeing diversification there. We are coming from having 30% on browser, which is a declining market, to in 2022, we expect 21% and even lower in 2025 as the browser from Forge is expected to decline, but being compensated by mobile in both Forge but also in the other games.
On top of that, we're also investing in third-party distribution platforms, most of them PC-related, so for example, Steam, where the margins are healthier for us, and we're actually targeting a different kind of audience. Especially Ninja Kiwi with BTD 6 has done this very successfully so far. Last one here, game franchises, where you can see that that mix will not change dramatically, which is also a reflection of the fact that we believe all of them will actually contribute to the growth. Good. Now turning from revenue to profitability. I think if we just start with the headline, we estimate an adjusted EBITDA margin around 23%-25% going forward. In the old definition, this would be 24%-26%. This is to an average from 22%-25%.
The biggest element by far in our EBITDA bridge, as you can also see, is UA spend, and hence we've chose to increase transparency around this metric, and we will report on it also going forward. In Q1, as you can see in 2022, Q1, we reached an all-time high of 42% UA spend as a percentage of revenue. That level is primarily driven by PlaySimple. That has become a larger part of the group. PlaySimple has a different margin structure. They have a similar total EBITDA margin as the rest of the group, but higher marketing spend.
As illustrated on the slide also with the gray line, without PlaySimple, we would be at 31% for the group, which is slightly higher than we had pre-COVID metrics in Q1 back in 2020, reflecting the impact from scaling new titles and the impact from IDFA. Looking forward, we estimate in the range between 39% and 42%, depending on our ability to scale new and mature games, and hence we expect to see variation across the quarters based on the market development. Hopefully, as you understood from Christian's presentation, quarters with high UA spend should not be seen as a negative, as it means we've successfully been able to identify high return investment opportunities, and the same with quarters with lower UA investment levels.
Further, there's also been a number of questions previously related to the cost of the MTG headquarters and how we expect that to develop in the future. We've seen a fairly steady level at about 2% of our revenue, if you look historically, both the last quarters, but actually also the last years, if you isolate the gaming business. We do expect it to stay at this level also going forward, despite the fact that we are adding some costs when it comes to the Flow Platform. That basically takes you to the old adjusted EBITDA margin outlook here between 24% and 26%. If we then deduct the run rate LTIP cost, we get to the 23%-25%. Putting a couple of words to those run rate LTIP costs, what are they?
They basically cover six different programs, one for the headquarters employees and five programs for the portfolio companies. The those programs, of course, also some of the programs that are you could say part of ensuring that there is this a longer term management incentive, management buy-in beyond the earn-out programs, and hence an important piece of the puzzle of basically running an integrated gaming group as we do. We also expect it to stay at that 1.5% going forward. Turning then from profitability to cash conversion. With the latest market development, this is not gonna be a surprise to anyone, this has become a key focus for investors to better understand.
We estimate that the business will deliver between 50% and 60% post-tax cash conversion for the years to come, which will deliver significant cash flows that can be used to either deleverage the balance sheet or to be distributed to shareholders, or as the last one, of course, which is related to the balance sheet, to further fuel M&A expansion, as we'll talk more about. To also understand our cash bridge, the largest two components are basically CapEx. Here we estimate that will remain around the 13%-17% of adjusted EBITDA margin. That is equal to 3%-4% of revenue. One should expect some variations over the quarters, but historically, the rate has actually been fairly stable in this interval. Net working capital, we don't expect any either negative or positive contribution from. Of course, some quarter-by-quarter deviations, as you also saw in Q1.
We have tax as the other big component here. We estimate it will remain around 28%-30% of the adjusted EBITDA, or 6%-8% of revenue, which basically reflects the structure of the countries our portfolio is basically spread across. If we then look at the balance sheet, given that we have no financial debt, but only earn-out liabilities, we had end of 2021, SEK 2.8 billion in expected earn-out liabilities. The cash flow from the business will actually be self-sufficient to ensure that we can pay down those earn-out liabilities in the years to come. As you can see illustrated on the right-hand side, as we start paying down those earn-out liabilities, we start adding to our cash pool, which is about SEK 4.5 billion after the share redemption program.
This is even better illustrated on the next page, where we are looking on the left-hand side a bit on the firepower number. You heard Arnd say that we would have SEK 11 billion by 2025 in terms of firepower. If you then look at how is that actually calculated and decomposed, it's three different component, one being cash, and cash is fairly constant, as I mentioned, in the next couple of years to come, but then starting to increase. The driver of that is the purple part here, where you can see that we estimate a potential earn-out capacity on the balance sheet at around 2x EBITDA. Right now, we're not very close to that, if you look at the 2022 here.
As we approach 2025, and we have paid down that earn-out liability we have today, of course, that gives strong flexibility there. Then on top of that, we estimate about 1.5x EBITDA in financial debt capacity, which we haven't utilized today. We have RCF facilities in place, but just not drawn on them. That's also, of course, growing with the organic EBITDA here in totality, leaving SEK 11 billion on the balance sheet in 2025, especially for M&A purposes. If it was for shareholder remuneration purposes, you wouldn't look at the earn-out capacity in the same way.
If we're then looking at the SEK 11 billion, and coming a bit back to Maria's point on how will we actually double the business, if we assume we're gonna invest those SEK 11 billion in accretive M&A deals, we've done the math here to do M&A at 10x-12x EBITDA. You can see we would a little bit more than double the EBITDA, some of it coming from organic, but of course, as you can see, the red part here coming from acquisitions. That translates into a more than doubling also at the free cash flow per share.
If you then look at more than SEK 14 in free cash flow per share as a percentage of our current share price, we believe at least we will be trading at a very attractive yield based on the M&A opportunity and organic opportunity that we have here in front of us. Just a summary of the long-term outlook that we have presented here today. On revenue, and revenue here is a pro forma FX-adjusted growth rate, but of course, very soon pro forma and organic is exactly the same thing. We estimate an organic CAGR of 7%-10% for the years 2022-2025. We estimate an average adjusted EBITDA margin of 23%-25%, in the old definition, 24%-26%. On the cash conversion, we estimate 50%-60% cash conversion, and that's a post-tax.
As part of Q2 reporting, as we also mentioned, of course, we will be adding these data points as reporting. Some of them we already have today, e.g. revenue. EBITDA will have the new adjusted, and then we're also gonna show more, specifically cash conversion. Of course, the franchises and UA spend, as was mentioned already earlier. Just before opening up for the last Q&A here, I just wanna summarize a bit the investment case that we see in front of us. Because as a pure-play company, MTG has really a unique opportunity to capture beyond market growth in a very attractive and growing market, estimating to deliver 7%-10% revenue CAGR organically, plus a significant opportunity on top from M&A.
Building on a strong portfolio of companies, MTG can utilize the reach and capabilities to build an operating model that we call the Flow Platform, which is needed to really scale evergreen franchises in a profitable way, delivering what we believe is very healthy margins between 23% and 25%, and a cash conversion between 50% and 60%. With a strong balance sheet and significant deleverage opportunity from the strong operational cash flow, MTG estimates that the EBITDA could more than double towards 2025 through both organic growth and utilizing the balance sheet for value- accretive M&A, increasing the potential free cash flow per share to more than SEK 14 . I think with that, I'll invite my colleagues up on stage with me here for the last Q&A.
Thank you very much, Lasse. I'm sure we'll get more questions incoming, but let's start with a wider question on the market. The overall mobile market has been down for three quarters straight according to data reports. When do you think we will see that changing?
I can start and then you can pitch in.
Yeah.
I mean, every news report you read has a slightly different twist to it. I mean, I referenced the Newzoo reports earlier today when I talked about the 5% CAGR that we expect in the market, and that is coming both with this year and also in the years to come from Newzoo. I know Sensor Tower were out, now in June, sort of citing a 1% growth this year. The reality is probably somewhere in between. I think what we are focusing on is to make sure that we drive our performance. We are in the game for the long term, so I mean, we focus on the long-term 5% projection, the 3 billion gamers out there. Our focus is to come back to organic growth in the second half of the year. That's to Lasse's point in his presentation. Now that's what we feel very comfortable about.
I think maybe to add, in quite a few of franchises we have a small market share, and that also means that we have a very good opportunity to actually take market share with some of the new games in those genres. Of course, we are exposed to declining markets, and we would like to see that post-COVID-19 period soon to end and see the future growth from there. I think it's important also to remember how small we still are in some of these genres.
That makes sense. The next question goes to Arnd and has to do with M&A. In the past, esports have been a factor when acquiring new companies. With Savvy Gaming Group as the new owner of ESL and the former esports vertical, and also recently, of course, a new large shareholder of Embracer, how do you see that relationship evolving in the future?
Just that I get the question right, you mean our relationship with Savvy Gaming?
Yes.
Our relationship with Savvy Gaming has ended when we handed over our friends from ESL and with FACEIT, and they will now pull off the merger between these two companies. ESL was for us the proof for successful buy- and- build strategy and also the proof that we are a really good owner. We have done roll-ups and executed buy- and- build strategy. We have also realized that we're also at a certain point in time when we are not the best owner, and this is now Savvy Gaming who drive the consolidation of the market. I can't comment on the relationship of Savvy Gaming and Embracer. We had a good interaction with Brian and his team, and we believe they will continue investing into the esports market.
That makes sense. Then a follow-up question on M&A. You mentioned previously that we want to do accretive M&A. Does that mean that you rule out doing deals like Hutch that are, for example, maybe currently dilutive but have a strategic value? Also, as a follow-up question, with our current valuation quite low, will it be difficult to find great studios at the current valuations? Maybe a two-step question to Arnd and Maria.
Yeah. Probably if I can start. As I said, we are here for the long run. Yes, we are a listed company and we have to report quarter-over-quarter, and we wanna also bring you closer to the market. When it comes to Hutch, we have high confidence that Hutch will deliver in the long term. The nature of the games business, as we've seen with InnoGames and learned over the last now seven years, it sometimes takes some time to launch successful hit game. Hutch has all the ingredients, the know-how, the talents, and the passion to deliver these hit games, and they've done in the past. This snapshot over the last 12 months doesn't represent and hasn't shown Hutch's full value.
That's why I can only encourage everyone to have some patience and look at the long run where Hutch will deliver. I'm very confident on that one. Again, would I do the same deal again? Yes, because nothing has changed what we have seen. All the great assets, the drivers of future growth, the capabilities, so it's still a great asset, and we are not distracted from probably a short-term shortfall because we know the key driver is still intact, and we'll help them to grow over the next coming years.
Thank you very much.
I think maybe commenting on the second part of the question, which was the difference between, you could say, our multiple and how the market is right now developing. Of course, there is a discrepancy in terms of how the recent market development has been on the public companies. I think we are very happy with our balance sheet because it basically enable us to do M&A without having to necessarily issue shares, which is a good thing in these kind of markets. Then of course, you always see also impact on the private markets when something like this happens in the public. It's not making M&A significantly easier, but it's not making it impossible either.
Thank you very much. The next one on a slightly different topic is a question on the margin guidance. If you have seen 2022 as a year of significantly scaling new games, why do you not see a higher long-term margin? Should this be seen as a result of a strong current growth for PlaySimple, for example?
Yeah. I think we are only giving guidance here until or an outlook until 2025. If you look at the portfolio for PlaySimple, they have one game that is really being scaled right now, but also further two games that will be scaled, and hence we do see that opportunity to invest in these titles for the years to come. Of course, we're now a portfolio of five different companies, and some of them will then be the next ones likely to have real big games and titles that needs to be scaled. We believe at least this gives us some room of flexibility in terms of where we'll be.
Again, also we do communicate an average over the period, and hence it could be that a year we are higher and another year we are lower because of basically this point in terms of how we are scaling and investing our games.
That makes sense. We don't have any further questions at this moment, but just like before, we're going to give our guests a little bit of time to see if anyone wants to add any questions before we then either answer or move on to closing remarks. No, it doesn't look like we have any more questions coming in, so I'm gonna hand over back to Maria for any closing remarks, and thank you very much.
Thank you, Anton. Thank you everyone for tuning in today. It's been an absolute pleasure to walk you through our strategy, MTG as a pure-play gaming company. I truly hope that you enjoyed the session as well. Hopefully then we'll come back with you, with a date coming up in late, sort of mid, late Q4, where we're also gonna invite you to an in-person event where we'll bring our game makers and entrepreneurs and bring you behind the scenes of our games. Until then, have a fantastic midsummer and summer, and we're also hoping to see you soon. Take care and have a good day.