Hello, good morning.
Good morning, good morning.
Greetings from Finland.
Spring is coming.
Yes, yes.
We are here.
Indeed, again. We are here to deliver you fresh off the bat the new Q1 report and the key things inside it.
Exactly.
Yes. I'm Jussi Tähtinen, CEO and Co-Founder here at Nitro Games, and with me I have my co-founder.
Antti Villanen, Chief Strategy Officer. Together running business with Jussi now for 18 years.
Yes, yes, yes. Five sentence.
Five sentence.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay, just in case you are new to Nitro Games, this is what we do. We are a games company from Finland. We have been doing this for a long time, like Antti mentioned already, and we focus on action and shooter brands across platforms.
With the brands, we're meaning that we are not only developing the games, we are working with the big IPs, we are partially publishing some of the games, so we are widely working with the big entertainment brands and developing games, publishing games, licensing games, sometimes even acquiring some gaming assets. Yeah, it's a quite wide range where we are operating.
Indeed, indeed.
Why in the shooter and action category?
I think that's because firstly, we like it a lot. We like games where things go boom. Also, when you look at the longer history of gaming, it's action and shooter that has always sort of become the leading genre on any given platform, on any given generation, one way or another.
It seems that also in the mobile.
Yeah.
It seems that mobile shooters are dominating the charts. Naturally, there are many other categories that are very profitable and working fine within the customers, but shooters, action being the one definitely dominating categories.
It is this type of category for gamers in a way. There's so many casual categories these days as well.
It seems that the shooter brands in any platform, they quite often become evergreens. There are lots of these Call of Dutys and whatnots that are living for decades.
Yeah.
Something you will see when we look at our portfolio is that why we get to work with so many leading brands, whether they are our own brands or brands of our partners, is because of our background in the field of marketing, where we come from before we did games. I would say that maybe in Nitro Games, you have two big unique selling points in a way that one, we're super strong in the technical side of things, which is essential in this type of game development and maintenance. We are also especially strong when it comes to understanding brands. We know what makes a brand a brand, and we know how to deal with different IPs in a respectful manner that we stay true to the IP.
Also understanding the customer, customer behavior, and market trends, and that's where we have a heavy focus on business intelligence and customer insights and looking for those perfect combinations of the gameplay and brands and monetization and meta game to fit for the needs of the evolving customer needs.
Indeed, indeed. That's us. Now we look at the recent highlights from the first quarter. It was definitely a quarter full of many different events, and we had this transformation with our game portfolio going in many ways. There was obviously some bad news during the quarter as Netflix canceled the project we had with them. Also, like always in life, with every negative surprise, there's always something positive that comes with it. For Nitro, that means that we were able to focus so much more on new things in our portfolio, which is smack bang in line with our plan for this year. We want to expand our portfolio, we want to expand to new platforms, and especially to new types of gamers and audiences out there. Out of these, short on what we've already done is that we pushed out the first public demo for Altocon Heroes: Supercharged.
Expanding the brand?
Yes
expanding the platform reach for the customers. There we saw the kind of customer needs for this kind of gameplay feature and this kind of brand also in the kind of traditional gaming platforms. It gives us good benchmark against the mobile and web, where we have a little bit different type of consumer behavior and what they want from the game. Then behind the scenes, we also continued the web expansion for Altocon Heroes. We've been trying out stuff on some new platforms, but we will talk maybe more about those later as things become public. On the mobile gaming side, we, of course, pushed forward with Supersonic and seeking our way towards the scalability.
We expanded the new area of gaming.
Yes, yes.
High gaming world and being a bit of a different from the traditional mobile gaming, but very interesting area where we could utilize our existing brands in a very new environment and maybe touching a new consumer segment also.
Definitely, yes. It's Pistolo we are talking about, and I think it's a prime example of that because we have such a big back catalog of various different game brands, gameplay mechanics, elements, what we call in our Nitro platform, and that we have produced with what we call our MVP process, where we tested many different things. There's a lot of good stuff there to pull from moving forward as well.
It seems that there is a market for that kind of experiences modified to fit into the gaming ecosystem.
Yeah. In terms of numbers, we again continued by delivering profits. We are not talking huge profits during the first quarter, but we are proud that we were able to go through this transformational period with our portfolio and still deliver revenues and still deliver positive EBITDA. That is also well in line with our goals for this year, where we want to focus on the profitability. How we go about all of this is thanks to our fantastic team. This is something that we maybe do not talk enough in a way, but it is all about the team. In our case, teams in plural.
Yeah, it's not just the two teams or two locations that we have here in Finland, but we have several partner studios that we've been working for years and years and years, pretty much all around the world. Some of those studios are working purely for us. Some of them are working partially together with us on our models' varieties. For us, it brings scalability to direction.
Yep.
Access to the talent, best possible talent, whenever the project lands, where we have some specific needs for the high gaming sector or something else. That is very both cost-efficient for us. It is a risk management tool, but then it is also a very good way of scaling those smaller studios that are specialized in some field and maybe have some longer-term strategy with the studios and evaluate the collaboration and what is the cultural fit between the teams. There are many kind of factors to consider while operating like this.
Yeah. Especially this year, when we seek to expand our game portfolio, and it's no secret, we're also looking a lot outside of our current teams, like what can we do, other games that we could collaborate with from third-party studios and so on, because we have worked with these different studios for so long. We know the people and so on. Now it's a natural next step to see what they have in their own game portfolios as well.
We are scaling those teams all the time.
Yeah.
Speaking of games and brands and portfolio, this is our brand portfolio at the moment. Maybe we go through these things one by one.
Yeah.
Warframe is obviously a very, very big brand. It's one of those evergreens with way more than 10 years history under their belt. We have worked together with Digital Extremes for maybe more than three years now.
Something like that.
Quite some time now. Yeah.
This is a good example of a partnership where we just strengthened it moving forward and become closer and closer in terms of the collaboration, despite the big time zone difference.
Yeah. I think, as we earlier mentioned about the unfortunate cancellation of the project with Netflix, I think this is more like a process than a project.
Yeah.
It has become like a collaboration process where our team and their team are seamlessly working together towards the common goal.
Yeah. This one's by Nitro Games out there on iOS, and it's no secret that we are working on the Android version of the game. Of course, the game is available on all the other platforms out there as well. This is a good sort of example of how we treat a cross-platform evergreen brand on mobile in a way that, one, it runs technically smoothly. It's the same game you can play with the other platforms out there, but we also treat it in a way that respects the mobile audience, what they are expecting in terms of usability and the whole interfaces and everything.
I think the technical side is something to highlight of this case even higher, because there are not too many teams around the world who can pull this kind of AAA, AAA experience on a mobile with a similar quality as in a big console or PC. That is definitely based on our unique strength of having very strong technical capabilities.
With Warframe, we are proud to say that, again, the game has received some new industry award nominations and so on. During the second quarter, we are nominated at least for two different awards at the moment. Happy to see how those play out. That's always a good sort of stamp of approval also from our customers.
Customer ratings are another one.
Yeah.
Getting better and better.
Yes.
We have Altocon Heroes with the Supersonic.
Yes. That's our dear brand that we've been working on for a few years now as well. That's live on mobile together with our publishing partner, Supersonic from Unity. It's live on web together with our publishing partner there called Crazy Games. Like we said, we're also behind the scenes looking into other new avenues for that game, how we can expand it to more audiences. Where we go now with that project is that with Supersonic on mobile, we have been searching for the scalability for a while now.
Which is a combination of cost of acquiring users and the money that we can generate from the users. It is a balance of us making games better and better and then them optimizing the customer acquisition funnel.
Yes. Like we've said, I think it was in the previous webcast that this is kind of like chasing a moving goalpost in a way that you keep improving the game. Then again, the audience and the cost of acquiring customer, that evolves and so on. That's like a game where you try to get both ends match. Just recently, we launched a very big update to that game to the new user experience. That is something where we revise things from gameplay perspective, also a little bit visually.
Visual style.
We are now at the moment with that update where we are collecting a lot of user input and feedback, but also data. Based on that, we are seeking to make the conclusions about the next steps moving forward. This is how the game rolls moving forward as well, that we see that scalability, that magical point where the user acquisition costs and what the game produces meet nicely in a scale.
Look and feel is maybe more casual, maybe targeted more for the wider audience, where we then keep the kind of deep monetization and deep progression within the game. There might be a combination that works on the market.
Yeah. I think that's the beauty of the data-driven development in mobile, where we can try out more and more radical things if needed to pull the needle and get the numbers where we want them to be.
We have Altocon Heroes: Supercharged.
Yes. This is then again nothing to do with free-to-play anymore. Taking GUS and the other cool guys on PC.
A bit of the gameplay mechanics taking from the original Altocon Heroes, but now introducing it to the new platform.
Yeah.
A little bit of new target audience with the new kind of mechanics of how to download and play and pay for the game. It has been a very interesting journey with one of our kind of key partners on this area. This game is something that you obviously can play with your PC, mouse, and keyboard, but with a pad, it really comes to life. That is something that also makes the core gameplay very sort of big screen friendly if you think about consoles and stuff for that one. With Altocon Heroes: Supercharged, we're now at a point where we did, during the first quarter, some closed testing with the demo and everything. Until we were satisfied with those results, we now pushed it to live demo testing. If you haven't tried it out, you can go and get it from Steam. Next up, we're obviously continuing to finalize the game and get ourselves ready for the launch, which we, of course, never announce beforehand when those things happen.
We are also looking to expand the brand even wider in the platform.
Yes.
It is a step by step, long term, we keep expanding the audience. As a fantastic thing, when all of this then finally come together, we are looking at a brand that is available on many different platforms, many different audiences, and with interconnectivity between all of these to maximize the potential. We have NERF: Superblast. That is a combination of our brand, Superblast, and NERF brand by Hasbro. This is something that we have been working, basically maintaining the game and updating it. Behind the scenes, we have been working on opportunities for this project long term. This is something that we hope that moving forward, we get to talk about some cool new things happening with NERF: Superblast. While waiting for those, we keep the game alive. We keep pushing new seasons of gameplay and so on for the players out there t seems that there is a happy community playing the game and consuming it.
Yeah. It's a prime example of how we are loyal to the NERF: Superblast brand, how they feel and how they look and everything. We treat them just right. We are happy about that.
Pistolo, we already touched a bit, but it's a new take on a new sector segment on gaming. And it's very interesting to see now how the game will perform. It has been live for a week or two.
Yeah.
Something like that. We are gathering and collecting the first data points and doing some small maintenance stuff for the game. I expect to have some more on the iGaming area if this proves to be kind of successful.
Yeah. I think it's an area where we can definitely see a lot of synergies, if not with the audience per se, but with the things that we do on the other platforms and for the other audiences. I think this was a good case for us to learn how things work, not just technically, but how things work in that ecosystem and environment, because, of course, everybody knows that iGaming itself is huge. If you can introduce something new there, who knows about the potential? That's something.
As the mobile free-to-play is so binary, you might have a great game, but there is something with the marketability. There is something with the monetization or something. Now we can also recoup some old investments in new ways, and that may introduce new revenue streams to the company.
Yeah, definitely. Then on the last box, we're highlighting some of our previous partnerships. Like we mentioned in the beginning.
Existing.
Yeah, existing too. Yeah. We've been doing this for quite some time now. Something that, if you look at the long history of Nitro, something that we're known for is that these B2B partnerships and projects, they kind of come and go in the big picture. Sometimes there's a longer-term project.
Yeah, projects. Sometimes it's completed projects. Sometimes something happens in our side or client-side at the end.
It is a combination of longer-term and then sometimes shorter-term. Sometimes we have small little projects as fillers in between and everything like that. It is no secret that, of course, at the moment, we're very active on this front, looking into new opportunities. That is something that this year, in terms of how the outlook for action and shooter category looks on mobile and this combination of the talent we have both on mobile, but also on the other platforms, that looks very, very exciting to Nitro at the moment. That is something that timelines are, of course, always difficult to predict how much time certain things take, but we're very excited about what we see ahead of us at the moment.
Definitely.
Yes. Speaking of history again, this is our history from the previous five years, numbers-wise. This is where we come from. We have five years of consecutive growth behind us. We turned the company profitable at the end of 2023. Last year was the full year when we delivered our profits throughout the year. Like we've said earlier, of course, we want to continue on that, but despite the fact that we do not do any financial guidance, of course, as a company, you want to become better and better and grow moving forward. In terms of numbers, here is our income statement from the first quarter and also the key financials summarized.
I think the key takeaway from these numbers is that despite the transformation in our brand portfolio, we were still able to deliver revenues, deliver a profitable quarter, keep up that pace. Moving forward, of course, we're seeking an improved balance between our own games in our games business, in our portfolio, as well as B2B partnerships, both existing and potentially new ones. That is how we go about these things. Talking about the future, longer term, this is the same slide that we had in the previous webcast, but we wanted to reiterate where we go now.
On a game side, what we are looking for, expanding the new platforms. New games, as I said, we are exploring there. There are some initiatives within Nitro itself. We are exploring the third-party games. On top of that, we are exploring the new platforms where we could take our existing assets and that way introduce new games to new platforms with or without the new partnerships. I think what could be expected from Nitro is expanding the portfolio.
Definitely. Yeah, yeah.
It becomes more and more of a spider web where these things are connected and so on. It is a good base to build on in many, many, many ways.
In terms of the team, this is where I did talk about a little bit earlier, but I think during the first quarter, we have shown the power of this global team and the scalability in both ways. This is also what gives us the leverage moving forward. We are happy to take in more opportunities to work on and expand without it becoming a distraction for the existing projects or the existing things that we work on. This is something that during these previous five years, we've been doing this a lot in different ways.
Working with the various partners all the time, that creates also the strategic opportunities to Nitro. Sometimes it might be acquiring some gaming assets, as we have done with Altocon Heroes, or it can be even something more. Those are something that when we get to know with the people from other teams, other studios that we are working, the cultural fits are starting to melt in. There might be a day that somebody might even join us.
Yeah, indeed, indeed.
Last, but definitely not least, what we're seeking this year is financial stability. This is something that we very much achieved during last year. We have absolutely zero incentives of letting it go. Everything we do this year, when we talk about expanding the game portfolio or even working with more and more teams in new types of ways, we definitely keep the whole financial stability.
The financial profitability.
Yeah.
That's a key driver.
Yeah. We focus on making sure that the existing profitability, existing cash flow we have, and so on, so that we can go forward with those. That's all this time. I hope we gave you a good picture about where we are now at the end of first quarter, and especially where we're headed for the rest of the year. Happy to hear some questions.
Yes, let's see.
Is there anything on a chat?
Let's see from here. Long question, let me read. How do you plan on staying cash positive now that Netflix is gone? It's worrying that you have not signed anything new instead. Also, the Altocon update was really something totally new and surprising. That's good, I guess. Can you elaborate on that and what do you expect from it now? And so on.
Firstly, the financial stability, I think that we have demonstrated already many times historically that we are able to scale our costs up and down depending on the staffing needs that we have at any given point. That is possible because of the model, how we work, with some part of the costs being on our external side. That is the way, not only to scale up, but also sometimes to scale down.
Yeah, yeah.
Those we typically always sign like project-specific type of arrangements and so on, so that there is this flexibility. I think there really is no too much of secrets. We're simple guys, so we like to keep things simple. We base our costs on what is needed at any given time. About signing something new, that's of course a combination of things that you sign for longer periods, maybe some bigger things, and then something you do in between. For example, now during the first quarter, we signed the iGaming deal, and then pretty soon after that, we released it. These, of course, are smaller things on the side, but then again, they come with, in a positive sense of the word, unknown upside over time. These bigger deals, just look back at our history.
This is what we do. Those things will come. What we expect from Altocon Heroes, of course, we are seeking that magical threshold of scalability where the cost of user acquisition meets what we make from a single user. Right now, we're very much headed in a mode that, like I mentioned earlier, we're expanding it to a wider audience and hence playing with different visual styles and so on. Now we're curious to see how the data plays out. We already have some user feedback that we've taken in, and then take it from there. If we're headed in the right direction, you can expect us to expand more in that one. If there's anything wrong with the direction, you can expect some more radical steps. That's what we expect there.
There is a question about, is there a risk of rights issue moving forward? We're not planning any fundraisers at the moment. Regarding Altocon, I see one can play it for free on the web. What is the plan there? Nothing is free. While it's true that you can play it for free, that means that whenever you play Altocon Heroes on the web, you get exposed to advertisement, and that's how we make our monies from that one. Why don't you try to launch the Altocon Heroes on PlayStation, Xbox, etc.? It has the potential for real. Fully agree about the potential. Love playing it on the pad and big screen I have at home. We don't talk about things before they actually happen, but I think it's natural that we talk about platform expansion and the way we've designed the game.
It's built with that type of connection.
It's also already in the PC, and it's not a big jump from there.
There is a question about talking a lot about the scalability of the team, and should we expect costs to come down in the upcoming quarters and so on. I think it's safe to expect that during first quarter, we were in a transition phase, and that's always a little bit more cost-heavy when you do transition, and maybe after that, things settle down to the level where they have to be.
Overall, I would say that we are very cost-cautious. Whenever there is a need, we scale down or up.
Yeah. There is again a question about Altocon Heroes and the scaling of that, and a question about how long we are willing to invest and so on in the product. We do not have any end dates for these things specifically. We always go by the data. I think that you can look at it in a way that when it comes to previous titles in our game portfolio, there is always a point where we conclude the balance, the income versus the costs, to make sure that if it looks like the scaling up is going to be too expensive, like with some games it has been, we might scale down the efforts and do some live maintenance instead so that we can keep the product profitable, revenue-generating.
We explore other platforms or other sectors in gaming. iGaming being a good example of one old asset to be monetized.
Yeah. And then over the longer run, something that we've already seen with the whole Altocon Heroes brand and with the different games that we now have for the brand is that this combination of platform mix that can be the type of spider web where the ends magically meet in a way. Let me still check this other interface of this. No more questions there. Okay, we're done with the questions. That means that we shall meet again in August when we deliver the results for the first half of the year. Be sure to tune in then and don't miss that one.
[Foreign langauge]
Yeah, thank you so much. Have a good one.
Bye-bye.