Good morning. Good morning and good morning.
Good morning.
It's Jussi Tähtinen, the CEO and Co-founder of Nitro Games here, bringing you fantastic sunshine in the form of two Jussi, actually. Today I'm joined with industry legend, Jussi Immonen.
Okay. Yeah, my name is Jussi Immonen. I'm COO of Nitro Games, and I have been in mobile games business for over 20 years, and now in mobile free-to-play business more than 10 years, and last five years with Nitro Games.
It's been a cool ride so far.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Getting better all the time.
Yeah. usually I'm joined by my co-founder and our chief strategy officer and board member, Antti Villanen, but he couldn't be here today because he is on a business travel meeting some of our partners. We have some excellent news to share from Autogun Heroes. The game has been killing it in the soft launch so far, so Immonen, who leads our games business, is here to tell you a little bit more details about what have we exactly seen and what are we about to do with that information moving forward.
Exciting times.
Indeed. Indeed. For those of you who are potentially new to Nitro Games, in terms of a quick summary, Nitro Games, we are your Finnish mobile gaming powerhouse with more than 150 game professionals in our network. The way that we operate is that we have two studios here in Finland, then we have tons of partner studios here and there and everywhere, and that's how we scale up and down. We focus on action and shooter games on mobile. That's our vision, that we want to be the household name in that category. We also have another business, which we call our B2B service business, where we offer our services and expertise to selected partners.
Those are mostly mobile games projects, but more and more so these days and moving forward, also cross-platform, cross-play opportunities that we have there.
Service business was actually the way how I got to know the Nitro. I was working at the Rovio.
Oh, yeah.
B uying services from Nitro Games.
Yeah.
I saw the insane potential, what was there coming in the form of development, skills and resources, and how kind of advanced all the back-end and multiplayer stuff was. Kind of, I saw that, kind of, if this now, kind of, is something that can be utilized to build own games and kind of a not only develop games for the others, but also kind of going into self-publishing and more scalable part of the business and kind of... That's, that was the opportunity, and that's the kind of how I got to, kind of, interested in Nitro. Now we are exactly following that path.
Yeah. I remember many, many years ago, when Immonen used to be our customer, we worked on a couple of Angry Birds titles together back in the day. Okay, cool. Obviously today is all about the Q1 report that we published earlier this morning. Couple of highlights from the report. Compared to the Q1 previous year, we saw our revenues increase, and also we saw our EBITDA improving. In terms of our cash position, we actually improved our cash position slightly as a result of our cost control during the Q1. This is all well in line with our number one priority this year, which is to take Nitro step by step towards profitability, and that's where everything is headed at the moment.
In terms of significant events, obviously Autogun Heroes was announced during the Q1. We started the soft launch. We're gonna talk more about that. Also NERF: Superblast progressed from the initial six months launch phase into live operation phase. We've been very happy to see the game scoring several industry award nominations, in addition to what we've already seen before, like tons of praise from the players and the app stores and so on. That's been generating a lot of good PR for Nitro so far.
Yeah, not only PR.
Yeah.
There's a lot of good things happening because of the quality of the game and all the kind of awards and ratings and all that. Kind of how we have seen Apple, for example, giving us continuous featuring.
Yeah
And kind of a top visibility in the store all translates to more downloads and players and... Right now we are happy to say that we have millions and millions of organic downloads-
Yeah
Coming for the game, kind of, already now after six months of operation.
Indeed. Indeed. In our service business, we signed an expansion with Supermassive Games. This is one of the two key projects we have. We work with Supermassive Games and with Digital Extremes. Those are the biggest service business projects at the moment in the house. In terms of funding and money, we received a positive decision from Business Finland, who is this governmental operator here in Finland supporting technology and export activities for companies like Nitro. This project helps us to go forward with our game portfolio, seeking more opportunities there, and play around with AI, which is obviously the hot new thing in this business and everybody's looking into it.
Now we have a little bit more control structure into exploring the variety of opportunities when it comes to AI and how we can take more and more advantage of that moving forward.
That's super interesting. Part that will probably change also this business quite a lot.
Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. After the period, we just announced today that Autogun Heroes has continued to perform above our expectations, so that's what we wanted to talk to you more about during today. This year for Nitro, we are the oddballs, wanna make huge things happen. Whatever you have seen from Nitro so far, that's not where our ambition level is at. We really want to become one of the top companies in this business. Like I said earlier, the way that we operate is that we have our in-house teams here in Finland.
We have tons of partner studios around the world, and this is the secret for us to be able to scale up and down when it comes to development and operational capacity, depending on the scale and phases of the different projects. This is also something that helps us when we are controlling costs, when we focus on preparing games for upcoming launch, and also, on the other hand, helps us when we potentially sign new deals on the B2B service business, then we can rapidly scale up, depending on the needs of the projects.
Also, the same model applies for our publishing operations that we have built the publishing department and all the marketing operations so that we have now all kind of only very senior people working in the marketing team covering all the main operations. Our technology used is super kind of a modern and scalable and kind of can handle even huge success. When the success happens and we need to start scaling up the operations, we have built everything so that we have the core operations in-house and we can kind of add to kind of a more muscle through-
Yeah
O ur partners and kind of other kind of operations with our game.
Yeah. That is very important because many companies in this business, they kind of like forget to prepare for the success and forget to build the sort of foundation layer in a way that it can also then tolerate increasing, whether it's in terms of headcount or the scale of the game and so on. Our vision, like we said earlier, is that we wanna be the household name in the category of action and shooter games, and that's something that we've defined a few years ago now, and we sharpened our vision, and we focus exclusively on games in that category at the moment. For us, a shooter game can be anything from a first-person shooter to a third-person game to a top-down or a side-scrolling platformer like Autogun Heroes.
As long as there's stuff that goes kaboom, that's essentially what we mean with that. We feel that by further exploring that very specific category and seeing the category grow on one hand, but also opening up new opportunities, that helps us to focus on a very specific thing and become better and better and better with each iteration that we go through.
Shooter games have been the fastest-growing category on many markets and kind of now become already kind of a biggest category.
Yeah
in several markets. This is a growth category, but it's also a massive business opportunity in many different directions, like you just told that there's.
Yeah
T here's very different style of shooter games, and all of those pockets are opening their kind of own opportunity.
Yeah. Especially like we have now learned with Autogun Heroes, we are at a point where we're able to implement modern monetization mechanics on top of the shooter gameplay and thus make shooter games monetize better than they have perhaps been doing in the past. If we look at our strategy and the overall roadmap where we stand, we started with our current strategy at the beginning of 2017. That's when we wanted to start exploring self-publishing and building the capabilities. That's when we listed ourselves in the Nasdaq First North Growth Market in Stockholm, and you joined in 2018, I think, as part of that process. During those years, we kind of like prepared everything. We did our first launches.
Heroes of Warland was launched towards the end of 2018. This first phase in the strategy concluded basically in 2020 when Nordisk Games joined as a leading investor. With their help and support, we've been able to expand the last few years. 2021, we expanded our project portfolio and made Nitro Games operate more in the B2B service business. In 2022, we had two focus points, game launches and B2B projects. We expanded quite heavily on the B2B process side and increased the revenues quite significantly. We also went forward with game launches. The biggest of them was obviously NERF: Superblast.
We also launched some games on Snapchat last year, as a result of Snap announcing that they wanted to discontinue the whole games business, we also discontinued those projects on our end as a result. This year it's all about getting this company towards profitability, as is clear if you look at our numbers from the Q1, but also continue expanding the business. The big thing this year is the upcoming launch with Autogun Heroes.
Yeah.
Yeah. We are very close kind of reaching the profitability, and that's the kind of a main goal for the company. At the same time, also kind of, all the growth directions are looking super good. We have kind of a very strong games now in the self-publishing portfolio and also very cool opportunities on the service business side.
Yeah.
We are kind of, naturally seeking those growth opportunities all the time, but kind of, with the profitability kind of a first mindset now.
Yeah. I like the dynamics how us getting better and better with our own games also introduces new type of opportunities on the service business. These two are supporting each other very well.
I have seen it many times happen in the other companies that when one thing works, then all the kind of projects around starts to work. That's kind of a little bit what I'm seeing now and kind of getting the sense of that.
Yeah
Y ou know, that's happening now with kind of across the portfolio.
Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. Overall this year from the vibes that we have inside the house and with the team, we are very much already like sort of headed towards the success. The vibes have been really good and strong here this year, and the year just keeps getting better and better, the more we go forward. With our strategy, we have a portfolio strategy, and basically at the moment, we have two key projects in our games business, and we have two key projects in our B2B service business.
With these things, what we are seeking to do is that basically our games business is designed to produce shots on goal when it comes to finding these hit games and discovering that hockey stick potential, whereas the service business is giving us the backbone in the form of steady revenue streams, but also improving the brand recognition and allowing us to explore different type of opportunities, especially in the form of other platforms and so on. During the quarter, we continued forward with all of these four projects, and today we're gonna talk mostly about Autogun Heroes because that's the cool new thing and the thing that we haven't spoken too much about earlier.
Worth mentioning that now we are soon with our own game in the state where we have two live products out on the market. Same interesting thing happens now with the partner project. We are getting closer and closer with those projects also to kind of a phases when those games can become a success.
Yeah.
We might end up kind of towards the end of the year having kind of very many successful games in operation.
Yeah
in line.
That's what builds tons of excitement within Nitro as well, because there's so many avenues how we can, how we can make it this year. If we look at the numbers, we started to follow the IFRS, so the International Financial Reporting Standards this year. The difference between this and the previous FAS, Finnish Accounting Standards, is not huge. There's some technical differences in how the numbers are reported. Essentially everything that we report forward from this Q1 report is in IFRS, and we compare to the previous year numbers that have been also converted to IFRS to keep things clear.
What we saw during the Q1 is essentially with our revenues increase compared to the similar period previous year, we saw our EBITDA improve, at the same point, we were able to protect our cash position, we actually had a little bit more money in our cash compared to where we started the quarter. Moving forward, what we're gonna continue to do is to continue on this step-by-step approach towards profitability, while also making sure that we maximize the opportunities with the game launches at hand and with the business opportunities at hand in the service business.
Let me pass the microphone to industry legend Immonen, and we start talking about Autogun Heroes, and this being our own project and not a partner project means that we don't need to oblige to any confidentiality agreements that we usually have with partners and stuff, so we can talk a little bit more openly about the results that we have seen so far.
Yes. So this is- Kind of a project that I'm super excited about. We have been kind of also now fairly open with our partners and industry partners and all the discussions that we have had with partners, like very big companies, they have kind of wanted to give opportunity for us to kind of work with them.
Mm-hmm
With this game. Maybe kind of we have seen some publishing offers on the table. We have seen super good take from the Apple and Google regarding this product and the numbers that we have been kind of pushing from the soft launch. The game has been not only evaluated by us, but also several external analysts.
Yeah
L ooking kind of under the hood and looking the metrics and kind of trying to kick tires and seeing kind of where are the problems.
Yeah
For the problems haven't yet seen.
Yeah.
We are that's why very confident that kind of something that we have now in the hand is definitely kind of a future success. For me, the only open question is that kind of this is gonna be scalable free to play, but then kind of how scalable.
Yeah
A nd how successful, that's kind of a next question. That's only something that we explore when we, when we start scaling. That's when you kind of learn that.
Yeah.
We don't have money to kind of start doing scalability testing with the millions of budget because kind of that we can see then when we start actually operating the game live.
Indeed. Indeed. Let's talk a little bit about how we got here. The thing that we have been discussing earlier is how we have this data-driven process and the MVP process where we test tons of games, both our own and also from our partner studios and so on.
Yeah. If we look at the roadmap in the kind of a timescale, we have already been working with this game, with our partner studio maybe 2 years.
Yeah.
We started following their progress with the game, and we saw the potential very early on, and then we went to the direction where we were discussing that since that company didn't have the mobile publishing expertise and skills and resources, that maybe we should publish the game, and we were testing that game for the publishing opportunity. Pretty much a year ago, when we started going into more late phase testing of the core gameplay, we saw outstanding results which were definitely something that.
Yeah
Haven't seen in this business in terms of retention and in terms of ad monetization. Very quickly we decided that kind of this is the kind of a way too massive opportunity to be kind of a used as a publishing opportunity where the kind of upside is shared and kind of there's a lot of friction for the scaling. We decided that this is the kind of a play that Nitro Games need to play as a kind of a, as a driver's seat. We went very quickly to the acquisition deal with the company. We acquired all the rights for the core product, and we hired the whole team that was working on the game.
Now ever since that, we started scaling up the business with our own resources and kind of, main things now since that last summer was that we started pushing our free-to-play expertise, monetization expertise. We needed to build the whole back end.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm
And all the live operation tooling because the original game was only client-running.
Yeah
Kind of was not built for the kind of a very efficient, modern free-to-play operation, so more like a Games as a Service mentality. Now everything was finalized for the kind of early this year, and we started then measuring the.
Yeah
S uccess of the kind of a more final looking product. Now all the testing that we have been doing since end of January kind of is looking that we have a really winning game in the hand. We are seeing all the metrics are definitely on the kind of a high part of the industry standards and kind of validating that this game needs to be launched and scaled.
Yeah, yeah. We've never gone through this fast soft launch period ever, with any game in the past. One of the reasons is that, we saw pretty exceptional performance out of the box after a little bit of balancing and tweaking that always has to be there. Also because it's a single player game, you don't need to worry that much about how the experiences between different players is going to impact the player journey like you have to do in a multiplayer game. It's also more straightforward and makes measurement more easier because you don't need that huge cohorts to get tons of players to populate servers and things like that, so you can isolate the player experience in an easy way.
Also the balancing of the game is very simple.
Yeah
W hen we can follow the kind of a progress and kind of tune kind of how hard is the monetization, how that starts to impacting the engagement...
Yeah
And kind of, making sure that the balance for the kind of player fun versus the monetization and kind of all the friction that there's on the way is fine-tuned.
Indeed. Moving forward from here, what we're preparing now is the upcoming hard launch for the game, and that will then start the launch phase. Usually, we like to do roughly 6 months launch phases, but we always look at those case by case. During that phase, we usually scale up the game and start seeing revenues grow and all those things. Then we, during that phase, determine what exactly is our live operations strategy beyond that, how much do we want to invest in the live operations phase for years to come, and how does the project life cycle look like. Let's go forward and have a look-see a little bit in terms of what have we actually now seeing during the soft launch and what are these numbers telling us.
All right. Normally we don't publish these numbers because kind of, there's always debatable facts on the table because kind of, what was the cohort, what kind of a testing was done.
Yeah, yeah.
What are the markets where the testing is done, and so on and so on. You can slice and dice these numbers and kind of, you can look at them from different angles and kind of. It's very complex world. Since the numbers are so solid from all the different kind of points of view, we wanted to kind of, give this for the public so that we can be more freely talking about these numbers with our partners and possible investors, also kind of, because we are so kind of confident that the levels are super high.
Yeah.
When it comes to retention, we are looking kind of a day 30 retention, so kind of, 30 days after the game install, kind of how many player will be on that day playing the game. We are seeing now, kind of everything which is above 6%, and 6% is already like a strong long-term retention at this stage. When the game was more in the kind of a fun and run shape last summer.
Yeah
W e saw that this number was close to 10%.
Yeah
T here's now kind of a much more friction put into the game in order to kind of make the monetization super efficient, and that's why kind of the retention has taken a little bit hit. We know that kind of now when we balance the game and kind of start operating actual live events, kind of, we know that this number will go up, and naturally we want to kind of maximize the.
Yeah, indeed.
Long-term retention. The most interesting things with this product are definitely the monetization. We have seen ARPDAU, which have been on the record high number. It's like here $0.45. This is a net ARPDAU from the in-apps. We are a looking product that is not fully operational. We don't have all the live operations. We don't have surprising deals and those things happening in the game. It's a very base MVP product, but it monetizes in insane manner.
Yeah. What we mean essentially with that is that, before the actual hard launch and stuff, we don't usually play around too much with live events or special promotions and offers, which are tools that we of course use after the launch, which only, you know, usually further improve both the retention but also the monetization of the game.
Yeah. Naturally these ARPDAU numbers, like average revenue per daily active users, those are super high, but they are mostly high because the conversion % for.
Yeah
Kind of a daily payments is super high. We have seen that normally when people start playing this game, it takes kind of a maximum three days when they convert to paying customer, ever since that, they start kind of doing regular payments for the game, and that kind of is visible in the super high conversion but also kind of a super high LTV. The same applies to ad monetization. Naturally, we want to balance this kind of a game experience. It's like how much you have ads kind of and how much you drive people to convert to actual in-app purchases. We haven't seen any kind of a cannibalization between these. Like, both of the kind of a monetization avenues are delivering like a insane high...
Yeah
P erformance. These ad numbers here are kind of, when looking any kind of a game business case even like hyper-casual, we are looking kind of conversion % which are kind of comparable to kind of best performing games on this business.
Yeah. When we talk about the ads, we've been discussing that a lot internally that why are we exactly seeing such a high performance from the ads, especially when the IAP are performing so well. What we've been hearing tons of feedback from our players is that the way the ads have been implemented seems to work really, really well for this game, that they don't interrupt the gameplay in a negative way, but they kinda like hit that itch when you want to continue the gameplay session.
These kind of ad monetization opportunities and techniques that we are using here are not possible in multiplayer games.
Yeah
B ecause we have kind of basically implemented most of the ads in the core loops. Kind of a player is offered kind of a instant gratification and instant revives and instant kind of a battle boost during the gameplay.
Yeah
That is almost like impossible to kind of.
Mm
F rom the player perspective. Naturally everything comes down to return on ad spend measurement. That's the only one that kind of is meaningful because kind of you need to kind of always look like, okay, we are looking definitely high LTV. What is the cost per actual install?
Yeah.
Kind of all this balancing comes in the form of return on ad spend, and we have seen that the game starts monetizing very early, and that's very good for the kind of steering the performance marketing, but then also that the return on ad spend is kind of growing nicely on the curve and hitting kind of those magical points like kind of after 2 weeks, we have already seen that the 30% of the ad spending is received, and we are looking at kind of a full payback in kind of 2-3 months. That's kind of a, the short window, payback window, which we now start operating the scaling the game, and then when everything looks kind of a solid, we can start expanding the window.
Yeah
Increasing the spending and thus scaling the kind of a maximum business case out from this opportunity.
Yeah. These are things that I love as a CEO because a big part of my job is de-risking our plans and making sure that we always protect the downside while we are seeking to, you know, get to those hockey stick scenarios. The fact that we have a single player game that starts to monetize so quickly means that what we have seen already during the soft launch is actually money returning and coming back to our bank account because in the end of the day, the most important KPI is money landing on our bank account and the revenues that we're seeing.
With this game compared to things that we have done previously, it's a world of difference because we're able to see things now during soft launch that we normally have only discovered after the hard launch when we are able to populate the games big enough, and that's beautiful for us at the moment.
Yeah.
Let's go forward with Autogun Heroes and start to summarize all the greatness that we have seen so far and where do we actually stand now.
Yeah. like I said earlier, we have now kind of a very confident that we have found a winning product now through our.
Yeah
K ind of a validation process, which kind of, we explained. Now the question is more like how big and how successful this opportunity will be. That's why we have now kind of wanted to keep all the kind of cards in our own hands. Like, even though there's been lucrative partner opportunities on the table, we want to go kind of forward and kind of start operating this game and showing the actual potential through that. Everything so far, like kind of however we have been looking the numbers and success, kind of everything is exceeding them or meeting the kind of all the kind of wishes and wants.
Yeah
That we had for this product. That's why we have now green-lighted the global launch. We are not kind of publicly stating when it happens, but Apple and Google already know, so we want to kind of keep the partners preparing for the launch, and we are now busy preparing for the launch. Everybody pretty much like we have already stated, like all the biggest players and partners are super excited about the game and want to kind of participate one way or another.
Yeah.
I think this opens up a lot of partner opportunities going forward in the form of like if we need to have more muscle for the scaling after the initial success, there's plenty of partners lined up who want to jump in, or if we will see this being big, there's plenty of companies who want to invest or.
Yeah
O r kind of even acquire the whole company.
Yeah. In terms of Autogun Heroes and moving forward, obviously all those opportunities with different partners, they are still going to be there down the line. The fact that we are going forward with self-published release to begin with does not exclude anything moving forward. We've seen several examples in this business during this year and the previous years where companies take their game to a certain stage on their own, and maybe then after that, if they don't want to continue on their own, they can then sign it up with a partner. We're pretty much enjoying the fact that we have something that's very much wanted at the moment and are going forward step by step with that.
Also, one thing to note still about the Autogun Heroes is that we opened the game in Sweden, so it's available now from App Store and Google Play Store for kind of people to test. I want also kind of all the... This is a consumer business and kind of-
Yeah.
The cool thing about this business is that kind of you can go and test the game and kind of see whether kind of this is kind of quality product or whether you are enjoying. Many of us are probably thinking that, "Okay, the mobile games are not for us." Actually, when we have been testing the kind of marketing and kind of a target demographics for this game, this game is kind of a targeting plus 30-year-old male.
Yeah
A udience not exclusively, but kind of as a primary target group. We naturally want this to be kind of a as inclusive and kind of a wide appealing product as possible. Those players who grew up by playing Mario and kind of all the side-scrolling platformers and then went to Duke Nukem.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm
Nukem's and Contra and those are definitely kind of the best probably and probably at least the most monetizing audience. I'm one of them, and I have spent kind of a lot of money for the game and enjoying every cent.
Because in the end of the day, it is an entertainment business, and our job is to deliver fun for the people. The game is now out in Sweden, so I think what we can do is to encourage everybody and have a go with the game and try to find somebody who does not like it and see if you succeed with that. We've been trying. We haven't yet found that person, so have a go with that. This wouldn't be a webcast without questions and answers and, let's see what we have here. There's a couple of questions here in the chat, so let me have a look-see here. What is the reason to change to IFRS now? Attract international capital? Or change stock list? Let's handle that one first.
Switching to IFRS is technicality if you ask me. We've been thus far following Finnish Accounting Standards, which are not that far off in terms of numbers from the IFRS, so it's not because of anything like that. Simply put, we want to be super professional in everything we do, and the most professional thing you can do is to portray your numbers in IFRS, which makes them easier to read for everybody and removes any possible hesitation about what's behind the numbers. We believe that we're doing a service for our shareholders by doing so because it makes numbers more standardized. Question is that what does Hasbro think of NERF: Superblast and will they push the marketing of the game moving forward? Obviously, everybody's been loving NERF: Superblast so far.
With Hasbro, what we have seen is that they have been supporting the launch already thus far and we can expect to enjoy more of that moving forward as well. For example, I think we just, you know, together with them gave away some, you know, real life blasters in the competitions and so on.
Yeah. That type of collaboration is kind of, all the time ongoing and further activations are ongoing.
Yeah.
Many of the Hasbro's big marketing campaigns are something what they are planning kind of, for 3-6 months.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
F orward. We have been kind of continuously working with them towards those kind of a bigger marketing beats.
Yeah
B eing part of those. kind of, it's not kind of happening like this.
Yeah.
There's a more planning and more kind of that type of execution happening.
Yeah. Somebody once said that a big ships turn slowly, so there's always a lead time to certain things. Let's see what we have next. Congrats on the great results. Thank you. On Autogun, what are the total downloads for the game and which territories?
We have mostly or kind of, let's say, exclusively done all the testing now in US.
Yes
Because kind of, we need to succeed in U.S. That's the kind of, if you want to kind of go to the belly of the beast, kind of, let's go there first.
Yeah. Yeah.
And see the validate the numbers in U.S., and if they work in U.S., then we know that they work everywhere else as well. We have, we don't re-reveal the actual numbers, but we have tens of thousands of downloads from U.S., from different type of campaigns, so kind of from install optimized to high quality, kind of a value optimized campaigns and kind of. All the kind of sample sizes have been kind of naturally minimum what kind of is needed to deliver the results, but also kind of big enough to be statistically significant. Now, we are looking single player experience, so we are kind of in the position where we can measure the things in very kind of.
Yeah
K ind of a standardized way. Only thing that we need to make sure is the sample size. The sample size for kind of this type of measurement is big enough.
Yeah. Yeah. Compared to the multiplayer games that we have done in the past, there's so much less noise in the data and.
The experience.
Yeah
C hanges kind of depending who you play with.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
If you have live players-
Yeah
And so on.
There's something which we're not gonna answer directly, but this is a question about how much are we estimating downloads for Autogun Heroes and stuff like that. We don't communicate any future guidance or expectations towards downloads, revenues, none of those things. So, you have to bear with us and continue to see the upcoming reports when we then see how we did. There was a question about data available in public sources. There's so many different public sources, and of course, we can't comment on those in detail, but this is a question we get a lot.
Usually, when we look at our own games or other games where we know the data points in reality, if it's during soft launches or smaller scale, those are not that reliable, what you can see in public sources. If it's in super big scale and so on, I think they give a pretty good indication about where the game is headed and how it's performing. Those are always more or less estimations and assumptions built on publicly available data points.
I think.
Yeah
After the global launch, when we kind of start to get scale in meaningful manner, kind of those public sources start to kind of deliver fairly good indications for the, for the game, kind of a performance on...
Yeah
In terms of downloads and also revenue.
Indeed. Indeed. There's so many more questions about the Autogun Heroes performance, which I think you've already covered. Good job with that. Questions about how does this compare to previous games. We don't wanna pinpoint into any game specifically, but I think it's safe to say that what we're seeing now is completely on a different ballpark than what we have seen earlier, and that's why we are so excited about the opportunity at hand.
Especially the monetization part is, like, when comparing to any kind of a industry's kind of a available data.
Yeah
Kind of best performing games are performing, kind of these monetization numbers, both from the in-app purchase and 広 告 side, they can kind of stand the comparison to anything. That's kind of on a solid level and definitely kind of much higher than what we have seen with our internal games.
Indeed. Indeed. There's a question about the service business. How confident are we about our ability to discover new service business projects, and could we provide insights on how the service business market has evolved over the past year, and especially with the challenges faced by the overall mobile gaming industry, and have we observed any significant shifts in demand and things like that? Long story short, we are very optimistic about the service business overall. What we have seen in the service business market specifically is pretty well aligned with what you have seen in the global markets overall. Obviously, end of last year and earlier this year, things weren't that bright when there was a lot of, you know, companies canceling big projects and companies announcing cost savings and all these things happening.
Obviously, that means that there's less opportunities available in terms of new projects. Thanks to us having these long-term partnerships, we've been able to continue forward with the existing partners that we've had. That's part of our long-term strategy to make sure that we deliver quality, we're not relying on us signing new customers. That said, what we have seen this year is definitely things starting to go for the better again. There seems to be more and more demand. I hate to put it this way, less competition for Nitro because not everybody survived last year. Overall, in terms of trend lines that we're seeing moving forward, what we are seeking out to do is bigger projects. There's more and more opportunities on the cross-play, cross-platform side.
That's what puts Nitro in a unique position because we have our background in PC gaming. We've been doing some wide-level console in the past. We work with so many companies in our history on a variety of platforms, and we still have those capabilities and fresh samples on how we've delivered IP from other platforms to mobile, how we work with other platforms in our service business, and so on. That's an area where we see a lot of opportunities moving forward. Maybe if we previously said that there's more and more companies we're seeing who want to bring their shooter IP on mobile, that's still very much the case. Also what we're seeing as a new angle is bringing that shooter IP to a cross-play, cross-platform direction where mobile is one of the components.
The unique nature of mobile games advertising and marketing makes it very attracting to track the masses to the IP through mobile and then spread it around to different platforms.
Portfolio, kind of LTV becomes interesting.
Yeah
I nvestment because the mobile marketing is the most efficient kind of, out there, kind of where you can get masses of players into your product. If you can provide the same experience on the mobile device than on the, on the kind of a console platform. We are already seeing that this product is holding kind of a more, kind of a processing power than Nintendo Switch.
Yeah
Y ou start understanding that kind of, the capabilities on this platform, once you have kind of, figured out the controls and kind of all that-
Yeah
G ameplay for the device, then kind of the world is open.
Yeah. Recently, since we've been working with so many different technologies, we work a lot with Unity game engine, we work a lot with Unreal, different versions of Unreal Engine, but also with some proprietary technologies and so on. That puts us in a position where we are able to basically respond to any demand that's out there in the service business. Next question is about what should you expect in terms of operating expenses and cost of goods sold moving forward. Are there plans to increase costs throughout the year, or is a more conservative approach being taken to manage expenses? Very good question.
The number one priority for Nitro this year is to get ourselves towards profitability step by step, which means that we are, at the same time, seeking to increase our revenues and control our costs while we do so, in order to make sure that we get there step by step. If we, for example, look at an approaching game launch, that's why we are super careful about the return on ad spend, for example, to make sure that we get the money back. Obviously, in this business, everything we do, whether it's a game launch or starting a new partner project or expanding an existing partner project, any of these potential scenarios always means that we need to add to the costs, usually in terms of labor, but either internal or outsourced. We always make sure that we have a revenue stream covering those costs.
If you would see our cost base increasing, that would mean that we also have a revenue stream increasing, with obviously profits included. Let's see if we have anything else. Just a second. I think that's all for now. Thank you all very much for the questions, and that means that we're ready to wrap up. Thank you, industry legend Immonen, for joining.
How did I do? Is this kind of an on-going basis to replace Antti or?
Competition has been started. For Antti, I think we wish safe travels. I believe he's in Dubrovnik at the moment, and, like I said, meeting some industry friends and our partners. Pretty much looking forward to what you guys bring home from there. For everybody who tuned in, thanks for this, and please don't hesitate to reach out through email and so on if you have any further questions. We're happy to go through those.
Please test the game.
Indeed. Go and check it out. Until next time, have a good one. Bye bye.
Bye.