for example, and, our EBIT is not at the level where we want, due to a number of big write-offs, during the quarter. But if you look back on 2023 in general, we had a good lineup of DLCs, meaning that our production line is coming together, and we see a productivity increase. We released four base games, and we have five experimental releases from Paradox Arc, so we're getting there.
For sure.
I've been getting a lot of questions about Paradox growth going forward, and so I thought we would look back a bit as well. So when I joined the company in 2003, this is 20 years ago, in August last year, it was 20 years ago. We decided to go back to 2005 on this one. I don't think we found any numbers from 2003 and 2004, but in 2003, our revenue was SEK 10 million. We just closed the books on SEK 2.6 billion, just over that, and this has been done without adding any capital, without raising $1 in capital, with 100% organic growth throughout the years.
So we believe that this is obviously very strong, and we believe strongly in our continuous growth as well, because of the strategy that we set out two years ago with a Dig in, Stock up, Break out, different parts that is growing the company together. So we just wanted to show this and said, "This is the history of Paradox," and hopefully we're looking forward to the journey ahead as well, that we believe, at least I believe, that the best of our journey is still ahead of us. If we go through Cities: Skylines II, which was the main release this quarter, we didn't really meet player expectations when it comes to performance, or the release on consoles. Some of the functionalities and qualities, including modding, was lacking as well. We still sold well because the underlying game is really good.
So we sold just over 1 million copies after the end of the quarter. We are now working really hard on improving said things, including performance, and we are gonna develop this game for many years to come. So Cities: Skylines II is one of our long-term engagements and is one of our most important franchises as well. If you look at the other releases in the quarter, you had Star Trek: Infinite and Lamplighters League that I mentioned, that was one of the reasons our financial performance wasn't where it should be. Two releases from Paradox Arc that didn't make much of an impact, but worth mentioning, Stellaris Nexus, which is a multiplayer-focused, more board-like game experience, and Space Trash Scavenger, where you collect things and build things in space.
Now, the games didn't sell that much, but they both got really good reviews on Steam, so they're both over 90% on recent positive reviews on Steam. And that's a start. We know how to find good games, and we're learning how to scale them and build large franchises around them. DLC releases in the quarter obviously help as well on the revenue and the EBIT side, so we released basically DLCs for all our major grand strategy franchises and Age of Wonders IV in this quarter. We also released a smaller DLC for Across the Obelisk, and Across the Obelisk was also brought into the main portfolio through the during the year. So, we're looking forward to developing this game in the coming 5-10 years to come.
Announcements made after this quarter is Prison Architect 2, where I myself have a couple of hundred hours, so it's gonna be really exciting to see when it releases. Hearts of Iron IV: Trial of Allegiance, Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury, and Crusader Kings III, a small, just graphic DLC, North African Attire, was released as well.
That's it.
That's it for me, so I leave you with the numbers. I'm gonna comment on some of the numbers as well, if I may.
Please do. So let's get started. As Fred mentioned, we hit a new record in terms of revenue for the quarter, almost SEK 1 billion, just short of four and a half million, so SEK 996 million in Q4 2023. The year before, in the same quarter, we did SEK 580 million, so that is 72% year-on-year increase. The previous record was in Q2 in 2023, then we did SEK 737 million, so we broke the record with an impressive 35%. As often, the reason why our revenues deviates from quarter to quarter is currency changes, but also, of course, what we release or even more so-
Right
... what we release in the quarter. If we compare it a year ago, the currency didn't do much change. The dollar has been fairly flat over the year, and, well, it has moved a lot, but if you just look at Q4 versus Q4, it's on the same level. Pound and euro up a little bit, but the impact from currency has been very low quarter to quarter. What has changed quite a lot, on the other hand, is, as Fred already has mentioned, what we have released, and Q4 2023 has been a massive quarter in terms of releases. Cities: Skylines II, of course, new games, Star Trek, Lamplighters, the Arc games as well, and DLCs on all our big franchises.
So all our GSGs, Stellaris got one, Europa Universalis got one, Hearts of Iron got one,
Crusader Kings
... Crusader Kings, Victoria 3, Age of Wonders got one, and Across the Obelisk. So, so all our big franchises got DLCs.
A full quarter.
A full quarter, and that, of course, pushes up revenues, so that is fantastic. Yeah, top five contributors, so we always share it's four of the five usual suspects. So it's Cities, of course, CK3, HOI, and Stellaris. The fifth one, which isn't there often, is Lamplighters.
Right.
So even though we are far from satisfied with the financial result, it still generated a significant amount of revenue.
Yeah
... large part driven by the deal we had with Microsoft to have the game on Game Pass. Let's move forward in the P&L and talk about operating profit, 124 million SEK. There we are down compared to the same quarter of the year before, when we did 244 million SEK, so it's down 49%. Profit after financial items, 131 million SEK compared to 244 million SEK. So profit after financial items is higher than operating profit. The reason why we do have that is we have a significant amount of cash, and we get the interest on that.
Yep.
So therefore, we have a increasing profit of the financial items compared to the operating profit. Profit margin, so this is after profit of the financial items divided in the revenues, 13% for Q4 of 2023. It's significantly lower than the same quarter in 2022, when we did 42%. And two explanations: one is, of course, The Lamplighters League. That contributed with SEK 250 million in a negative result in Q4. So if we hadn't had the game in the Q4, the revenues would have been SEK 381 million, and the profit margin would have been north of 40%.
Yeah.
So, our core business is performing as always.
Yeah.
We also had elevated marketing costs in the quarter, and we'll come back a bit to that, but we have spent significant money on games that we haven't released in the quarter. So Prison Architect 2, Foundry, Millennia, Life by You, all games that will come after the quarter, so haven't contributed to the revenue, and therefore margin is being held down a bit. Employees, at the end of year, 625 versus 656 the year before, we have decreased. The reason is that we have closed offices in Arctic, Thalassic, and Seattle. In these numbers, we still have, I think, 18 FTEs in the Seattle office, but they've left just at year-end, so they're in these numbers, but January first, it's 18 less.
Right.
Oh, I forgot to mention equity to asset ratio, a strong 73%. So let's break down the costs a bit more. The chart you see shows revenues in green. We have talked about revenues already, but what this chart adds is that it shows how fluctuating our revenues are. They vary with the releases, so up a lot versus previous quarter when we didn't release almost anything in Q3.
No.
And this is... We would have loved a smooth release stream, but it hasn't been so far, and it's not gonna be that going forward either. So-
No, I mean, we, our long-term growth, as you've seen in the historical chart, we have a plan for long-term growth, but it's still gonna be a bit different from quarter to quarter. So, it's still gonna be a variety, depending on what we release, basically.
Exactly. So cost, three main costs: cost of goods sold, selling expenses, and admin expenses. Let's spend some extra time on the cost of goods sold, since it's by far the largest cost, and it has gone up significantly compared to the same quarter the year before. So, it's basically the cost to develop all our games. So cost for internal studios, external studios, royalties to external studios, amortizations on studios and brands that we have acquired-
Mm-hmm
... all the costs we have for, our central tech organization, for example.
Yeah.
So everything that's related to making games.
In brief, when we buy a studio, we write it off over a period of five years, normally, right?
Yes. When we acquire studios, but also IPs, we amortize it to 99% of the cases. We have one small exception, where we had to allocate it EUR 2 million to goodwill.
Okay.
But everything else has always been allocated to assets that we amortize over time.
Over a five-year period or?
Depending on the asset, but roughly 5 years. So that has... we can mention that already. So in this SEK 712 million, every quarter over the last years, we have had roughly SEK 20 million.
Mm.
of amortizations on those acquired assets.
Yeah.
And that's, of course, the decision we have taken, that we want to, we want to, amortize it over time instead of risking ending up with a too big balance sheet.
Yeah.
So amortization of acquired IPs is included, SEK 20 million or SEK 19 million. It has decreased a bit. It's gonna decrease going forward a bit because Harebrained Schemes, how we have stopped amortizing on it since a half year back. Prison Architect is five years ago-
Yeah.
We acquired that IP, so that will stop now.
Yes.
That number should probably go down. Considerably larger amortization is amortization of capitalized development, and that has gone up a lot this quarter. SEK 300 million in Q4 2023, compared to SEK 119 million Q4-
Mm
... in 2022, or Q3 2023, which is the closest one in time, SEK 114 million. So up from SEK 114 million to SEK 300 million in just one quarter, and it's all due to what we have released.
Yeah.
So Lamplighters, we have already press released that and said that that impacted amortization with SEK 150 million. So just SEK 150 million come from Lamplighters. Then we released Cities II and Star Trek, all with the aggressive amortization model that also pushes up amortizations, and we released DLCs on, on all our-
Key franchises
... key franchises, yeah.
Yeah.
Roughly half of them, so CK3, Victoria 3, and Age of Wonders 4, there we have this degressive amortization model-
Yeah
... meaning that we apply that also for the DLCs we release on those titles. So we take one third of the capitalized development in month one, and another third in month two to six, and so on.
Yeah.
So, so-
And the rest over-
Over the-
Twelve
... remaining 12 months after that.
Yeah.
So if we release something in October, we take one third in October, and then we take roughly 15% again in November and December.
Yeah.
In the full quarter, we almost take 50% of the capitalized developments.
Right.
So quite-
When did we change? Was it in 2020?
Yeah.
We changed the model.
Yeah.
Yeah.
CK3 was the first game when we started to apply this on.
Yeah.
Yeah. Speaking about the capitalized development, we took a massive write-down in the quarter as well. So Lamplighters, we have talked about several times. We amortized SEK 150 million on it, but we also wrote down the rest, so one hundred and seventy-one million in write-down. So in total, SEK 320 million in amortization and write-downs in just one quarter-
Yeah
... for Lamplighters, and that, of course, increases COGS and pushes down profit and profit margins for that quarter specifically.
Right.
Now, after that quarter, we don't have any costs left, so that's good. We also, there was also one other game that we wrote down. We had released that game, or we haven't announced which game it was, but we released it earlier in the year. It didn't generate much profit. We had almost amortized everything off, but it was still SEK 5 million left on the balance sheet, so we decided to write that down in Q4-
Yeah
... as well. Royalties, considerably higher in Q4. Royalties is one of the costs that I like to pay because it's just a percentage of the revenue. So high royalties means high revenues, and this is-
Yeah
... what happened in Q4. We released Cities: Skylines II, and with that comes high royalties. So that royalties landed on SEK 112 million in Q4. Normally, it's around SEK 30 million-
Yeah
... if we look back the last 18-24 months or so. Quite significant increase, but also a significant increase times a few on revenues. Also, royalties goes up as our Arc business becomes bigger.
Mm.
Arc, when we release games on Arc and when we sign games for Arc, we work more with royalties in order to keep our investment down.
Right.
So in order to keep risk down, we are happy to share a bigger part of the revenues than we used to. So we capitalize and amortize the significant part of our development, but some of the development costs we take as cost directly, and in Q4 2023, we took SEK 100 million of such cost-
Mm
... compared to SEK 73 million Q4 2022.
Right.
Or SEK 85 million in Q3 2024, 2023. So that has gone up. And this is our central tech organization that don't work with specific game development, but they work with the platforms and develop that. Also, all the games that we sign through Arc, we, as we have said a few times, we don't capitalize those anymore during the early phases.
No.
So,
They go directly as costs.
They go directly as costs, and they end up here, and this is the reason why these direct development costs have gone up in
In the short term,
Yeah, and this, over time, it doesn't matter. The impact this will have is that we will have less to amortize and less to write off.
Right.
Um, so-
Hopefully avoiding a bit of sunk cost fallacy in projects going forward, because that has been a thing of the past as well, that you have a sunk cost fallacy in projects where you have some things in the balance sheet, so.
It's an easier decision to cancel a game project when you don't have a massive amount on the balance sheet.
Yeah.
I agree. So what else? Yeah, we also stopped capitalizing. When we released Lamplighters at the beginning of Q4, we saw that it didn't sell much. We had already committed to release one small DLC, and of course, support the game as we always do, but we stopped capitalizing in Q4.
Yeah.
So the cost we had for the studio and the development of these DLCs, we took as cost directly in Q4. That's why this item is slightly increased in Q4 as well.
Mm.
... Let's shift the line and talk a bit about the blue line, the selling expenses. That's also up significantly compared to a year ago, so from SEK 45 million in Q2 2022 to SEK 86 million in Q4 of last year. So two reasons: one, obviously, we have released much more in the quarter. So releasing Cities: Skylines II, releasing Star Trek, Lamplighters, all the DLCs comes with the increased selling expenses, of course.
Yes.
But we also have quite a lot coming up. So we mentioned Prison Architect 2, Millennia, Foundry-
Nightlands.
We have started to do marketing campaigns for that already in Q4 and taking those costs in Q4.
Yeah.
We didn't have anything like that a year ago.
No.
Therefore, the selling expenses has gone up.
Yeah.
Admin expenses is normally around SEK 22-23 million, slightly elevated in Q4. We had a huge get-together for the whole company group back in October, where we flew in everyone that didn't work in Stockholm, and we spent 2-3 days together here. So that was the staff conference we had.
Yeah.
Therefore we see slightly increased admin expenses. Other income and other expenses, let's spend a few couple of minutes on that one. So, this is currency movements in the quarter.
Yeah.
It's strongly negative in Q4 this year or in 2023, -SEK 45 million. It was negative also a year ago, but, but not as much. So what, what happens is that when we have closed a month, we invoice our distributors for the sales in that month, and we invoice in U.S. dollars. We book, for example, Steam and Microsoft and PlayStation, Sony and everyone. We booked that in SEK according to the currency on the date we send the invoice, and that happened, for example, at the very beginning of November. We sent big invoices because we had sold a lot in October, of course, with Cities: Skylines II and everything.
We book it to the rate we had, and then 30 days later, when we get the payments, we get the same amount of U.S. dollars of course, as the invoice said, but translating that to SEK when we got it at maybe the beginning of December, then the amount of SEK was less than we when we thought a month before.
Yeah.
And-
So basically, it's the strengthening of the Krona that keeps-
Yeah
... our revenue less than SEK 1 billion,
Yeah
... SEK this quarter. So,
Yeah
... but on the other hand, historically, it's the Krona is quite weak, but it's been strengthening in the last couple of months, right? So-
Yes, in Q4, it has strengthened, and that movement ends up on this row.
Right.
Yeah. So yeah. But as Fred said, over the last years, if you look back at our quarterly reports, we mostly have fairly big positive items here.
Yeah.
Let's move on. Financial income and expenses. This is interest. The positive is a real interest that's on our money we have now on our bank accounts. Then we have an accounting-based interest, and that is lease accounting rules that makes us report the office lease, not as an office lease cost, but as an amortization on the debt and as an interest, so-
Ah.
But-
Very specific.
Very specific, but all in all, it's a positive because the interest we get on our now fairly massive cash position is quite strong.
Right.
So, revenues and operating profit quarter by quarter. Again, this chart shows how volatile our quarters are, and it also shows what a massive record in revenues it was.
Mm.
The yellow line also fluctuates. Percentage-wise, it fluctuates even more than the revenue, but yeah, and this operating profit includes, as we mentioned, Lamplighters, so SEK 250 million. Remove that, and we would have been at a record high, SEK 381 million here as well. Next one, rolling 12 months, we put it together so in order to see a much clearer trend, and I think the trend is quite clear here over time. It is trending upwards, both revenue and profit. We have had the last two quarters, a bit of a bump downwards. Let's hope that we can turn that upwards again and continue the climb.
I'm sure we will.
Cash flow. So cash from our operating activities, new record, SEK 526 million.
Not bad.
No, not at all. Last year's Q4 was very strong at that point as well, 344, but this year it's SEK 180+ million more. So operating profit was. Let's quickly go back. So operating profit was SEK 124 million.
Mm.
The cash flow from our operating activities is SEK 526 in the same quarter, so quite much more, and the main reason is that a large part of the cost that we've had in the quarter have been amortizations and write-downs.
Yeah.
That impacts operating profit, but it doesn't impact the cash flow because it's cash that we spent a long time ago.
Speaking again about organic growth, that we paid everything with our own cash in the bank, basically. So,
Sure
... yeah, we don't have any loans to pay back on the games that we made.
No.
... everything comes back as cash. Even if we lose money on some games, it's still paid with our own cash flows.
Yes, exactly. And going forward, we have a couple of big games that has costed a lot to develop. They will come with big amortizations.
Yeah
... but the cash impact from those amortizations are zero.
Yes.
That's important to remember, which decreases the risk quite a lot in the business going forward.
So that's the case, yeah.
Sorry, I jumped one.
Oh, oh, there is the cash flow.
That's the cash flow. Looking at it over 12 months, we have generated or our operating activities have generated more than SEK 1.4 billion, quite important. Looking at cash flow from our investing activities, we invested 147 million in the quarter of Q4 last year, and that is almost all is investment in game development. If we look at that over 12 months, it's 700 million, so 700 million invested in game development over the last 12 months. Final slide, I think, the ratio between our total equity and our total non-current assets, total equity continues upwards.
So that's our accumulated profit, less what we pay as dividends and total non-current assets, mainly Capitalized Development, whatever we have left on the balance sheet of our acquisitions, and, and some of this accounting-based lease debt.
Mm.
But you see, it has gone down significantly in Q4.
Yep.
That's because we have amortized and written off quite a lot. So the ratio between total equity and non-current assets is quite important.
Yes. It's looking good.
I definitely think so.
All in all...
But all in all, to summarize, we believe, maybe we said that already, but we believe we're in a great position. We have cash in the bank. We are able to take advantage of any opportunities that will arise in the market when it comes to game development or whatever we wanna do. So, all in all, I mean, quarter is, it's okay. It's an okay quarter, and we could have done better, but position-wise, strategically, the positioning, position for us is really good.
I agree.
So if that was the last slide, should we take some questions?
Let's go. We've had a couple of questions sent in, and maybe some people have added questions as well in the chat as we go along. We'll take turns, me and Alex-
Yep
... answering, so.
This is one for you, I think. "In your pipeline of nine games, what's included? Does it, for example, include Arc Titles?
The nine games that we say, the main pipeline, as we call it, does not include games from Paradox Arc. Some of these games, the nine games that we, that we mentioned, are announced, like Life by You, Prison Architect 2, Millennia and Foundry, to mention, the ones that we know about, and then we have a couple of unannounced games as well in the pipeline. But the Arc Titles are managed differently, and, some of those will be announced and released as well, but it doesn't count to the nine games that we mentioned.
Good. And also, of course, maybe that's obvious for everyone, but the development that we continue to do on our live games, like Stellaris, Hearts of Iron IV, and everyone, is not included in these nine.
No, of course not. Right. And Alex, looking at selling expenses, it was high in Q4 from multiple releases and new announcements. Is it fair to assume this comes down from Q4 in the first half of 2024?
Oh, good question. So Q4 was, as I mentioned, high for two reasons. And what drives the quarterly selling expenses will continue to be those two things. How much are we releasing in the quarter, and how much are we planning to release in the upcoming one, two quarters? Of course, we have announced five announced games, and I think we have announced all five to be released this year. So of course, we will see significantly high selling expenses-
Mm
... also in the spring.
Yep.
But, at least if you compare it to a year ago, but if you compare it to Q4, and also Q2 last year was very high... Well, once we have-
Yes
... once we have re-released those five games, it should start to come down.
Yeah. But since we're increasing revenue as well, costs will increase over time.
Yeah.
So it's the nature of the beast, so to speak.
One for you: "What is your strategy for supporting mods, mod creators, and modding tools for the next few years?
Well, the modding community has always been important for us, not only for the creation of mods, but also for the creation of fans and people who actually come to work at Paradox. A lot of them come through the modding community, at least historically, and we will, of course, continue to update and support both the community and the tools that we have and work even more with the modding community in the future. So it's definitely an important strategic thing for us, the whole modding community. Alex, can you comment on your localization strategy? Why support some languages and not others?
Yeah, it pretty much comes down to expected audience.
Yeah, market size.
Yes, that has that language. Of course, we aim to, in general, I would like to say, to support more languages, but we will focus on those languages where we consistently have a large player bases.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a financial decision.
Yeah, and we're learning every day, and we're growing, the company's growing every day as well, so we might make more languages in the future.
Yeah
... also as a part of our growing business.
Yeah. All right, Fred, what are your big picture goals for the next 5 and 10 years? That's a good one.
It's a good one, and you have to be very broad in your description here, but we don't like doing forecasts, and everyone knows that. And when you look at the quarters, you see that some quarters are very good and some are not as good. But as you can see, when we showed the historical trend of Paradox, our aim is to grow and be a better company every year and every day.
Yeah.
And, the way that we grow is by supporting our community and making better and bigger games for them to enjoy, and, and just enhancing their experiences. So the thing is, we should not lose focus on our core business and what we do well, which is, making great gaming experience for people. And it's a boring answer, but it's the only answer I can give. But we will continue to grow. We will continue to make great games. That's the five-year plan, that's the ten-year plan, that's the infinity plan for the company, and, it's gonna be great to be a part of it. And now I start sounding like a politician, so we'll take the next question here.
Alex, could you elaborate a bit on the CapEx in Q4, as well as what CapEx should have looked like for the full year 2023 without Harebrained Schemes? In addition, you expect the CapEx to accelerate for the announced releases as they get closer to release.
Mm.
Oof!
Mm.
That's a mouthful to say-
Yes
... and even more so to answer.
Yeah. So what would CapEx have looked like without Harebrained Schemes? So Harebrained Schemes was our own studio in Seattle. They developed The Lamplighters League. So during 2023, they were at full swing, finalizing the game, and we capitalized everything. At the beginning of the year, they were 60 individuals, Seattle, fairly high-cost environment. And what can I more say about? Yeah, well, we said that we the capitalized development cost on that project when we released the game was SEK 320 million.
Yeah.
And that is, and you can spread that out over the years that has been developed. So then you can figure out roughly how much capitalization that has happened each year in 2023. So a significant amount of CapEx has come from that game.
Yeah.
And of course, since we have stopped developing on that game, we don't have the studio anymore, the corresponding amount will be zero.
Yeah
... from today and going forward.
Yeah.
The second question, within the question, do you expect the CapEx to accelerate for the announced releases as they get closer to release? So we have five announced releases. I don't think so.
No
... because when you're this close to the release, you're already at full swing.
Yeah
... you are at full speed, full studio size.
Yeah.
I don't expect that to go up.
No.
Fred, will you continue supporting your games as actively in 2024 as you did in 2023?
This, this question looks like it was planted there by myself. So well, well, we, we love supporting our games, and, and, if people play our games, we will continue to support them.
Yeah.
And we get a lot of questions about games that we don't support anymore as well. But yeah, the plan is to support our games for as long as people play them, we wanna support them, and as long as it's also financially viable for us, we will continue to support them. But we have long-term plans for all our games.
Yeah.
Alex, besides the development cost of Lamplighters League, how much of other costs did you incur in Q4 for that title?
We normally don't share much financial information on separate titles, but on this very one, we did. So when we press release this in October, and we said that. So what did we say? Yeah, we said. Yeah, we also repeated it in the report. We said that the game has impacted Q4 with -SEK 250 million.
All right.
We also said that the Capitalized Development was SEK 320 million.
Yeah.
We haven't said exactly how much revenue it was, but-
Yeah
... but apart from that, yeah, let's break it down. Amortization and write-offs for that games in the quarter was SEK 320. We have said that. We also had direct development cost for the 19-20 individuals that worked throughout Q4.
Yeah.
And some marketing cost. Not that much because we realized fairly soon that the game wasn't selling, and we instead of throwing good money after bad, we decreased the marketing spend-
Yeah
... and saved some money on that. Hope that answers the question.
Yeah, to some extent it does, I think. Good.
All right. Fred, can you detail your roadmap for Cities: Skylines 2?
No, I can't detail it. I can't, but I can tell you what we're focusing on. So improving performance is the top priority for us. Also adding mods, going forward in the future, and the console releases, and obviously continue to support it with DLCs, going forward as well. But the most important right now is to improve the performance of the game, making it run smoother and better on most PC machines, and then do the other things as well.
... More questions? Yeah.
Yeah, Alex, with a big cash position, are you looking more at internal projects or to be active in the M&As when the rest of the market is hurting and using your strong financial position?
Both. Our main focus, as always, is to invest money in game development.
Yeah.
I think I said that in the last 12 months, we have invested SEK 700 million in game development. We will continue to invest in game development, of course, but we have high requirements in terms of risk-reward ratio when we look at new game projects.
Yeah.
So we won't go after everything we see, of course, and it's the same with M&A. It's a good question. There are good opportunities out there now because the bidders are less, the bidders have less money, the expectation from the sellers is less as well. But also when it comes to M&A, we're picky.
Yeah.
We have a kind of high requirements in when we look at the risk-reward ratio in M&A as well.
Yeah.
I think that's the reason why we haven't done that much lately, and I think it will be the same going forward. We will for sure look at it. We spend quite a lot of time looking at interesting opportunities, but we rarely pay what the sellers want.
No, someone asked me in the media this morning if we're looking at what's the probability for an M&A throughout the year? And my answer was that it's unlikely, but not impossible. So somewhere in that scale, if you wanna, yeah, take a guess from there.
Fred, should we infer from Lamplighters League that you're really not going to try and break new IPs and focus exclusively on established IP? All right.
All right. Yeah, but no, of course not. We will always work to establish new IPs and try to hit the balance in between old and proven versus new and, like, fresh, if you wanna call it that. But our pipeline now is much more close to home than it has been in the past three, four years, and we focus mainly on strategy and management games and what we really do well. And if you look at Paradox Arc, it is looking much more into new game concepts and new IPs, whereas Paradox Interactive as a whole focuses more on the core business and what we already do well. So I think that summarizes the whole product strategy of the company.
But just, you know, being, you know, disheartened by one single release is not the way we do this. Like, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, he said once that, "If you think this is a failure, you should see all the stuff that we have in pipeline." I mean, we will continue to succeed, we'll continue to fail, as long as we succeed much more than we fail. So it's a balance in between the two, of course.
One more question?
Yeah. Alex, the dividend has been moved up. Not by much... Well, 50% is not little. I mean-
Yeah
... I don't know what, what people, you know-
I don't know. Maybe they look at the share-
It's not me saying this, it's someone else, right? So not by much, but still moving in the right direction. Now that you have over SEK 1 billion cash in hand, should we expect a ramp-up of cash returns? If not, why not?
If not, why not? We will try to find, of course, good investment opportunities in, in game projects and in M&A activities. But if we don't, me as a CFO, I don't want this much money—I don't need this much money to run the company, and at the end of the day, money that isn't needed in the business, my philosophy is that it should be returned to the shareholders. But at the moment, we're keeping it and see what we can do with it. No more questions as of now.
No more questions, no. And, as always, thanks a lot for watching and, see you again soon. It's end of April, right?
End of April. It's a Q1 stream coming up, and, thanks for watching. If you have more questions, or if we missed anyone, email us, and we will answer it over email.
Thanks a lot again for watching, and take care until next time.
Bye.
Bye.