Welcome everyone to this Stillfront Capital Markets Day. My name is Alexis Bonte. I'm the Chief Operating Officer of the Stillfront Group. It is a pleasure to see so many of you here today physically, and also many of you there at home or your offices watching us on stream. We have a packed three hours of content ready for you today. You will be hearing from several Stillfront executives. You'll be hearing also from some of our studios. You'll be hearing a lot about our Stillops growth acceleration platform. I am thrilled to be here today and to be able to share with you how we are going to take Stillfront to the next level. We have a small video that we've prepared for you, and then after that, Jörgen, our founder and CEO, will start with some opening statements. Thank you.
In the past two years, the Stillfront family has grown dramatically. By entering the Indian subcontinent and continuing our expansion in MENA, U.S., and Europe, we have grown from 12 studios in 2019 to today's group of 21 studios. During the same period, we have more than doubled the number of games in our active portfolio. We have also significantly increased the number of talented employees worldwide. New genres in games that target a larger part of the global gaming population have entered the Stillfront portfolio. In 2019, we had 1.3 million daily active users.
Today, we're proud to say that we have more than 12 million unique players from around the world that enjoy our games every day. We've also successfully diversified our revenue streams by increasing our share of advertising revenues across the group from 1% of revenues in 2019 to 18% in 2021. We have further strengthened our marketing reach, making sure that we spend our marketing money where we get the best returns. Today, we run our user acquisition campaigns in more than 50 different marketing channels across more than 100 countries. At every given moment, we have more than 1,000 concurrent campaigns running. In 2021, we have taken collaborations between our studios to the next level, including new game development projects. In other words, a lot has happened since we last met in November 2019.
Today, we're here to give you more insight, share updates from our studios, and talk about what comes next. Welcome to Stillfront's Capital Markets Day 2021.
Hello, everyone. I would like to start off with what this is all about, what Stillfront is all about. The fact is that what it's all about is that people love games. People love games because they address three main deep human needs: the need to be entertained, the need to compete, and above all, the need to socialize and meet with others. The combination on the phenomena of games that is generic and very old and new technology and the ways that we can provide games to our audience make this even more clear. We meet that need in a better way than ever.
That is the foundation for Stillfront and our business, and we will go deeper into that during the day. Our vision is that our mission is that we would like to make a positive impact in people's everyday life through games. Here's how we looked like two years ago. We have our history in strategy product with a niche audience, and that has its merits, but also its limitations. We decided two years ago that we should widen our audience and widen our portfolio. Now we have also casual games from, for instance, Storm8, Property Brothers, Home Design Makeover, that caters to casual gamers, basically. We also have widened our game and our portfolio so that we can cater to people that label themselves as non-gamers.
Non-gamers is a massive audience and very attractive audience that we now have games that meets and not the least coming from, for instance, Moonfrog, and we'll listen later into, to Anand talking about what their journey have been about, but they cater with traditional board games and tabletop games to so-called non-gamers. A fantastic opportunity for us. Also, we added simulation games from Nanobit that has been very successful, narrative simulation games, primarily for a female audience, built by a female game producers, by the way. Also, we have, text-based life simulation games that we didn't have a couple years ago from Candywriter. Nadir from Candywriter will talk about their journey on their games, and they're very exciting existing games and also, not the least, what they have in their pipeline just being released. Very exciting indeed.
Now with this much wider portfolio of ours that you can see an extract from, we can give this positive impact to a larger universe of players out there compared to two years ago. This has been absolutely key in our growth trajectory so far and going forward. The best thing is that we have never had more games on its way out now as we have today, never ever in our history. We will continue to develop this to an even more exciting animation. That's the prerogative as being founder. I have the coolest animation today. Anyway. By the way, Phillip, our CPO, will elaborate on our product pipeline later on. We have a vision that is intact. We would like to build the leading free-to-play powerhouse. Our strategies on how to achieve that remains intact.
They're basically the same as when I founded this company 11 years ago. We have refined them over and over and over again. We have adopted them for what fills its purpose best for the types of studios we have, the type of people we have, and where we stand in our journey. Today, we would like to go into these strategies and understand them better. You can understand them better and see them more clearly because they are really making a difference in our company today more than ever as well. I'm really keen on that.
One of the key explanations why we have reached the position that we have today, and I'm sure one of the reasons for taking us to the next level, is that we have a unique balance between, on one hand, to let the studios and the game teams focus on their core knowledge and what they're really uniquely good at, which is develop, operate games, publish games, and take care of their community and the users that they have there. It's absolutely key that is made on a studio level and not that we centrally try to manage that. However, if we don't have common things, processes, tools, and things that really makes a difference value-wise, we ultimately don't have any reason to exist.
The trick of the trade is easy to say, it's easy to write on a slide, but very difficult to implement in practice, is how to centralize without centralizing in traditional meaning, but see to it that we have the things available from the common ground. What's different is so that we take away hindrances so they're not slow down the studios, and we add components so they can speed up. That is one of the key things in our business today and in order to build a free-to-play powerhouse. As mentioned, we had a Capital Markets Day two years ago, the 27 of November, I think it was. We made a lot of statements, we gave several promises, and communicated new financial targets way back then, two years ago.
One was that we said that we aim to create a 2x larger company from 2019 to the end of 2022. Now we have achieved creating almost a 3x larger company in one-year shorter time. We have done that through the expansion of our audience, as I elaborated on, and through the expansion of the types of games that we have, as I also elaborated on, and we will go deeper into that. That has created also a significant stronger stability and predictability in our business through a further diversification of our revenue streams, through geography, obviously through product and audience, but also since we have the ad revenues that we said that we aim for being at high teens of our revenues coming from ads, and they were 19% in Q2 and 18% in Q3.
We have implemented an ambitious ESG platform that really is deployed into our studios. The majority, over 90% of our employees, has gone through something at Still Academy to be educated in what this means, our code of conduct and so on in our business process for M&A, how we market, that we have a responsibility from an ESG perspective, how we market and obviously the content of our games. We have stopped games, we have changed games, we have declined potential M&A opportunities due to ESG. ESG has really come into being an important part of our business. We are climate neutral since 2020, fully including when every of our 60 million players charge their phone, we compensate fully climate-wise.
We also have more synergies happening in our business than ever before, and these are accelerating not linearly with the number of studios we are. They are accelerating progressively with the number of studios we are. These are really, really making a difference through our business platform, Stillops, and this is one of the key things during this day that we will talk about. We also have increased the number of games coming out, which I also touched upon, and our market reach that we mentioned in the short movie here, that we have really improved our capability to market on a global scale through more channels than ever, more products than ever, in more markets than ever. This came in very handy as the IDFA challenge came in this year. We have leveraged more than ever from that.
Basically, we say what we do, and we do what we say. The Stillops platform. This is basically the whole carrier of how we do things, how we create value. Throughout this whole day or this afternoon, you will hear about several examples of how we achieve results. We have drawn all these processes, tools, and things all together in this business platform called Stillops. we have our knowledge base, the big exchange of knowledge through IDFA topics, for instance, called Still Base. We have Still Suite, where we have tools and technologies that we share, save money on licenses and other stuff. Very, very important are the Still hubs that we have implemented.
Today, we will listen to Jochen Gary, heading our one of our most important hubs, that is the hub for performance marketing, delivering significant value over the whole group of ours. We will also listen to Andreas, our CFO, and Verena talking about other types of hubs that take away the hindrances. Again, to get our studios to focus on their core, the Still hubs is absolutely key for that purpose. We have Still Reach, which is a very, very powerful thing for us in order to shorten time to market, to get out more sophisticated product without just plunging money in development projects with uncertain return. Phillip will elaborate on this. Again, Still Reach, one of my favorites. Again, how we can optimize our marketing over a larger universe of opportunities on how to market in different products, in different markets, through different channels.
All this together is what is building significant value for us. Again, the good thing here is that we feel that we have really pulled things together. This is delivering significant value for us, but we still have so many more things to do to fill in and add into this, to this business platform of ours. If it's one thing that you should remember from this presentation and this day, it is Stillops, because that is what explains where we are today. Tomorrow, you will hear more things that we achieved through Stillops, the Stillops platform. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, even more. This is something that you really should take away from this day and this presentation. We are as committed as ever to our financial targets.
SEK 10 billion with 35% EBIT margin, 2023. I envision that we look like the following in four very important dimensions. We will not only have 56 games live in our active portfolio, we will have 100 games. We will not only have 60 million people playing our games every month, it will be 100 million players. We also will be very active on 100 markets through 100 different channels. If you excel in these four dimensions, you can create your own ecosystem. Your own ecosystem where you generate a lot of the traffic, not only by through buying new traffic from outside to one game, but you can generate a lot of the traffic within your own system. That is one of the most.
The biggest steps that we or any gaming company that has the ambition to be leading must take and will take. There is a lot of buzz about ad tech software, and that is important. You need that, but you can build it, you can buy it, you can partner it. What you cannot compromise with, and there's only one thing of doing it, is these four dimensions. You need to be good at the number of games you have actively promoted, the number of players you have, and you also need to master channels in many different markets. Then you can have your own ecosystem, which will be a big thing. Finally, many of you investors, some analysts, myself and our management, people here, we expected to reach higher revenues this year.
Not that we should earn more money, and we didn't really expect that we will have as good cash flow as we actually did have, but we expected. I'm, I must say I'm a bit disappointed on that. There are some expected challenges that we faced, IDFA, for instance, and some, a few unexpected. Listen to this, if we grow as much as we did this year, despite these challenges, next year and the year after that, we will not only reach our financial targets, we will beat them. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Jörgen, for that introduction and also for the introduction how our Stillops business platform is really gonna, you know, help Stillfront get to the next level. You'll get a lot more details about concretely how the Stillops platform is going to work and how it's concretely helping our studios throughout the rest of the sessions. Yes, very much looking forward to beating those targets together. I think that's a good transition now to one of our studios. We're gonna get in touch now with our studio in India, in Bangalore, Moonfrog. It's one of the recent additions to the Stillfront family. We'll have Anand, the Chief Operating Officer of Moonfrog, to join us in the Q&A session. Before that, we'll have a small intro video and a presentation from Anand. Let's roll. Anand, how are you doing? Can you hear me?
I'm doing well, Alexis. Thank you.
Excellent. Wonderful. How are things over there in Bengaluru?
It's a little wet. It's been raining for the last four weeks, so it seems like the monsoon is never ending.
Sounds like Sweden.
Except it's a lot warmer, yeah. You can see me in a T-shirt, so.
Wonderful. Listen, why don't you take it away? I know you have some really interesting slides to share with us here. Then you and I will do a little Q&A. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Alexis. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I'm pleased to welcome you to this Capital Day presentation on behalf of Moonfrog Labs and the entire Stillfront Group. As was mentioned, Moonfrog was the nineteenth studio to join the Stillfront Group in February this year. We're really grateful to be part of this family. I'm coming to you today from the tech capital of India, Bangalore. This is where all the tech action seems to be happening, not just in India, but we are driving technology across the world. For the uninitiated international observer, India seems to be an amazing growth story. In fact, for many people, it is mysterious how India is able to achieve these growth numbers. From the time that we opened our economy in the mid-nineties, India has made tremendous progress across multiple sectors. None of these match the technology growth.
In fact, many people will tell you that India had an advantage because we were a late adopter of technology. Because we were late adopters of technology, we were able to leapfrog all the evolution, all the mistakes, all of the experiments that the other countries had to go through. As a result of this, India has remained in the forefront of not just IT services, other technologies. We are now slowly, you know, part of the mobile revolution, digital economy and certainly the gaming economy. As all of you must be aware, India is a large country. There's over a billion people in India. Already, the growth that India has seen in the last five years, 1/3 of these, of our population is already using smartphones. That should tell you the growth opportunity that India has for gaming.
I'm going to spend a few minutes walking you through the gaming scene in India, and then a brief introduction on Moonfrog and our strengths, and you'll see why we are so bullish about the markets that we're in. India is the fastest-growing gaming market in the world, unquestioned. Now, while we may be smaller than other gaming markets like the U.S., just under $2 billion this year, what makes India an interesting growth story is the growth rate. India is growing at a CAGR of 38%, and what that means is that the gaming market size is going to double in three years. By 2025, India should be reaching the gaming market size of over $5 billion. That's a significant growth, probably faster than any other country in the world.
Now, while gaming itself is big, I mentioned earlier that India leapfrogged all technologies. Unlike other countries like the U.S. and China, where gaming evolved on consoles and on PCs, India has been a mobile gaming space. 88% of India's gamers use mobile phones to play their games. Like I said, gaming is growing at 38%, and Moonfrog is positioned to take advantage of this. I'll come to that in a little bit. Now, there are three main factors that are fueling this growth. Of course, government policies play a large part of this. In the last few years, India has brought policies that make smartphones available to almost every Indian. We have the lowest data costs. We have the fastest internet speeds on average across the world.
Like I said earlier, 1/3 of India is already playing games on the mobile phone. There was a recent study made by Google, where they said the average household in India has two smartphones. That is an amazing statistic because many still believe that India is a developing country, but the smartphone penetration is growing so quickly because of the low cost. I'll give you an example. Just a few days ago, one of the largest telecom operators in India launched a full-blown smartphone at $20. This is for the entire device. It's just an amazing price point. My own data plan that I have, which is almost unlimited data at 4G speeds, is $30 per year.
Imagine a $20 smartphone and a $30 data plan for the entire year, and you can see why India is such a fast-growing market. Majority of India, almost half of Indian users already connect at very high internet speeds over 12 Mbps. Moonfrog is extremely bullish about this market. We're excited to be where we are. We are already amongst the top two gaming companies out of India, and we believe we can consolidate in this space very quickly. Derive value not just for our team, but Stillfront and its shareholders. Here is a sort of timeline of our history. Moonfrog was founded in 2013 by a bunch of gaming professionals, actually four professionals who came out of Zynga. Gaming is in our DNA.
From its very early days, we have always believed that mobile games is what we should focus on. In the early days, we built games for the Indian ecosystem. We were aware that the networks' speeds were low and India six-seven years ago did not have the range of smartphones that we have today. Our games were lightweight, and they just worked. The users that we targeted or the users that we imagined was, for example, somebody traveling in a local bus, going across mobile towers and still being able to play on their mobile phone. For the most part, Moonfrog builds multi-user games. We allow users to play against each other. By the nature of our games, it's a socialized experience for socialization. Friends, family come in and play our games.
Within one year of Moonfrog's inception, we had our first major success. This is a game called Teen Patti Gold. It has nothing to do with a teenager. The word teen means three in India. This is an Indian version of the three-card poker game. Of course, none of our games are about real money. These are all free-to-play entertainment games. Two years later, we raised our first and only round of venture funds. Tier 1 investors, Sequoia, Tiger Global. The growth journey continued. In 2017, we had our next big success. This is a board game that many of you must be familiar with. It's called Ludo Club. Over the span of these years, we came to realize that our strengths lay in board games and card games. We call ourselves a publisher of evergreen games.
All the games that we build are games that are familiar to our user base, so we have stayed away from more complex games. Over eight years, a lot of things have happened. Most recently, we are about 160 employees. Our team is about 160. As you are aware, we joined the Stillfront family in February this year. Over our eight-year journey, we have seen success year-over-year. The last three years have been good. We continue to grow 30% on average year-over-year, and we're extremely bullish and confident about our future growth in the next five-10 years.
Like I already mentioned, we are in the business of evergreen games, so we believe that our games will be played for at least the next 10 years. This is a growing market. We have two titles which collectively account for over 6 million daily active users. These two games are different in nature. One is a board game which is more global in nature, the Ludo Club. It's played internationally across America, Latin America, the MENA region, and of course, the Indian subcontinent. Teen Patti Gold is more culturally close to the Indian subcontinent. We are a dominant player in this space in the Indian subcontinent. Like I said, we are one of the top two game publishers out of India. Teen Patti is a top 10 game in terms of revenue that it has grossed over its lifetime.
This is a sort of quick view of Moonfrog. We have, over time, made several games. Today, I just want to leave behind a set of our current games. We continue to double down focus on board and card game titles. Very recently, we have launched a game called Carrom. This is like a mini pool game. This is a game we are extremely bullish about. We've just launched a Parcheesi game and our own solitaire in the last couple of weeks. Overall, the next year looks extremely good for us. We are going to continue to grow in this space. Just looking at the numbers, all the opportunities that we see, we're very confident of success in the coming years. Being part of the Stillfront family has been an amazing experience. We have learned a lot from the other studios.
Special mention calls out to our sister studios, Goodgame Studios and Candywriter. Later on in this presentation, you'll see how we have worked with them for mutual benefit. Finally, none of us would be here if it wasn't for our team. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, this is not a very recent picture, but this is the most recent picture that we could find. On behalf of everybody at Moonfrog, it's my privilege, my pleasure to talk to you guys. Good luck. All the best.
Thank you very much, Anand. That was great. We just have a few minutes for a few questions, about five minutes, to go over those. We'll run a few and then I will let you know when we run out of time. I think the first question was, you know, how have this kind of first few months within Stillfront how have they been like?
They've been amazing from a personal standpoint and an organizational standpoint. I think what many people do not realize is that this relationship was constructed over a set of video calls. Even today, Alexis, you and I have never met in person. It is to me testimony to the trust that we have developed in each other. I think it's a great story for how human relations can develop internationally. Apart from that, just you know whole bunch of warm people across the entire group. Of course, we have learned a lot. I mean, Moonfrog has been a company that has grown organically for the most part. It's just in recent times that we have spent time with Goodgame, we've spent time with Candywriter. We've learned a lot about user acquisition, ad monetization.
We continue to learn, and this is not even touching upon all the personal connections and all the knowledge that's shared across the studios from StillBase. It's been an amazing experience. We feel part of a larger family. Just on this call, the fact that we are across pretty much all time zones around the world, I think it's a great feeling. Thank you.
Yeah. No, thanks. I think it's pretty incredible as well that having never met physically, and I'm traveling there soon, now that we can travel, it's just incredible also how it shows the power of the Stillops business platform that you've already started, you know, doing some collaborations, already start working and leveraging some of the part that gives you working with GGS on user acquisition, starting to work also and learning from Candywriter in terms of ad monetization. I think that's a really great sign. Just a follow-up question, a different question on that. You mentioned a little bit briefly the Indian market.
I think when Marina and I when we looked at the pipeline in terms of M&A, what really struck me in terms of Moonfrog is a lot of the things that we saw in the pipeline and a lot of the traditional M&A that's been done in India has been around how can we get cheap development power. You know, how can we to basically then sell externally. What we thought was really exciting, the mega opportunity was the Indian market itself. For us to see that, you know, you're one of the top two, you know, Indian continent game developers, we think if you're able not even to stay top two or three. Of course, you're gonna go to number one.
Even if you just stay in the top five or top 10 over the next four or five years, that is a massive opportunity. Just how do you see the Indian market developing over the next few years beyond just the 30% growth or 38% growth?
I think I'll just sort of, you know, stay with the growth for a moment, right? Like I mentioned in the presentation, already one-third of the Indian population is using smartphones. The numbers, the growth rates show that in 10 years' time , 96% of India will be connected on a smartphone. That's basically a billion users that we can target in this region alone. Digital economy has got a huge lift from the government policies. India is an economy where small transactions happen in really high volumes. Moonfrog is extremely well-placed to address that market. All of our games, you know, we have sachet level pricing. Essentially, we are very bullish about leveraging the growth that's coming in India.
Because of our areas of focus, we've remained true to evergreen games. India continues to be a space where people are comfortable playing traditional games. We have such a long history of entertainment. I was reading somewhere recently that fifth century, you know, there was a poet called Kalidasa, and in those days apparently the norm was people used to spend four hours a day on leisure and entertainment. This was 1,500 years ago. All of that tradition, all of those, you know, habits carry over. Even today, amazingly, the most recent data shows the average Indian gamer is spending 3.5 hours a day playing games on their mobile device.
Oh, incredible.
It's incredible how 1,500 years later, nothing seems to have changed.
Yeah. Thank you, Anand. We're out of time, but I do want to, you know, make one more point and ask you kind of one last question. Cause you've been also, you know, finding success outside of India. For example, you know, I understand recently, you know, you had the number one ranked game on Snapchat. And also, you know, if you could briefly go over. You've got plans for some new games. I understand you're gonna reuse the engine for Ludo to do a Pachisi version, which is kind of the Latin American. If you could just briefly go over those.
Sure. Yes, you're right. We launched our Ludo game on the Snap Games on the Snapchat platform a few months ago. We continue to remain among the top three to five games on Snap. We're just sort of moving our current game to the Snapchat platform, so that's one area of growth. The Ludo game is growing internationally across Latin America, MENA. You mentioned Parcheesi. Because Moonfrog has a proprietary tech stack that we have built over the years, you know, for board games, we are able to churn out a board game in a matter of a few weeks. Parcheesi, interestingly, is a game that actually came out of India, but now it seems to be growing in Latin America.
That's an opportunity we identified, little under two months ago, and we are already talking about the launch possibly in the next week or two. That's how quickly we can turn around a new board game. Really excited about the opportunities in Latin America and MENA.
Thank you very much, Anand. Really excited to have you guys on board and to be working together and capitalize on this massive opportunity together. Thank you.
Thank you, Alexis. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Yeah. Okay, perfect. So, now, I would like to welcome on stage our Head of M&A, Marina. Marina and I are gonna talk about the Stillfront model in terms of the, you know, acquisition and also organic growth. You know, the two engines of growth here at Stillfront. I think we'll be able to illustrate how closely we work together.
Thank you, Alexis. Hello, everyone. Very nice to see you here. I joined Stillfront in January 2019, and I can really say I've been keeping myself busy since then, and I've been having a lot of fun. There are 10 studios and one game asset that joined Stillfront during this time, so it has been intensive indeed. How could it be even possible? With the M&A team, as of today, we are two people, and I was the only one when I joined. That's not without a reason that I'm standing here together with Alexis, just exactly as it was two years ago at our Capital Markets Day. Because in our M&A approach, we always work really closely with our operational leadership.
Those are Alexis, of course, Philipp, our CPO, and our Senior Vice Presidents, Operations, who work with our studios. Today, I am really happy and proud to say that despite the softness we've seen in the market, post-COVID and post-IDFA, we do really see a solid and strong M&A pipeline. We're speaking about approximately 120 studios and around 110 game assets that we see as potential near and midterm M&A targets. With near and midterm targets, I mean, like, there is a potential deal within probably 18 months. Of course, not every one of those studios and gaming assets will join Stillfront because our approach is being highly selective. We like to speak about M&A approach in terms of strategic chessboard, like every move shall strengthen our position in the market.
Also, often we speak about pieces of the puzzle, like if there is competence that we lack currently within the group, if there is knowledge and expertise we do not have and cannot build with our own resources within the reasonable time, then probably the best approach to that is to find someone who brings in such competence. Therefore, we always think about such competence can be a new product, new genre, it can be broadening our audience, it can be becoming more cross-platform with this target, or also establishing better geographic reach, just as we spoke about Moonfrog. That's all about diversification. It's about mitigating the risk in our portfolio. This is the importance of our highly selective and truly diligent M&A approach, and we've seen that now in the current market environment as it has become more and more important.
How can we facilitate that? Well, this is our M&A process. Very important part of that is, of course, sourcing. A lot of sourcing is done with our internal network, so it's people within Stillfront Group. Of course, it's also networking, attending fairs and events, and like doing screening, following the trends, and trying to search for good targets. Also, we have strong and well-established relationships with the banks and M&A boutiques who have good competence within the right segment, within gaming. Then important part of that, and that could never be possible with only M&A team efforts, it's assessment and selection of the targets with a good fit. This is done not with M&A efforts only, but of course, with the support and collaboration with our operational leadership team. In the M&A approach, we now have knowledge and competence to work really efficiently.
We have our roadmaps and routines. There, we have a pretty standardized approach and processes that we follow. In this process, we work together with our finance team as well, our legal team, and we have great support from our advisors. All of that leads one day or another, not always, but in the majority of cases, to the happy day when we sign and close the deal. We do see it only as the start, because from acquisitive growth, the important part to get to successful onboarding and to successful organic growth. That's also the reason we work so closely together. With that, I would like to leave the word over to Alexis, our COO, to speak about organic growth.
Thank you very much, Marina. Appreciate it. I think, you know, one of the important things for me as well, and that some of you might not know, is I'm actually one of the founders of the studios that joined Stillfront, eRepublik Labs back in 2017. For me, you know, one of the reasons for joining a group like Stillfront, you know, was the ability and the possibility to work with incredible talent from around the world, right? For me, I would never have dreamed of being able to work with some of the talents, such as Marina or the people that she has in her team are the people that we have here in the group, to be able to do what we're doing right now.
That's really something quite special. I think when we say that we work very closely and that we're always looking for pieces of the puzzle, if you look at our Still Labs business platform, you know, every single one of those pillars, we're always looking at every single M&A opportunity. How can we make one of those pillars stronger? You know, we look at Candywriter, they're excellent at ad monetization. That can become an ad monetization hub. And then they become part of us. Moonfrog joins us. They help Moonfrog with their ad monetization, and that's the result. So it's always kind of now almost like we get these snowball effects of additional synergies, of additional collaborations with every studio that we get on board. Let's talk about organic growth.
As we know, 2020 was a bit of an abnormal year. I think it's very important with concrete numbers and concrete studios to show you know, how the engine is working at full steam and how we are gonna be able to improve this engine as we go. Of these 11 studios that made up Stillfront going into 2019, those 11 studios have had a combined growth that is faster than the underlying games market. In the last two years, these 11 studios have grown by 27%. The total games market has grown by 18%. You can see that all of these have. The growth has been driven really by, you know, the strong performance from evergreen titles.
There was a Twitter exchange one day that, I know, somebody was talking about old games, and I replied, "Stillfront loves old games." That got people talking a little bit. Yeah, we love old games because, you know, when you are able to look for years and years and years, you get that predictability, you get that growth. You know that those games become a hobby. You know that as long as you're able to capture and care for the community, those games can live forever. We love old games at Stillfront, and you're gonna be able to see, you know, what that means in reality. You know you can work with live operations and all that sort of stuff.
On top of that, if you add the fact that, you know, we're being very selective and working with these evergreen games, and you have an increased number of collaborations, increased number of superpowers that we can give to the studios through the Stillops business platform, that's, you know, part of the secret sauce of how we're able to basically make those old games continue to grow. Second part obviously is cross-platform. By applying a cross-platform strategy, you're really able to increase not just the revenues, but also the level of the engagement that you get with your games. That's how you get, you know, 11 studios with mostly an old games catalog to continue growing. That and of course, new launches that our CPO, Phillip will talk about.
Concretely, if we start with a studio that is close to my heart, obviously eRepublik Labs. eRepublik Labs was acquired in May 2017. At the time, it hadn't launched yet, War and Peace. It was just before the launch of War and Peace, so great timing, Jörgen. We had what Jörgen at the time, you know, Sten, which was our CFO at the time before Andreas joined us. What they had spotted, and very correctly, is we were very good in our niche. We were very good at doing 4X strategy games, and we had an engine for making 4X strategy games, and we had a whole technique of doing theme selection, all that. We had spotted this niche of the American Civil War in terms of 4X games.
We launched this game called War and Peace. We were able to scale it quite successfully in the first year, first year and a half, more or less. You know, it's kind of started declining a little bit. We have been able to basically get that game that is now four years old to actually grow significantly and break records last year again by basically getting help from GGS in terms of Goodgame Studios in terms of, you know, how do we improve our marketing, all that. Getting tons of information in terms of features from other studios. What are the features that work? What features have you A/B tested? All that sort of things has allowed the team at eRepublik Labs to find ways to get a four-year-old game, not only to grow again, but to break records.
That's an example, and as you can see, we have grown that studio by 77% over the past two years. Also while doing this, we've improved the War and Peace engine, and now several studios across the group are looking at that engine for potentially launching their own games on it. Another example is Playa Games. This is a studio that our SVP of operations, Harman, who's here in the room today, supports. That studio was acquired by Stillfront in December of 2018. Speaking of old games, their main game, Shakes & Fidget, has been around for 12 years. That studio has grown in the past two years by 157%.
That game is breaking records daily in terms of revenues after 12 years. What happened there at Playa? Just so you understand, you know, better, you know, how the sausage gets made. Playa at the time when we acquired them had a big part of their team working on a new game, and they'd been working on that new game for over a year and a half. We were able to see that that new game had actually quite low chances of success. We were also able to see that they were maybe not giving Shakes & Fidget all of the love that they could give it. The live ops weren't as strong as we could see in other studios and all that.
By sharing those learnings with Playa, not telling them what to do, just giving them the data, sharing the learnings, saying, "We were able to get them to refocus on Shakes & Fidget. Kill that game. Kill the game that was on sale," 'cause this is the games industry. When a game is going the wrong direction, the data tells you that it's not okay, you kill the game. They killed the game, refocused on Shakes & Fidget, and you can see the, you know, the growth that they've delivered. Marina, anytime you find me an old game that can grow by 157% over two years, we're takers, as you know. That's really interesting. Now, again, Playa is in the position to evaluate, you know, developing a new game, again.
Of course, one of the options for developing that new game to go faster go-to market, increase the chances of success, is to look at the various group, the various engines that we have within the group to develop that new game. That's Playa. Another example is Dorado Games. Dorado Games was one of the first acquisitions made by Stillfront. It was acquired in June 2014. Dorado at the time, you know, had difficulties in really reaching scale with its existing games portfolio. They had a declining games portfolio. They were kind of struggling to keep stable, and their big struggle was to basically find a new game to develop. Now, they were trying to find a new game to develop. They weren't finding something that was hitting the kind of KPIs that they needed.
At the time, what they did is they simply decided to partner with Bytro. Bytro is a very unique, very special grand strategy engine that is really special in the market and has a very dedicated niche that likes it. They have limited developing power in terms of using that engine and making more games about it. Basically, those two studios partnered together. Bytro, you know, offered up the engine for Dorado. Fast-forward a few years, not only was Dorado able to develop a game with much less risk and much faster at a much lower cost, that is the basis behind, you know, them growing over the past two years by 279%.
On top of that, Conflict of Nations, which is one of the latest version that of the games that they've done on that engine, is now one of our largest strategy titles. On top of that, because it's not just two teams improving an engine, it's just not one team improving an engine, it's now two teams improving an engine, Bytro has also benefited from all of the improvements that Dorado has made to the engine. You get two studios benefiting from that engine share. That's another example. If you look at basically the cross-platform aspect of things, you know, offering games across platforms is really key component of our product strategy. It's also another reason why we love these evergreen games. We love these communities, these dedicated communities to games.
Basically, launching on mobile really increases the engagement that you see in browser and adds additional revenues. You can see here examples of Supremacy 1914, which is one of the Bytro games, and you can see the impact of the mobile launch to the revenues of that game. Same thing, you know, for World War III and then also obviously Shakes & Fidget where you can see just the impact of the mobile version. What is interesting in here as well is that it very rarely causes cannibalization of the original platform revenues. It's really additional engagement, and more importantly, it enables you to target new players and therefore basically creates a profitable user acquisition funnel.
It's really a way not just to extend the lifetime of a game, not just to increase the revenues, but basically to bring, you know, fresh players and new players to a title. You know, Phillip, you know, will tell us a lot more about, you know, interesting things that we have in our engine sharing. That really was some examples that I wanted to share with you. Marina, thank you very much.
Thank you.
I think now we're going to transition to Candywriter.
Thank you.
Where we have Nadir in Miami that's gonna join us. We'll start with a short video, and then I think Nadir will have a small presentation, and we'll do a small Q&A. Let's go forward, Nadir.
Hello, Nadir. How you doing?
Doing great, Alexis. How about yourself?
I'm well. Please don't tell me it's miserable and raining in Miami. I won't believe you.
I don't think it's ever been miserable and raining in Miami. As you'll see next week when you come here and visit us.
Wonderful. I'm really looking forward to that trip.
Okay.
Uh, Nadir-
Yeah, we're looking forward to having you.
Excellent. Nadir, I know you've got a few slides that you're gonna share and present with us, you know, within the next 10 minutes, and then you and I will we'll do a quick Q&A. Are you ready to go?
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
First, I wanted to thank the investor community. It's both an honor and privilege to be addressing you again. I spoke this time last year at our last Capital Markets Day, and I'm happy to say a lot has changed positively for our company as we expected it to. BitLife has had a tremendous year. The brand just celebrated its third birthday, and the game remains as popular as ever. Users continue to request new features. We're constantly inundated with comments and suggestions. Really, it just shows us that just like life itself, really the possibilities of the game are limitless. YouTubers continue to make unique and compelling content based on the game. They can rely on BitLife as a vehicle to drive their own engagement, therefore the flow of videos on YouTube stays.
Remains very high, and the user population remains very engaged on that platform. Our advertising continues to bring in new users at scale. We don't seem to have any trouble, even three years in, finding users that haven't been exposed to text-based narrative games. We're capturing those users and keeping them engaged and inside our app. All of this combined has shown us that we've really struck a chord with the user community with these text-based narrative games. They want more games and more content in the BitLife model, and we're more than happy to oblige them. We've been part of the Stillfront family for 18 months now. I remember about two years ago, Alexis, you were over here in Miami for dinner, and you were describing to myself and Kevin the powers of synergies within the group.
You described Stillfront as a place where we could continue our creative vision, but also offload some of the responsibilities that have been bottlenecking our ability to produce new content. Just like our game icon, as you can see above my shoulder here, our product at that time was just an infant. Just like an infant or a child, it requires many hands and minds to help that child grow up to its fullest potential. A whole family, if you will. Stillfront became our family just a few months after we had that dinner, and we're excited to tell you how we were able to nurture this product together with Stillfront, to set ourselves on the best chance for success. It all started with the initial acquisition about 18 months ago.
You may remember in the last couple of Capital Markets Days, our two main goals after the acquisition were to, number one, deliver BitLife in more languages, and number two, to deliver more BitLife apps and storylines in the way of spinoffs. We're happy to say that we were able to achieve that. In order to achieve that over the course of the last eighteen months, we had to kind of cultivate this tree that we were growing. We started by developing BitLife into an extensible cross-platform narrative engine that we could reuse to create more spinoffs and localize. We set upon partnering with our sister studio, Goodgame, to release the German localized version or essentially to develop at first. We're seeing great success with that game.
As we cultivated this tree, we were able to see it start bearing fruit with this very first version of foreign language BitLife in German. I'm happy to say that as of today, it's the number one game in Germany soon after its launch, and I believe it's gonna do many great things. We've been able to see through this localized version that a lot of the great performance that the English version had was able to carry over into this foreign language version. This gives us the great confidence that we need to know that pursuing foreign language versions of BitLife is the right path for our company.
Furthermore, continuing along with our growth journey over the course of 2020 and 2021, we were able to use our newly developed BitLife engine to deliver the first spin-off version of BitLife called DogLife. Upon its release, we were able to rise to the top of most of the English-speaking markets, all of the English-speaking markets that is. We got to number two overall game here in the United States, number one in the U.K. and Australia, and the game remains a top 10 game in all of the English-speaking languages. This is especially exciting when you think that we were able to do this with just a nominal amount of user acquisition and cross promotion.
As we continue to develop the game based on user feedback, we're really excited to enter into its next stage where we really start going out there to capture new audiences. We're really excited about what the app can do. Much like the German version, the early indicators of the app are showing us that there's indeed a high demand for these spin-offs, more games in the BitLife model, and we're just really happy and excited to bring them to market. Over the course of 2022 and beyond, you can expect a lot more in the BitLife brand from our company and our sister companies in the Stillfront Group. Starting with BitLife German, as I mentioned, DogLife, BitLife in perhaps Spanish, Portuguese, really the options are limitless.
Further BitLife spinoffs in English, in some of those foreign languages, as those opportunities become available to us. In order to have achieved all of what we achieved over the course of the last 18 months, I want to describe how the synergies in the Stillfront Group have allowed us to get to where we've been, where we're at, that is. As I mentioned earlier, BitLife and Candywriter has had a tremendous year of growth. Jörgen mentioned that in both the conference call and the presentation that he made. It was very kind of him to attribute that to Kevin, my partner, and my professional management. The reality is that they were a result of the synergies that we were able to introduce to our company as being part of the group.
We've always considered ourselves a small but efficient studio, but as we started to work with some of these sister companies of ours, we were absolutely impressed with some of the ways that they handled their business. I'll start out with Goodgame. We leaned on Goodgame to lend their localization expertise and project management capabilities to make the monumental task of translating BitLife a reality. One time we measured the depth of text in BitLife, and believe it or not, we determined that there was more text in the game to be displayed than even in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which is a famously large book that you wouldn't want to drop on your foot.
That should give you a sense of how big BitLife is from the perspective of text, and how monumental a task of translating that into a new language would be. We were able to lean on Goodgame to help us get that done. It was absolutely impressive how they were able to both manage the project and manage the localization aspect to deliver that game in a relatively short window. Like I mentioned, we're really happy to see that game sitting at the top of the charts in Germany, or Austria and Switzerland at the moment. Furthermore, we wouldn't have been able to focus on our engine supporting Goodgame in their effort to localize BitLife or creating DogLife if it wasn't for some of the other synergies that were made available to us.
One example of that is KIXEYE. KIXEYE has essentially removed the accounting burden from our internal team while still being readily accessible and reliable to us. They've made themselves feel like our own internal accounting financial team, and that's allowed us to do what we feel we do best, which is creating engaging product. Furthermore, they keep on this ever-changing regulatory environment and make sure that we're at any given moment compliant with all aspects of regulation across the world. Furthermore, we've received a ton of support from Stillfront HQ. At a group level, we benefit from the streamlined processes, and assistance in critical areas such as GDPR compliance.
As well, we take advantage of the strategic relationships with gatekeepers in the industry, introductions to people from Google, Apple, as need be, to help move our products along. In addition, we've taken advantage of group-level cost savings, that come with being part of a strong and powerful group, such as Stillfront. We were able to drive down costs in key areas such as attribution, drive up things in revenue share, such as in areas of ad monetization, for example. All of this together has resulted in a stronger Candywriter. Taking advantage of the synergies has allowed us to grow and focus ourselves on the areas of our business that, number one, we feel we do best and what we enjoy the most, which is creating compelling product. These are all synergies that I consider inbound.
They're synergies that help us out as a studio. As these synergies allow us to grow. What are we doing for our sister studios? It's given us the opportunity to contribute to the other 20 studios that we're a part of. Inbound synergies allow us to focus on the areas that we do best as a studio, as a United States-based user base, that we could share with our group studios. Furthermore, we've developed several viral marketing techniques, which have made themselves evident in the success of things like BitLife German, DogLife. We continue to develop these types of techniques and are ready, willing, and looking forward to sharing them with our sister studios.
We see how these inbound synergies and outbound synergies work together, and we could see how these partnerships flow together in this graphic here. Where synergies come into us, we make use of them to create a stronger studio. We in turn relay those synergies back out to the rest of the group. You know, it kind of reminds me, Alexis, of you know a rope and a wheel, right? These two tools have been available to humankind for centuries, generations, millennia. It wasn't until Archimedes that figured out when you combine the two into one, creating a pulley, that you could literally move mountains. That's what we feel like these synergies have provided us.
We've taken the tools that were at our disposal, the tools that were at the disposal of our sister studios, and we were able to combine them essentially into a machine that is able to do great things, as we can see currently on the top charts.
Absolutely. Thank you very much, Nadir. I think we're running out of time, but do you have any other slides or? Yeah.
Yeah, just one. If we zoom out a little bit more, we could see how countless opportunities, just like in my graphic, illustrates how countless opportunities could combine across 21 studios.
Excellent. Thank you, Nadir. I think it's just a great illustration, what you've been doing, of the power of the you know the Stillops business platform. When I mentioned that for me, now one of the reasons we're in Stillfront was the ability to join with incredible talent. Don't forget that behind every pillar in this Stillops platform, there's incredible talent, incredible expertise that as a single studio you would never have access to, and that makes a huge amount of difference.
Actually, talking about incredible talent, one of the things that I'd like to announce today that I think we've just announced yesterday, it was with Amy Lee, who's here today, with us, who's just joined us from Blizzard Entertainment, where she was leading mobile and also working on synergies with Activision and King. She joined us yesterday, and she will be leading and providing support to our U.S. and Canada-based studios. Welcome, Amy. You're getting extra support, Nadir, to do even more synergies and get that flywheel going even faster.
Looking forward to it.
Excellent. Just conscious of time, but we'll go through some of the questions that I had. You mentioned DogLife a few times. Just so you know, I'm in the unfortunate position in DogLife of being a Rottweiler that's dominated by a Chihuahua. I think I haven't figured out all of the game mechanics yet, so I'm expecting some tips when I come to Miami. What has the reception been like for DogLife?
Well, I think anybody that's ever owned a Chihuahua will tell you that they're very dominant for their size. The reception has been very good. You know, I think we released the game. We made a very passive announcement of it as we wanted to kind of observe the metrics, the reception, and tune up the game just like we did with BitLife. Just like BitLife, the popularity of the game definitely got ahead of itself. It shot up to number two overall in the United States. Number one overall game, that is. Number one in the U.K., number one in Australia. It remains a top 10 game right now. The metrics are indicating that it's a very well-liked game.
People enjoy the prospect of playing as a dog, and it provides a whole new facet to the things that they loved about BitLife, a new way to play it.
That's great. A very, very impressive launch beyond even my expectations, to be honest. Well done.
Thank you.
You've built an amazing community around, you know, BitLife and this huge following for BitLife from social media. What's the secret sauce? Don't give away too much.
It's conversation and engagement, right? Creating engaging content that speaks to the audience. You know, I think that we stay on the pulse of what's popular, right? Meme culture, for instance, current events. We have a system inside the game that allows us to insert current events and things that are hot right now, live. I think people see that. It just keeps the conversation going. You know? People see the game, and they could tell that it's an ever-changing, ever-evolving game that stays current. Just like everything else that's current, the conversation stays alive because of that on social media.
BitLife Germany just made it to number one, the German version. What's the next language? Where are we number one next?
Well, as the polyglot at Stillfront, Alexis, you, the person that knows the most languages, I think I'm gonna rely on you to tell me what language may be best. Perhaps Spanish. We're getting a lot of demand for Portuguese as well. But I'm just super excited to see the way the German version landed. I think even, you know, three years into the BitLife brand, that just the sheer launch of the game could rocket it to number one shows how much people wanna play games like this, not only in the United States, but all over the world. I think the future is very bright for original BitLife, and the many languages that we can make it available in.
That's great. Just to conclude quickly, in the 30 seconds we have left, what's next for Candywriter? What do you have planned for 2022?
I think we've found a great pattern of success here, right? With foreign language versions of BitLife and spin-off versions of BitLife in narrative games. I think you're gonna see a lot more of that out of us now that we've tuned up our engine and firing on all cylinders. We're just really excited to keep using it and delivering more products in this vein.
Wonderful. Well, thank you very much, Nadir, and I look forward to enjoying some of that sunshine in Miami in a week or so. I'll see you very soon.
Looking forward to it.
Thank you. Perfect. Now we are gonna transition to product and one of our corner pillars, you know, which is Stillforce within our Stillops business platform. Our CPO, Phillip, is gonna talk about our product pipeline, but also engine shares and how that's an essential part of Stillforce, essential part of faster go-to-market with higher chances of success. Phillip, please, if you can come on stage.
All right. Thank you, Alexis. As part of my CPO update, I want to talk about how we achieve and sustain organic growth due to our product pipeline. This is all part of Stillops, which is namely new game development, engine shares, we touched on it already, and of course, also platform and region expansion of existing titles. There are of course many more aspects in Stillops which are also helping to organic growth, like live operations, marketing for existing games, but today I will focus on the new games, which is often the most fun. We did a major step up compared to previous years. In 2021, our Stillfront studios have been working on more than 40 new games.
So far, we have only canceled about 15 of those productions at various stages, which is significantly lower than what we are expecting before. To a large extent, this is the way how we changed our approach to games, which I will come to in a moment. Even more important is that right now in Q4 this year, we are on 15 games in soft launch. We already teased a couple of these, and I have the chance to show you a few more. All these games are in various degrees of soft launch. Some are in more early technical launch phase, others are currently optimizing the retention or optimizing the monetization, and others are already at the point where we are testing the waters for marketing scalability.
The way how we achieve this of so heavily increasing the amount of shots we have to find more successes is our even more enforced focus on spin-off and engine shares. Basically, not always trying to reinvent the wheel to make a new game, but much more relying on existing technologies, existing infrastructure, in these aspects. This also allowed us to significantly reduce the cost per game. We not only have much more games in production in soft launch, but we could also do this on average much cheaper. When we look at the games which are currently on Q4 in soft launch, and we look at this by our usual genre split, then I'm very happy to see, from a product strategy-wise, that it's a very even split.
If you look at simulation, RPG action, then casual mashup and strategy, fairly evenly distributed. Strategy, slightly smaller, but this is also just naturally because strategy games are just bigger production which take longer. Of course, when they succeed, they usually also have the longest lifetime. Just about thinking about Goodgame Empire, it just had its 10-year anniversary and still contributes heavily to the group, and we hope to achieve this again with future titles. Now, to be able to do this, to manage like the production of more than 40 games this year, we had to further improve the support that Stillfront can give to the studios.
I'm very happy to report that we reached a point that it's very clear when a studio joins Stillfront, it will have major advantage to developing new games compared if it would do this alone. This all starts with sharing of KPIs, because at the end, it's all about this. Like, the game's essence, the KPIs, they need to be good. We as Stillfront, with the 21 studios, we have access to KPIs in all kinds of genres, channels, stores, and platforms. When a company wants to soft launch a strategy game on Android in Poland, then we can give them the right KPIs. What would be a good loading time for a strategy game on Android in Poland? This is so important, right? Because the studio doesn't need to find this out for themselves.
At the same time, we can also support them through all these soft launch phases. That would mean, let's say, a given company has issues with resolving the loading time on the Android devices, which is a common problem. In general, when it's about making new game developments, there are many problems which are just coming up. A new company develops a new game and has a challenge, chances are very good that at least one of our 21 studios did already have this challenge and overcame it. Even if they not overcame it, they can still at least share their learnings out of the failure, which is already great. This also can even help us to cancel a game faster if it needs to be.
Of course, most of the time it's about like supporting them and getting over this. We do this by conducting the group headquarters visits, so it would be Alexis and me and other supporting units. Also even more important, giving them access to experts from the different studios. Imagine a studio wants to do a new puzzle game, and they try to figure out, "How do I best balance the difficulty of the puzzles?" On one side, if they are too hard, then it's frustrating and people churn. If they're too easy, then player will just burn through the content and don't pay. It needs to be like the sweet spot in the middle.
You can try to figure this out on your own with like testing and so on, but you could also talk to the experts at Storm8 who are basically living and breathing puzzle games, and this is what we can offer to them. That's why it was also important for us to expand the Stillops platform in the group to expand this access. A perfect example for this wide range of collaboration is BitLife Germany. So it's the reason that the text here is German. No mistake on this side, which we already touched about. I just want to get a bit more in detail how complex such a production is, because BitLife is one of our top games already in Stillfront, but it's only available in English.
It was from the very beginning absolutely natural and clear to us that we want to localize this game. It sounds much easier than it actually is. An inch of text that needs to be translated. More complicated is actually that this game, which may look like simple on the surface, is highly complex in terms of how sentences are generated, both on players' choices and on randomness. The English version may generate a sentence like, "I bought a car for my mother," and it can easily replace it to, "I bought a house for my father." Very simple. However, try doing this in German, where the gender of the persons and also gender of the object changes the sentence structure.
What we needed to do, and what Candywriter solved by working with Goodgame is basically partnering on co-developing a completely new standalone product. This game is a standalone app published by Goodgame to overcome this, like with a complex grammar tool behind, and it would be the same for future languages. By the way, the game has been launched in Germany because Germany is the second strongest market in the whole Stillfront portfolio right after English. There may be other languages like Spanish and Portuguese, which obviously have a higher range in terms of addressable audience, but Germany is just so strong because of our marketability.
We are indeed right now at the point that we are in a more advanced stage of soft launching this game, testing the waters of seeing how much we can scale the game. As Nadir Khan already mentioned, I was very happy to see that just today, the game hit the number one download spot on iOS Germany. We will of course see how this goes at the same time consider more languages as we touched on. What was very important is due to this collaboration, Candywriter had the chance to focus themselves on the spinoff on DogLife. DogLife is a great example for what I mean with spinoffs.
It's really all about not always trying to reinvent the wheel, starting from scratch with doing a game, but rather also looking at what do we have, which is already successful and how can we, like, make a new game out of it, more than just like changing the setting, but actively adding new gameplay elements and new story aspects. While BitLife is all about living the life of a human from birth to death and having careers or like crazy challenges and a lot of humor in it, now it's about actually being a dog. How is it to living a pet or even being a street dog and doing all kind of mischiefs with this.
Another example for an upcoming spinoff is a new match three and build project by Storm8, where we don't have a final name on it yet. Storm8 already had seen great success with Property Brothers, which was the first spinoff. They had Home Design Makeover, then they went with Property Brothers, new setting, also a new puzzle layer on it. They will soft launch another title. Again, new setting, it will be around the gardening, and again, a completely new take on the puzzle segment. Of course, a lot of learnings and a lot of fun technology from this, which allowed them to develop this game much faster and with higher chance for success than just starting from scratch.
The last one, example for a spinoff would be Iron Order 1919, which is another game on the grand strategy engine by Bytro Labs. As you may know, the strategy games of these engines were World War I, World War II, modern military, whereas this one is giving it a more fictional spin to basically an extended World War I with fictional element based on some marketing tests, seeing like some new audience and some new variations. This project is especially interesting to me to present you here because it shows greatly what we mean with this engine approach. We already talked about the success we had with sharing the engine between Bytro Labs and Conflict of Nations to launch more games, and now we go even further.
On this one engine, we currently have five games developed by three studios. The first two ones are the Bytro Labs games. We have Conflict of Nations, which we had a success both with the web and mobile version. We have Iron Order 1919, which is the spinoff that Bytro Labs currently in a very early phase of test launch. On the right side, we have an upcoming Arabic version in collaboration with Babil Games, which I will talk about in a moment. Just again to go a bit in detail what we mean with engines. It's really about not only like reusing certain features, which is great, but it's much more about the tool sets of infrastructure. Think about like how levels are generated or even how like certain assets are generated and combined.
At the same time, all the back ends, like such a strategy game like Conflict of Nations needs a significant server architecture behind which can simulate all the thousands of battles in real-time. This is something you don't want to develop from scratch if you don't have to. That's why it's so great to try to reuse these engines as we did here. This is not only about doing spinoffs, which is already great, but in Stillfront we also put great effort in setting up our studios to share the engines. To be able to do that, Bytro in Hamburg can share the engine for Conflict of Nations with Dorado on Malta, and extend further this.
It's also an example where the engine share product was actually more successful than the original games, which then went back to Bytro, as Alexis already definitely wanted to further enhance this, and during 2021, we started various new engine share projects, and a couple of these are already in soft launch, so I will touch on two of these. The first one would be Love and Passion. This is a new narrative game based on Nanobit's narrative engine, in collaboration with another division at Goodgame Studios. Nanobit has been very successful with this romance narrative games in modern settings. It was very attractive for us to look into ways of expanding the audience reach here, and what the studios have found due to testing is going in a Regency England style, like Jane Austen novels.
At the same time, also going a step further, modernizing the genre, adding some diversity as shown here, so it's a great success on launch giving something new. Again, it's much more than just sharing technology. It's also sharing experience in terms of, for example, writing guidelines, like how to write a story which is engaging, and gives me choices which are meaningful, and it's the right side, like which on one side keep me engaged, don't frustrate me, but can also encourage me to monetize. This is what the two studios did collaborate very closely, and this game will soft launch in Q4. On the right side, another great example which is SIEGE: Apocalypse, which is a collaboration of three studios, which would be at the beginning, Simutronics developed SIEGE: World War II.
They gave this game, which they transferred it to Imperia because Simutronics wanted to focus on a completely new game development. Imperia took over the live operations and the marketing, continued to grow and improve the game. Now this engine came to KIXEYE for them to create a new game. While SIEGE: World War II is, as the name suggests, in the Second World War, this game will be in a modern military setting, which fits great to what KIXEYE is already known for with their game War Commander: Rogue Assault. This game will also soft launch in Q4. Looking at this example of three studios collaborating, this is exactly what we want to see. We report that with our Stillops initiative, we have counted more than 100 such collaborations.
I'm talking about real significant collaborations like performance marketing, shared form expansions. Everything which does either generate revenue or save costs. This does not count into two game designers exchanging experiences. This is of course extremely valuable, but this happens every day all the time, so this is uncountable. These are all big collaborations. I think we are very good here, but we want to grow even further, and I think this is also visible in our acquisitions. That's why I want to highlight a couple of acquisitions we did in 2021. First of all, Moonfrog, we already talked about it. It's not only maybe the fastest-growing market, but is already in fact the biggest market when it comes to downloads on mobile.
Studios are struggling to monetize in this market, and we really believe the only way to be successful there is work with a local player. Someone like Moonfrog who is actually having deals with local corner stores to give people who don't have access to online banking still opportunities to pay in the game because they can literally do it in an Indian corner store, which something which without a partner like Moonfrog would be not possible for a Western company. We also expanded in our strengths in the MENA region further with Jawaker. Not only the MENA region, but also the 420 million Arabic speaking people worldwide that we want to address. Jawaker also has quite success with their own reseller networks in this Arabic region.
These two studios are already working together to improve this and learn from each other. Then the last group would be both Sandbox Interactive and Game Labs, which both brought in very successful titles which are only available on PC client. As Alexis has already shown, we had seen great success with bringing new games to mobile, and we believe that both of the studios could do much better if we were to support them on expanding their platform reach. The first one would be, of course, Albion Online, from which we launched the mobile version already this summer. Of course, it's not only a significant technical challenge to transfer your game from PC to mobile, but it's for example, also a completely different way of doing marketing for this.
This is something which we can support and we are still doing, so this game still has a lot ahead in terms of reaching further scale on mobile. In the middle, I have The General, which is the Arabic version of Conflict of Nations, which is again, a three studio collaborations, Dorado as the developer of Conflict of Nations, Bytro Labs as the marketing power behind Conflict of Nations, and Babil as our traditional local expert in the MENA region. This was about like localizing the game, especially culturalizing the game, which is very important for the region. This game is currently in an early soft launch phase where we are testing the tech APIs, and then we'll continue.
In conclusion, I want to give a bit of an outlook with Naval Action, 'cause it's another way of collaboration we do. Naval Action is literally the flagship game by Game Labs. It's a very successful PC premium title, and we believe this game can be much stronger and much bigger if it were a free-to-play game. We are working with them, and we are expecting to soft launch the free-to-play version in 2022, which will be one, hopefully one of the first game which will help us to maintaining this very strong pipeline also in the years to come. All right, I hope this gave you a good overview about everything which is going on in the slide outlook. Yeah, again, a couple of these games are already in soft launch, so I recommend checking them out.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Phillip. I've got to say that this is by far the most exciting new product pipeline that I've seen. It is really impressive. At Stillfront, we don't just love old games. We also have studios who are capable of doing very interesting and very exciting new games. That capacity has really been boosted, I hope you've seen, by things like engine shares, basically by our Stillops business operations platform. Very, very exciting times in terms of the pipeline, and also a great time to take a small break of 15 minutes. Please. Welcome back everyone to the Stillfront Capital Markets Day. I hope you've enjoyed the first part of these sessions.
I hope you've learned about how we are basically leveraging the Stillops business platform to deliver some very special studios and really, you know, accelerate our growth. Now, I would like to introduce to you two very special people, Andreas, our CFO, who's gonna talk to us about basically our financial model and set up, and also Verena, who leads one of our financial ops, who will explain also what that means and how that works. Please come on stage.
Thank you, Alexis, and I'm Andreas. Today I have Verena with me as well, and she will talk a bit about the organizational setup after my little session here. It's two years since we have our Capital Markets Day. What have we achieved? Jörgen talked a bit about how we have expanded our portfolio, but in terms of revenues. We have increased our net revenues with 154%. We have also added a significant amount of active games. We have 56 games in our active portfolio, excluding Neil Walker, with actually 57 today. Versus the 23 we had just two years ago. A quite large portion, we had SEK 78 million in Q3 of recorded revenues, that is our non-active portfolio.
These are of course long tail games, but also some of the games that are in soft launch, which Philip just talked about as well. If you would taken that SEK 78 million and compared to the revenues just two years ago, that would've been 15% of our total revenue portfolio. We have grown our player base by 11x . We had 62 million monthly active users in the last quarter. What does this create? Well, this creates a diversification. We have also moved the type of players we have. We went from having 85% male, 35- 45-year-olds playing our games just two years ago, to much more equal division of players between gender, geographies, etc. That of course has created a significant diversification in our revenue streams. We also moved to a higher share of mobile.
We now have, in the last quarter, 74% of our revenues coming from mobile from 56% just two years ago. That is, of course, fits into the growth of the market, and we have a better distribution of our own player games versus how the markets look, even if we still have strong desktop games. Ad revenues, we said just two years ago, that's a critical base to grow. We were now in 18% of our revenues just in Q3. That is very critical because that is our natural hedge versus one of our bigger spends, which is user acquisition costs. When prices go up on user acquisition costs, our income goes up as well. What has this created?
Well, we all like to think about growth, and that's important, but it's also how this has been created in terms of how we have grown. Is it diversification? This diversification brings a few things. Well, it brings stability, it brings predictability, which derisks our revenue streams. Why is this important? Well, because we come from gaming, we know gaming. Each studio, each game goes through cycles. They are in development phases, they are in soft launch phases, and they are in a scaling phase. This portfolio and this diversity creates this natural hedge and derisk our revenue streams. How have we grown? Well, we talk about sell-offs, but that's some collaborations that are now at a hundred but are yielding already and have been yielding significant amount of revenues. Stillfront also can provide financial support.
Of course, when you have your own studio, you might not wanna spend all the money you have or cannot spend all the money to actually scale a game. That's exactly what Stillfront can provide to the studios. Here we're showing how our studios have developed. These are all the studios that we have acquired that are coming out of earnout this year and how they've grown. All of the studios, except for one, has grown versus the year of acquisition. Some of them, two of them, more than 10x . Some of them, of course, have gone in terms of the times X, a bit short, lower.
Of course, Storm8 came in, and they have $118 million Q3 LTM numbers, but they're still growing, and they're still delivering on a very high level. We also, of course, acquire companies. We acquire in terms of upfront consideration, and we also pay earnout. Stillfront likes to pay earnout. I will get to that more in detail a bit later further ahead in my presentation. For these companies, we paid approximately SEK 5.2 billion. What has this delivered us then? Well, we can do M&A at attractive multiples. When you look at you acquire companies, you need to look at upfront multiple. What do you pay? Our model is set up that we encourage growth. As I disclosed on the last slide, all our studios are growing.
Looking at what we paid for the SEK 5.2 and looking at the Q3 LTM numbers, these studios would have been acquired at a multiple of 4.9x. Of course, it doesn't stop there. That's just a measurement point. They will continue. They're continuing to grow. They continue to deliver profits, and they continue to support the growth of this business. We have been able to do this at very attractive total multiples so far. I'm sure if we forward that EBITDA a bit, it will be even better. We, of course, have enjoyed support from our equity investors and shareholders. That's one key fundamental to our financing model, but we have three other pillars as well.
We have a very strong cash flow generation, which I will touch a bit about more, and we have access to the debt capital markets and how we developed that, and we have self-financed earnouts. If we look at our cash flow generation first, which is, I would say, it's an underlying pillar for Stillfront. I would say it's probably an underlying pillar for any company that you actually make money. Here is the development of Stillfront's cash flow generation since the last time we stood here. We have increased our cash flow after investments by 5 times. In Q3 this year, LTM, we delivered an operating cash flow of about SEK 1.5 billion. We continue to invest heavily over SEK 500 million in our product pipeline.
That still yields a free cash flow of over SEK 1 billion. A strength of our financing model. This is the foundation of how we operate our business. If we put that in relationship to our number of shares and look at the average number of diluted shares, that is increasing 3x since the two years. This is very key for how we can actually continue to use, because we have to use debt as part of our finance model. We still have a conservative leverage ratio, a target of 1.5 net debt over EBITDA. We have moved that. We always consider debt in terms of a maturity profile. We always try to slot in the debt that we don't have too close of the debt maturing.
That has been a very critical pillar how we fund this. We have three outstanding bonds, but I think one of the key aspects here, through our diversification of revenues, through our cash flow generation, we've been able to move our interest margins from 500 basis points to 275. That's almost halving the actual cost, which in the end actually saves money because we pay less absolute interest. This has been key. We also have, since the last two years, partnered up with three banks. We had one bank that was a partnership bank. What does the bank give us? Well, they give us flexibility and in terms of having a big credit facility of almost SEK 3.8 billion.
It gives us the flexibility and the firepower to actually be able to execute on M&A activities. The earn-outs. Before I jump into this, I mean, we think earn-outs is a very good way of acquiring companies, from both a management perspective and operations perspective, but also from the fundamentals of on a financial side. First, in terms of why do we use earn-outs? Well, the management, they are incentivized. They're incentivized to grow, to continue to expand their business because they get a reward for it. It also creates a hedge. If it doesn't go that well, we are actually hedged. It's not we're paying everything up front. That's why also debt bridge into to our actual how we finance this.
These numbers, just looking at the actual numbers that we paid, we paid approximately SEK 600 million in cash earn-outs in Q2 this year. This relates to 2020 EBIT. This is actually not just a theoretical exercise, but this is the amount of money that the studios generated in cash and the free cash flow, and that matches the cash earn-out. Of course, we have studios that are not in earn-out. Of course, we have continuous amount of studios that come into earn-out or go out of earn-out. Of course, this the absolute cash flow of the business covers that by far. This is a very key principle that we structure earn-out, so they are self-financed.
Before handing over to Verena, who will talk about what I will say is the only non-optional things when you join Stillfront Group. To summarize a bit, we have continued revenue growth, but especially we have a strong diversification how that growth has been created through the types of games, types of players, types of geographies, and demography's. We have been able to do M&A at very attractive valuations. The underlying pillar of this is also we have a strong cash flow, and the cash flow is improving. We have coupled that with that we can access cheaper debt capital. We can have more banks to partner with and a bigger flexibility. We have a self-financed earn-out model. With this said, I will move to Verena.
As I mentioned, finance and being at a listed entity or group has implications that a normal gaming studio needs to adhere to when it comes to reporting and control environment. That Verena will talk about how we do most efficiently in Stillfront.
Thank you, Andreas. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Verena Schnaus. I'm Managing Director and CFO of Goodgame Studios. Additionally to my local role at Goodgame Studios, I lead one of our finance hub we established at Stillfront. Today, I would like to take the opportunity to talk about the role within Stillfront Group of those finance hubs. As Andreas already mentioned, a new studio coming into the group, for them, the finance requirements of a listed company is probably the biggest change. What we could do as a hub, we could offer to support the finance services, such as handling the IFRS reporting, such as financial planning and analysis, internal controls, supporting with taxation. To summarize the services we could offer to the studios, I would say that it is the fulfillment of the finance compliance framework.
A number of studios have already outsourced their finance functions to the regional hubs, of which we established three in the Stillfront Group already. One is located here at headquarters with Andreas in Stockholm. One is with me in Germany at Goodgame Studios, and one is led by my colleague Tim Holland, CFO of KIXEYE in Canada. What are the key benefits of the financial hubs? With the regional financial hubs we established, we wanna make sure that the businesses could focus on their core business. This is what Nadir already told us in his presentation about Candywriter, that this is the benefit for them that they could free up time to focus on core business.
Because imagine not every studio at Stillfront Group runs its own finance department due to size, nor do we want the studios to free up resources to support finance matters of finance requirements. Instead, what we build is a foundation of knowledge, resources, and processes so that eventually the hub structure creates scalability of finance expertise. Not only that, the finance hubs support the established studios we have in the Stillfront Group. We also enable, from a finance perspective, an efficient M&A process, and we support the group to continue to grow constantly without building a huge central finance function. The regional finance hub plays an active role within our M&A projects around the globe. We come into the projects as a finance deal lead and are in very close contact during due diligence processes with our external advisors that time already.
We also support and prepare for the pro forma financials, and by the time of the finance integration of a new family member, the finance hub take over full responsibility for finance matters for that new subsidiary. Let me give you an example on a post-merger integration on the acquisition of Sandbox Interactive. By that time last year, we had three M&A projects running simultaneously at Stillfront Group, which were Moonfrog, Super Free, and Sandbox Interactive. The acquisition of Sandbox was announced on December 18th, and it was closed on December 13th. That means that by the time of January 1st, we were required, financially required to have our local accounts converted into IFRS reports and consolidated into our group financials January 1st. Not only that, this happened comfortably in time for our Q1 external report.
Moreover, with the hub, we were able to consolidate those financials, not only on preliminary numbers or on pro forma numbers, but on actual numbers into our group consolidation system within the deadline of our January report. With the hub, we were able to have for our internal addressees a full January financial group statements, including Sandbox Interactive actual numbers from day one. With this, you can see that with the finance hub models, we create an economy of scale. Not only that, but moreover, we also support the further development of our resources, of our already existing finance resources with new projects coming in all the time.
For the Sandbox Interactive acquisition, I personally must say that this has been outstanding because with Sandbox, every gear of the local team and the finance hub team just meshed each other. I would not call it extraordinary because due to that solid rock we built, to that expertise and structure level. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Verena. That was great. I think it's after you've seen and heard a little bit about how SLG's platform can help us in terms of the product. I think to see also how the finance hubs can free up so much time for the studios and help them. Nadir, Candywriter spoke a little bit about it. I hope Verena's intervention gave you a bit more color about what that means and how that works. I think now we're ready for Sandbox, Albion Online, Robin. So I think we'll have a short video now, and then we'll do some Q&A with Robin.
Robin, how are you doing?
I'm doing well. Thank you. Hello.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
How are things in Berlin?
Great. We're just a week from a major update. Everybody's excited about what's happening at Sandbox, so the team is in very good spirits.
That's wonderful. Listen, Robin, could you just take like a few minutes just to introduce Sandbox Interactive, what Albion Online is, and maybe kind of, you know, give a bit of background on the studio and the game and also what your role is. You know, you're one of the new family members. Not many people know you, so please go ahead.
Absolutely. Yeah, we are Sandbox Interactive, a studio dedicated to the development of Albion Online, a game which we believe to be the best sandbox MMORPG in the world. MMORPG stands for massively multiplayer online role-playing game. We're a team of 60 people located in Berlin, Germany. We're driven by our passion for growing Albion Online and improving the game together with our community. If you're not familiar with Albion Online, it's a single persistent world which players can join with their avatars, and they can then participate in shaping the future of this single world. They can harvest resources, craft these resources into equipment items like swords, wands, bows, armors. They can then build characters with these equipment items, basically building their own unique character classes.
They can take these characters that they have built into battle against other players or against creatures of the world. These battles against other players can take on very massive proportions. Hundreds of players can join into these battles, and this is why they are fought between large social groups called guilds. The game is very much about driving players into these guilds and therefore builds very much on the social foundations and builds on building these social foundations, which gives us not only the strength of the game that players stick around for, but also for the friends that they make in the game.
My own role in this is that I am, as CEO of Sandbox Interactive, responsible for the company, the well-being of the employees and of course, the direction of the company. I'm also Game Director for Albion Online, so I am creatively responsible for the direction of Albion Online and also of the production of the game.
Great. Thanks, Robin. I mean, as a studio, you've grown significantly over the past few years. To what do you attribute that success?
Well, first off, thanks to a lot of hard work. But mostly due to, I think our sort of uncompromising approach to building this game, which is a very unique game which we believed in from the very beginning, and we just constantly innovated to overcome challenges in the development process. Because Albion Online is a game about making a very deep experience available to a massive number of people, having a fair monetization model underneath and making that experience accessible to many, many, many players. That is a challenge. On top of that, making it available as a true cross-platform game, available both on PC and mobile devices, and being able to play in the same world with players on both platforms with the same accounts.
There's a lot of technical challenges that needed innovation, and there were a lot of gameplay challenges that needed innovation as well, which we were able to overcome with the help of our awesome player community that helped us constantly with great feedback and rewarded us with their loyalty.
Actually, you know, on that cross-platform experience, I mean, you've become a true cross-platform experience this summer, as you're saying, you know, with the launch of what I think is probably the only proper MMO game on mobile, which is a pretty impressive feat. Can you tell us more about that experience? What has the reception been like? What have you learned?
Yeah, I mean, it was developed from the very beginning to become a cross-platform game. Even in 2012 when we started, we made the plans, and we laid the foundations for launching this cross-platform version, but it took nine years to actually make that vision come true and release the cross-play version on iOS and Google Play Store this summer. The reception has been great. Our existing player community was very excited to check out this new version and see how it would integrate with their way of playing Albion Online. Most importantly, it also has reached a massive new audience, lots of new players coming in via the mobile version and exploring Albion is a huge benefit for us.
Yeah. What would you say has been the most difficult? I mean, one of the things that we did, and a lot of people think that parent companies, you know, would push you to launch earlier, get growth faster. We actually did the opposite. We told you, "Oh, wait a second. We think there's a few things missing in terms of the mobile experience. The UI is not quite there." We actually, you know, kindly nudged you to delay the launch a little bit until you would be ready. What was the most difficult, the things that you had to face there?
Well, there were quite a number of challenges. You already mentioned one of them, getting the user interface for such a complex game into a state where it can be played both on PC and mobile seamlessly. Players would obviously expect the mobile version to handle well, but also would expect to find the same things that they find on the PC in similar places. This has, of course, been a big challenge, and in collaboration with Sandbox, we basically decided to take several extra months to polish this up. On top of that, of course, just fundamentally building a game like that has been a massive challenge. I mean, like I said, we planned for it from the very beginning.
This is not something that you can decide at a later stage, that you want your game that has hundreds of players in the same battle to suddenly be able to run on a mobile phone. We had to optimize memory massively. We had to make many, many decisions on a technological level to make this work.
Yeah. That's probably one of the reasons there's not many real MMO games on mobile. There's just massive barriers to entry and a massive technical challenge to get it there. What impact has it had on the community tuning both on PC and mobile?
I mean, for us, it was very exciting to see what would actually happen because we've been pursuing this idea for a very long time. The original idea really was to future-proof Albion Online, because when we started, we always had the vision of making a game that would run 10, 20, 30 years. You know, if you look at the MMO market, this is the sort of lifespan that games are supposed to have and that we want Albion Online to have. We just said we need to be able to run on mobile devices because we don't know what the desktop market will look like. For us, it was an essential sort of survival goal or planning ahead goal.
Seeing how the community would react was an interesting something we were really looking forward to. The reaction has been basically that the core player base, the existing player base, has integrated the mobile devices into their daily playing experience, how we kind of anticipated. They're using it to check their market on the go. You know, Albion has a very strong in-game economy. There's lots of reasons to interact constantly, so they're using this to check on their own personal player islands or check on the marketplaces, or even, you know, play some dungeons on the go. On the other hand, on the other side, like I said, a lot of new players have been coming to Albion Online via the mobile channels because it's so much easier to do marketing for the mobile channels.
Most of the ads that we show are being seen on mobile devices, so it's much easier to get people to install the app than it is to get them to install a PC version. We acquire a lot of new players via the mobile version, and then eventually these players discover that Albion is a full cross-platform game, and they may decide that they actually start playing on the PC as well. It's very much a great new acquisition channel, and it is really helping us reach markets and communities that we couldn't reach before, cause there's obviously countries that are much stronger in mobile, and these are now except-
Thank you. You joined Stillfront in January this year. You know, what is your first 10 months as part of the group been like? I know you know, you mentioned with the mobile version. I know that Jochen is gonna be next, and he's leading you know, our marketing up at Goodgame Studios. I know his team helped you strategize kind of your marketing launch on mobile, with which you know, you had no previous experience. Tell us a bit more. How have these first 10 months been for you guys?
Yeah, I'd love to. The month started really with what Verena just mentioned, the integration into Stillfront, which I have to give thanks for her praise and give the praise back. Has really been a very smooth process, and was a very pleasant experience, although obviously a completely new challenge for us. Beyond that, really what's been the most influential being part of Stillfront has been the ability to get expert knowledge at sort of the length of an email or a Slack message. Where, you know, previously as an independent company, we had difficulties benchmarking our own efforts, acquiring information about new channels or new directions that we wanted to take.
Basically on any topic that we have questions on, anything we want to explore, we can reach out to experts in the Stillfront Group and ask them about their experience with these topics and also ask them for benchmarks. Because in many cases, we weren't doing too bad, but we didn't know how we were doing. We were maybe spending resources that we didn't need to spend to improve things that were already pretty good. There's a lot of value in just having this expert knowledge directly available and learning from each other.
Yeah. I think, I don't know about you, but I remember the eRepublik Labs. It gave me the confidence many times to invest more because I knew the KPIs were right and I could invest more. Without that information, I would not have done that.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. It's great.
Especially on the marketing side, we've learned a lot there this year.
Yeah. What would you say are, you know, the main focus areas right now and what is next for Albion Online?
Well, what's next? The most important thing that's next is coming up next week is the release of our major new content update called Lands Awakened, which basically is a complete visual overhaul of the game world of Albion Online. Adds plenty of new features, revolutionizes our season gameplay, which is essential to the guild conflict. Adds a lot of new things to the game. The only thing that we're sad about with that update is really that we can only bring it to the community now. The mobile launch was quite an effort. We're happy to get that out now before the end of the year.
For next year, we've already drawn up the release schedule for several new updates, which always expand the world of Albion with more exciting features for our players, but also always aim to widen the accessibility. Especially in terms of accessibility, we have some pretty exciting plans for next year, where we really want to expand the global reach of Albion Online and resolve some problems that our community has with the global version of Albion that we're really excited to talk about next year when we're closer to the release.
Yeah. I'm very, very excited about the release of Lands Awakened in, I think November 24, right? I think you
Yeah, just one week from now. One week from now.
You're a busy man right now and a busy team. I'm gonna do one final question, and then I'll let you go back to work. The influencer program, I understand you guys are also starting an influencer program.
Yeah, absolutely. Actually, we have quite a bit of experience with influencers at Sandbox Interactive. We were one of the first studios to really work with influencers back in our early access days when Albion Online was you know in an early access program in 2015. We saw the power of influencers back then. We've always had a lot of presence on Twitch and on YouTube, but we've now really seen influencers much more strongly, and we've set up a new content creator program which directly supports these creators in generating content about Albion, which we've just seen with the launch of New World from Amazon Games is a massively powerful tool to move large amounts of players.
We're hoping to massively expand the coverage of Albion.
Very exciting times coming ahead. Thank you very much, Robin, for your time, and I look forward to playing the new expansion. I think that's gonna steal many hours of my time, but they will be hours well invested.
Looking forward to seeing you there.
Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Excellent. Now we're gonna transition to Jochen. Jochen leads the marketing hub at Goodgame Studios. You've heard about, you know, how in our Still O ps, in our operations, business operations platform, you know, we have Stillforce with the engine sharing. You've seen all of the pipeline from Phillip that is being facilitated by that. You've understood from Marina and many of the people who have spoken now, just even Robin, you know, how within Stillops, you know, the financial hubs are a really important component for us. I think one of our, you know, great kind of, you know, synergies and there is definitely our marketing hub. Jochen, please come up and tell us about it.
Yeah. Thank you, Alexis. Very happy to be here and to talk about the evolution from the Goodgame marketing team to the Stillfront marketing hub. We heard about the Stillops model today multiple times, and the Still hubs is a really important pillar of the Stillops model. Still hub actually is looking for expertise within the group and then bringing it to the group to other studios as a service. That's exactly what we do with the Stillfront marketing hub, and I'm very happy to actually run these operations . We have a very clear vision for the marketing hub for Stillfront, and that is to build a full-service marketing agency for the group that we can offer to the studios. This is in-house, and that's why I think it's much better than any agency because we are really much deeper integrated.
We can be really a team to those studios. Obviously, if you want to provide a service, you have to be excellent. Excellence is one of our key elements we want to achieve with the hub. You've heard about Stillfront, and it's definitely an offering. There are great marketing teams in the group already. Many gaming studios have great marketing teams, and we don't want to break up. We don't want to kill winning teams. This is an offer to studios that would like to have support and would like to get additional expertise, and that's quite important to us as well. In order to allow that, it's easy access. We make it quite easy. We're, as heard, available on Slack. You can just chat to us.
You don't have to go into like a long-term agreement with us. We can just team up, do something, and see where that's going. Easy access also means fair pricing. We have quite a competitive pricing for the marketing hub, and that's also helping very much for studios to use our service. Why is Goodgame Studios a really good home for such a marketing hub? I can tell you why. I mean, Goodgame Studios is running two of the most successful IPs, game IPs, from Germany with Empire and Big Farm. From that history, we are used to manage complexity of big games. For years, we are running marketing campaigns that bring millions of installs to those games and to other games.
We are used to manage millions of EUR of ad spend every month, and that from time to time can be complicated to really make sure you invest in the efficient pockets and get the money back. We have Android, iOS. We also run desktop. We have Steam and also Microsoft Store. We are used to run multiple games. It's always easy to focus on one game only, but as soon as you have multiple studios, quite complex to manage. Worldwide campaigns, running a lot of different networks at the same time, not only focusing on the top one or two. Managing the marketing art operation. Art is quite important for marketing campaigns. Without a good creative, you cannot run a campaign. Pumping out those assets every month, hundreds of them, to really drive these campaigns is also what we can do.
Bringing all the data together, connecting hundreds of sources, be it from the cost side, be it from the performance side, be it from the game backend side, bringing everything together to be able to optimize efficiently. Running, like, billions of impressions every month on multiple networks. I think we are used to manage complexity and can do that as well as a Stillfront marketing hub. We also have this broad experience of running a lot of different networks. I mean, the obvious one, quite clear, Facebook, Google, and then Apple Search Ads, TikTok, Snapchat, and so on. We also know how to run video ad networks, so Vungle or Unity Ads. We know how to run native ads with Taboola, Outbrain. We did a lot of pre-install campaigns, already with Digital Turbine.
We work with incentive platforms like Mistplay, for example, and, last but not least, also we work with DSPs, which would be Xandr or Moloco. We know a lot of tools and a lot of backends and, marketing networks to optimize. As I already touched, we have a really great marketing art team, internal that can produce great art for a lot of games, and they are also used to, coordinate outsourcing activities. We do as much outsourcing as we produce in-house, and there we work with multiple outsourcing companies already today. One of them is like Babil Games, which also specialize in the marketing art production, which is really going great, and they produce really competitive, marketing art already.
That allows us to also scale really fast when there's a new game, and we should take care of it. How is that possible? How can, like, one team run for multiple studios with multiple games' marketing art operations? The key here is that we separated the marketing team. One, on the right side, you see the studios. On the right side, you see the game teams. The game teams are very specific for each studio. They are supporting each studio in the marketing, and they really deeply connect to the studio. They understand the games, they understand the workflow in the studio, they understand what events are running in the games. They also understand what players work for the game, what art works for the game. They build the product-specific knowledge, and team up with the studios.
These game teams are supported by shared teams, which then create the deep knowledge and expertise that you need to really excel on running a certain task. Here we, of course, have paid user specialists who really know how to run campaigns in certain networks. We have marketing art, as I said, but also marketing analytics, bringing together the data where we standardize, and we can roll out standard reports to new games rather quickly. Influencer marketing and content marketing, which we have done before, and we just activate existing deals to bring in new games on the same. The App Store relations, where what we've seen today with BitLife, from time to time are very successful, bring us to number one, but we have really good connections to stores, can partner on content integrations there as well.
The conversion team doing like App Store optimization, A/B tests, optimizing keywords to foster that organic growth for existing game. Marketing tech, which becomes more and more important. We heard from Jörgen about it, like the whole marketing tech. Really connecting all the dots on the marketing tech side and really deeply understanding each switch in each back end from a marketing tech platform to really optimize the most of it. We have like re-engagement experts who know how to use the data that we have for re-engagement campaigns. Business development to integrate with different platforms for like long-running deals.
Last but not least, we also see ourselves, for studios, as like a single point of contact into the Stillfront studio network because there's still a lot of expertise in Stillfront, and we might have come across it much easier than a new studio joining or a studio focusing on game production. We can, like, bring that knowledge to the person who needs it from the network. With this model, we can bring together expertise and scale in one go. The kind of services we offer, I would say we have core service, which is really about running UA for games.
Scaling UA to the max for a live game, trying to put as many users into a game as possible by aligning the marketing strategy, coming up with the channels, with the geos, with the networks that would work for this game. We have deep expertise on soft launching a game. We have done it multiple times, the soft launch planning to understand what a game needs to be tested. Does it need like a critical mass when it's more like PVP? Is the studio more focusing on the tech aspects of the launch or the retention or the monetization? Last but not least, also testing different directions the game could take with like asset testing, for example. We increase the marketability by really optimizing the conversion funnel.
Every dollar or euro we spend, we want to make sure it flows through the conversion funnel as efficiently as possible. From very early on, already in soft launch, we start testing in the stores what is like the best icon, what's like the best screenshot that we can use, and optimize basically the keywords, securing efficiency. We have a standard data model already where we bring every new game, every new studio to this data model, and then we can roll out our standard approaches on reporting, on data integration, and that allows us to really quickly pump out that like return on ad spend reports that you need to optimize the game on performance. There's also additional services that we do.
Some studios like to create their own art because typically they have like really great artists in the studios. That's totally fine. We would connect to them, and they work with us. We can also support, as I said, with our internal team or with outsourcing, coming up with like a really strong art pipeline. Making sure that the next best idea is already there when there's like creative fatigue or like a slowing down place. Then the last one here is business planning. We did this also for a few studios because it's not so easy sometimes to connect the marketing view of watching things to the finance view, a P&L model. We have also liked the planning models that support that. Yeah, this brings great benefits to the studios.
Quite obvious, we heard about this also today, is that the studios can focus on what they do best, right? They can focus on doing great games and leave the marketing to experts. This creates, again, a win-win situation that we can focus on what we like, and the studio can focus on great game development. Also, that allows us to bring like the best practice and the expertise to the games, resulting in really top results for our games. We can be much faster in terms of time to market because if a studio is reaching a point where they would need marketing expertise, they don't have to do like a beauty contest, find the next best agency or start like a cumbersome hiring process in this very competitive market right now.
They just reach out to us and have an expert at hand that either consults them or takes over the operations of running the marketing for them. We can be much faster. It's quite likely that we did it before, like in the genre or with a test that's needed. We might have experience already that leads also to less mistakes or at least some learnings we can contribute. Also helping us to get faster in soft launch to the point where we can make a decision. This is because we drive one learning curve together by working together. There's also great economies of scale. Obviously, we standardize. We standardize data and analytics, so that allows us to provide the benchmarks that help everyone. That also allows us to pump out reports rather fast.
We can together buy much more from one network that allows us access for discounts, and really special deals. We might get a kickback when we reach a certain ad spend level and so on, which at the end really contributes to that ROAS. What is quite important for performance is, we have access to betas. When there's change in the market, and change happens quite often, there's usually a reaction by the network. They try something new, they have a new feature, a new functionality that allows to target users better or differently. When you are in the triple A team, you get early access to these new technologies, and that brings you a competitive advantage and ahead of the pack before it's rolled out to the market. The last advantage definitely is for me in collaboration.
I mentioned on the benchmarks, we mentioned about the knowledge exchange, we don't have to 100% support a studio, but we have regular syncs in the marketing teams between the different studios, do the marketing with us or not, but we learn from each other. We team up if there's like a market challenge, for example, IDFA, as we will hear in a second. Quite important to me is the honesty and the cooperation on eye level. I've worked multiple times with agencies, and often you have this feeling, can you really trust them or are they optimizing for their own revenue and so on. Because we are all the same group, there is no need to not tell the truth, to not really go fully and solve a problem at the core.
We don't have to sugarcoat anything, and I think that's really a high value we can create here. I mentioned on the top-topic of IDFA, and I would like quickly to explain how we at Goodgame Studios and also in the Stillhub, we addressed it. Just to recap, I mean, I guess everybody knows, but Apple made quite some like, big changes this year, what kind of user data is available, to marketing companies. They introduced the App Tracking Transparency framework and ask every user if they want to share their data. If you say no, you cannot share user level data. They introduced like a new own attribution tool, which is called SKAdNetwork, which then they provide like attribution data, independent from a device or user level, but more on an aggregated level.
I think we managed that quite well. One reason is that we have a very diverse platform portfolio, so not all of our traffic is on iOS. In fact, every time we talk to a studio, we look at, okay, what other platforms are there that we can like grow and, add to the mix? That leads to a very healthy mix, for example, of Android and iOS. 65% of our traffic is not directly affected by iOS changes. Also, the networks are affected differently, and every network has like a different reaction to the changes. By having a strong diversification, we can shift budgets from one network that has a bit more, challenges to another one which at the moment can benefit from the changes.
In the last six months, we had more than 30 networks running, and that allowed us to switch budgets quite quickly whenever we see that someone struggled with the IDFA changes or someone was benefiting from it. As one example, our top network at the moment is only 35% of ad spend. We are very close with our like, networks. We are very close with our tech partners, and they come up with best practices. W e have the team that really understands what needs to be done to understand these best practices and to apply them. Not every studio can do that. We are able to roll out best practice setups. To me, also quite important is the point that we have to live with the change, right?
I mean, mobile marketing has been changing, I guess, every year quite a lot. There's always been change, and all the companies had to adapt to the change. This is, for me, just another change that's happening, and we have to embrace it. The users are still out there. There's still plenty of people that want to play games, and it's just a question of how can we reach them. It's not that the market is gone. We still have data, so there is now SKAdNetwork data, which looks different from the data we had before, but we can work with it, and that's what we do. We look at the data. We made dashboards quickly available for the whole marketing team, so everybody can start working with the data and come up with their conclusions.
There is still users that allow us to track. They say, "Yes, you can track." This data is there, so we can use it for sampling, to see, okay, what does this part of the traffic do and how can we make conclusions for the whole traffic? Every game is different, and the few values we can push through SKAdNetwork has to be very specific for each game. We spend quite a lot of time already for our top games to do in-depth game analysis on what events do we need to pass on and so on through SKAdNetwork to optimize on the best value user. These custom conversion schemas help to make the best out of the data that we can get.
Then when you do this right, you can start again doing like prediction of return on ad spend on that data. That's what we also do at the moment. Obviously, if paid marketing changes, we can also focus on other areas which would be organic growth. The last year we already spent a lot of time getting more knowledge and expanding our activities on influencer marketing and other organic growth channels. The last point I want to put here is that, if the device and user-level data is harder to access, we can still go with contextual data. See in which environment our ads work well and then optimizes more on that. We already have like multiple marketing partners where we test these optimization techniques. Looking forward, what do we aim for?
We want to grow the Stillhub marketing team within the Stillops universe. We want to cover multiple time zones. We want to further standardize the data so we can even be faster adding new games, doing decisions on those games. We want to continue having the best creative because creative will be key, and we want to scale our expertise in the organic channels and organic growth, especially in influencer marketing. With that, we will roll out to more games and drive more success. Yeah, that's it from my side today. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Jochen. We're reaching the end of our Capital Markets Day. I hope that we've given you insights and a better understanding of how our Stillops platform is really delivering superpowers to our group of studios, how it's really giving them access to incredible talent that they would normally not have access to. In the end, really resulting in better fundamentals, better profitability, better cash flow, better ability to do marketing, and in time also better growth. Now I think, I'm gonna invite Jörgen back up on stage to wrap up and summarize the day. Thank you, Jörgen.
Thank you, Alexis. Last week I received the question that I received many times this year. What value do the structure bring to the individual studios? I've tried to answer that question as good as possible, but when I say it's one thing, but when it comes from the studios and when we have heard today the different hubs and the different processes, or representative for different processes, tell how this really is creating value, hopefully that are new proof points to the kind of value that we actually are creating. One of the key elements here, as I mentioned in the beginning of this Capital Markets Day, is the balance. Because if you centralize completely, you kill a business in a super fast-moving consumer business like online gaming in particular. The unique thing is to figure out the balance.
It's easy to say, that's probably why the question come back to me all the time, but now we have added some more flavor to it and some more proof points to see what we should and could and we do centrally, and what we will add in the future, and what must be locally conducted to keep the proximity to the user so that we serve and make this every day better for our users, which is our mission. As I told you in the beginning, it's one f it's one thing you should remember from this day, it's the word Stillops and what that means.
I hope and think that you have heard that through the day, and hopefully you will remember that tonight, even though we will have some wine afterwards, you will still remember that, and tomorrow, and for a long time, because we will definitely continue our efforts so that we remain fast, fluid, flexible to reach our financial targets. Not only reach them, beat them the next four for 2023. Thank you for attending here physically, which is great stuff and unique stuff the last years, hopefully not in the future, and all of you that has been participating online. Thank you, Alexis, for running the day and for Sophia and Ludwig organizing and with support from everyone here, and not the least all speakers and most of all you listeners.
I hope you stay for a short while over something to drink and a small chat. That would be great. Thank you all.