Hi, everyone. Welcome to Stillfront's Capital Markets Day 2020. My name is Sofia Wretman. I work with communications and investor relations with Stillfront. A lot has happened with Stillfront and the industry at large since we met for the Capital Markets Day in November last year. Since then, we have made three larger acquisitions, and we're very happy today to be able to present two of those in person. We have Nadir Khan, our co-founder and COO of CANDYWRITER with us, and we will also have Perry Tam, co-founder and CEO of Storm8 later on. First, we will listen to Jörgen Larsson and Alexis Bonte, who will provide us with an update on the group strategy.
If you would like to ask questions during this seminar, please don't hesitate to send them via the webcast and do it quite early during the presentation so that we will be able to include them in the Q&A sessions that we will have directly after the presentations. Please, Jörgen, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Sofia. Good afternoon. I would like to talk about our ambitions and our strategies, how we should achieve what we aim to achieve, and a few other things. We have a high ambition building Stillfront, but we think it's time for us to gear up our ambition even further. That is what we should talk about today, how we gear up our ambition, and what we should do and how we should do it in order to achieve the results that we aim to achieve. We are building a free-to-play powerhouse by assembling and leveraging the best game industry talent there is out there. We would like to find the best people that we don't already have to take further steps in our ambition to gear up our business.
Before going into our strategies and what we have done and what we should do going forward, I would like to put where we stand today into some perspective. What you see now is our timeline. We actually now have become 10 years, so we are a very young company. We have the best in front of us, and we have the most to do ahead of us. You can see also in this slide what we've done so far. Basically, we have built Stillfront in three different phases. First, we had the entrepreneurial phase, where we put a lot of time and energy into understanding the depth of this business and this industry. What you should focus on, what are the value drivers, what you should not do.
We made many errors, but we've also figured out one or two keys to what we then have used to achieve the results so far. Very important period in the history of this young company's life so far. That was up until we went public in 2015. We entered into the structure phase. Very important phase because that was when we have took all the learnings that we had, added and implemented processes and components, and refined what we have figured out in the entrepreneur phase so that we built a platform. This platform should carry us to reach our new objectives, carry us to be this leading free-to-play powerhouse for the next many years, 10, 20, 30 years to come. We used this platform as we just recently at the Capital Markets Day or beginning of this year, entered into the scale phase.
Now the time has come for us to really scale our business. We should have leverage from the platform that we have built, and we should try to explain for you how we think about what is in the platform, what we are trying to refine further, because we will always try to refine our business and make it even sharper and be more competitive for every day, for every month, for every year that passes by. Now it's time to scale our business.
We think that any successful gaming company in the future need to have a certain set of capabilities, need to master a number of things and have a number of things in its possession and be able to use that to leverage what they already have to be competitive for the next decade to come. For instance, we believe that some of them are Games as a Service, which is very close to what free-to-play is all about. That repeatedly be able to serve your community of customers and the people that actually enjoy your entertainment, and the ones that have not yet discovered your entertainment, but you must be able to constantly work with them so that they are really enjoying what you're offering them on a constant basis.
It will not be enough to offer something once and then maybe come back to visit your customer once or twice per year. That is one area. We think that in order to be successful in that and a number of other critical areas, you need to be data-driven. If you're not data-driven, you will not be able to take the decisions with the quality that is needed to be competitive the next decade. You will not understand the depth and the nuances in your consumers' preferences if you're not data-driven. To be data-driven, you need a lot of data in your possession. We have collected data for 10 years, and in total, 2 billion lifetime installs that have come into our game. We have a significant amount of data. Further, we think that you need to be diversified when you build your business.
If you're not diversified, your risk increases, and you will be forced to take decisions which might not be optimal for the development of your business. You need to be decentralized, otherwise you will become monolithic. If you're monolithic, you become slow. If you're slow, well, in this very fast industry, we don't believe that you will be competitive. We also think that you need to master multi-channel performance marketing, a very complex blend of different channels, different way of reaching out to your audience, and in a very rapid pace and with high precision. We also think that you need to master Live Ops. You can hear it's a number of things. You need to be value-driven.
Further, I cannot imagine any successful gaming company that do not master small screen, AKA mobile as a component, a part in the blend of how you reach out to consumers. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but definitely in three to five years for sure. It's these insights and what we have done and what we have refined for nine years that have winded up in three pillars, the three pillars on which our platform and our company stands. It's our business model, it is our organization and operational model, and it's our value creation model. We will go a bit deeper into this during this afternoon, and I will start a bit with the business model. I will not go through the different components deeper than I already done, and what we also elaborated on in that Capital Markets Day on the 27th of November.
I would like to emphasize two things which are key to understand our company, but also how we think on taking steps forward. What we will, amongst several things, but two key things that we will focus on with the higher ambition that we have in our company. One is what I call the optimized universe. One of the key things that we have been refining over and over and over again is how we should allocate our resources. We believe the ones that allocate the resources in the most efficient way would have a significant competitive advantage compared to if you're not doing that. That is why we talk so much about the width of our portfolio.
For instance, think the following, if we have 40 products, which we have now, we work with approximately 40 markets very actively, and we work with approximately 40 channels very actively. On these channels, we run, say, four campaigns in parallel. This makes a total universe that we're optimizing our resource allocation to 40 times 40 times 40 times 4, which is 256,000 combinations. We take the top 1% and optimize how we should market over this universe. The top 1%, of course, will be much better compared to if we will take the top 1% of only 100 or 200. When we reach 50 games, 50 markets, 50 channels that we know about and run four campaigns on them, we will have half a million of combinations to optimize our resource allocation over.
This is difficult to achieve, but it's absolutely a key competitive advantage if you should be successful in the market, and this is how we work with capital and resource allocation, both for marketing but also for Live Ops. We think also in the future, not so much today, but at a point in the future within the next coming three to five years, the combination of how large existing audience you have and how many games you have in your portfolio. So in our case now, 33 million MAUs, but we also have the 38 or 40 games. That in itself will contribute to a stepwise larger and larger competitive advantage because then you could market and act within your own system. That is not the vital part and a vital volume today, but it will be in the future.
That is one of the key reasons why we focus so much on building a wide and a well-diversified portfolio. That is one area that I think is very important to understand our company, how we work today, how we have been working, but also how we work the next coming years that we see ahead of us. Another key area, which we will go deeper into as Alexis present how we work operationally with our organization, is how we create synergies. If we, as we grow the number of studio, would not bring any more value to just adding the different studio on each other and the games on each other without drawing any synergies, we will not be very strong on value creation because that is not adding so much value, it's just putting what is already there without getting the synergies. Synergy is a key.
We now have more than 50 collaboration projects. We now have six Center of Excellences, which we didn't have half a year ago, or a year ago, that are creating cost and revenue-side synergies every single day. These are two key things, the synergies and how we optimize resource allocation that explains that we have been able to achieve something that we set up as a target several years ago, called the 2020 vision, which is grow organically by more than 20%, and at the same time have a marketing spend in relation to net revenues, which is lower than 20%. We have achieved that now. We will continue to refine and do better going forward, but now we have achieved that very important milestone. As a matter of fact, we have actually been growing by more than 20% since 2018. Organically, that is, of course.
I also would like to reconnect to one other statement that we made in the Capital Markets Day on the 27th of November last year. That was, we saw as we then spoke about that we would like to build a three times larger company the next coming up to five years. We saw that during that path, as we are taking all the steps that is needed to take to get there, if we're not broadening our addressable market, we will lack in diversity. We told you that, listen, at that point in time, less than one year ago, that we would like to go into mash-ups. We think mash-ups is a very exciting area, and we also would like to add other genres, which we will come back to. I think both Perry as well as Nadir could walk you through different details of that.
We have done that. Actually mash-up is now in Q2, it represented 38% of our total revenue. I think that we have, in a much shorter time than I'd expected, to be honest, we have been able to represent. We're mirroring basically the industry composition in a quite balanced way, with the exception of social casino, which is a smaller part. Otherwise, we have a very good balance, and that again, is important for diversification, stability in our business and revenue streams, and predictability not the least. We also spoke about and been working on increasing our ad revenues because they add another dimension of diversification, which is very important for us. I couldn't say I'm completely happy with what we have achieved so far, but at least we have taken some steps since November last year.
We're now up to in Q2 to 5%, and not the least through Kevin and Nadir at CANDYWRITER, and also Perry and his colleagues at Storm8, we have increased our capability, but we have several initiatives going there. Further, another very important area for us was that broaden basically our addressable market. We had approximately some 80%-85% being male audience, and obviously since then, less than 40%, now 42% or something, are represented by a female audience. It would not be a very clever thing, we thought, not to have something to offer to that growing audience. We have now a good balance between male audience and female audience, and it's very good also from the perspective that it's an imbalance in the market between supply and demand when it comes to games for the female audience.
That is also from the perspective you should view our latest acquisition that we announced last week, and that will be closed at the end of this month. Nanobit that has focused on exactly filling that gap, take that business opportunity for the last nine years. I would like to also spend some time on describing maybe the last component, not the last, but the latest component that we have added into our platform. As I said, we will constantly try to identify how can we be more competitive tomorrow than we are today, and even more the day after tomorrow. We will identify, refine, but also add components that are strategically important to the growth of Stillfront and this higher ambition that I mentioned. I should do that by start with the big picture.
What we do, what the purpose of our platform is in the big picture the following: we have great game designers. The creativity in our studios is really impressive. 800 people building games, 900 people very soon, building games every day that are better and better and more refined, higher production value and so on. That is on one side. On the other side, we have the great community of gamers out there that would like to be enjoyed, that would like to be entertained, that would like to socialize in our game and do a lot of other things. We should meet their needs in the best possible way.
The Stillfront platform, you can say, is how we take our collective capabilities, our collective knowledge to make that connection as good, as efficient, as profitable, and as good as possible at every possible aspect. With that role being the publisher and the ones that connects the gaming community with our developer community, that comes with a significant responsibility. We have a significant responsibility, and to make that gaming experience when the creativity from our studios comes out to the individual gamer to be a very positive gaming experience. That is something that you might think is very simple, but you come into several quite difficult things that you need to consider and balance. That is why we now have added what is called the Stillfront FAIR model.
This is a key tool for us as it start to be that now, and we should refine and further invest into our FAIR model, but that should be a roadmap, a tool, or something that we can relate to so that we are even better in the future on see to that and ensure that our gamers out there, the millions of people playing our games, have a very positive, in every possible dimension, gaming experience consuming our games in a balanced way to the creativity that I mentioned are in our gaming studios. This model consists of four different areas. We also think that in order to get it to really work in practice, we need to be very clear about responsibility and accountability. We are driven by the entrepreneurial value, and one of the key things there is accountability.
We need to be accountable on individual levels. I need to be that, we as a management team, but also we need someone in group management that really follows up to see to that this is really achieving the results that we think it should be, as it is a key thing for us going forward. Our Chief Product Officer, Phillip Knust, will take on a group responsibility to see that our studios work with us centrally and jointly that we see to that we follow this model to achieve a better gaming experience for the many gamers that we have. What is FAIR? F stands for our forums and communities. We need chat filters. We have many chat filters in place.
We need to see to that we don't have abusive behavior or any other behavior that does not fit our values in our communities affecting the total gaming experience. The communities becomes even more important as we go along in offering our games to our consumers. That is one area. Another area is age protection. We have our entertainment targeting young adults and adults. What is an adult? Well, in some countries it's 16. It can be 18 or even 21. How should we see to that our content matches what we think is the right? It depends on region, religion, and lots of other things. That is the second area. The third area is inclusion and diversity.
These are key values that we bring through everything we do, and of course, we need to focus on that our content and the way that we market our content follows our values in the code of conduct that we have in the group. Last but not least, this should be responsible gaming. We have the responsibility. We should see to that this all comes together as a significant component in our platform, so we provide a good experience and entertainment for our consumers. A few words about organization. Alexis will go further into this, but we have, as we also spoke about on the Capital Markets Day, we have increased and scale up our central organization, not the least within how we support and manage and govern our businesses. [Armin Busen] has joined us, and me and Alexis in parallel work primarily with that.
We've also geared up our M&A teams, whereas M&A is absolutely key for our further growth. We have, as I mentioned, touched upon that our center of excellence is really creating significant value that Alexis will go further into. These are two things that we have delivered on since we met in November last year. Here you can see our value creation model. We focus a lot on creating risk-weighted value, you can see here on the slide some new information on our LTM curves, both acquired and organic growth. You can see how we have been able to transform acquired growth into organic growth. That is a key element to achieve our new growth targets. It's a key and vital thing also that we excel and that we are very disciplined and can accelerate our M&A going forward.
There is a lot of great opportunities out there that we would like to grasp, but also they need to come in and to go into a good organic growth going forward. On this slide, you see our financial performance up until Q2. As you can see here, we have actually reached what we thought we should have three years to reach, we actually reached in six months. That is, my friends, why we now have today decided to upgrade and increase our ambition when it comes to growth. Our new ambition is that we should have revenues exceeding or at least amounting to SEK 10 billion by 2023. We should pair that with an unchanged high margin at around 35%, and we like to work with conservative financial leverage, but still work with that because we think it's value accretive. We don't change that target.
It should still be less than 1.5x. To summarize I think that we have many components in place. We have really refined our platform. We add new components that we identify very recently, and we refine the first ones even further. We have an attractive position in the fastest-growing part of this industry. We have a diverse portfolio, but it should be even more diverse, and we should leverage our platform that Alexis will talk more about in a minute. I've spoke about our philosophy, our strategies, our platform, everything that we've done and prepared ourselves to go into scale up. Nothing of this would ever happen if it wouldn't be for the very hard work that all our nearly 1,000 people put in every day at work, and that is why we often say, "Wake up, kick ass, and repeat." Thank you.
Thank you, Jörgen. We have a couple of questions from the audience. Unfortunately, we won't be able to answer them all, but I've tried to compile some of them. What's your view on the organic growth up to 2023? Do you expect any product areas to grow faster than the others?
I think that we have a very well-balanced portfolio now. We have built and take the three verticals that we aim to take, and I think that we have growth opportunities over the whole array of these verticals. We're also adding genres within these verticals that I think is very attractive, not the least, the narrative RPG games that Nanobit now brings in has a proven growth opportunity. We're not trying to say that a priori, we are optimizing on this universe of opportunities, the 256,000 growth opportunities that we have, to always pick the one that delivers the best results. We'll see in 2023 which one that grew the fastest.
That's a good answer. As you become larger, you're making larger acquisitions. Do you see a risk that the multiples start to increase and that you, to a larger extent, need to rely on organic growth?
I think that there are some different forces that comes into play here. One is that, you can see the last transaction we did is more or less on the same multiples that we've had the last four, five, six deals or something. Also, I think that at some point in time, it might increase slightly.
Also the whole sector has been valued higher, so we are traded at a higher multiple. I think that very much suggests that we will still have an arbitrage. That will never be the reason why we do a deal, but of course, it's value accretive. The reason we do a deal is that we believe that it will contribute for growing Stillfront over time. The key thing is to be able to transform acquired growth into organic over time through synergies and so on.
Which is the largest threat to reach the new growth target? Will you be able to keep the high margins as you have now?
We wouldn't put that into the targets if we didn't believe in it. We believe in targets that we can achieve, we'll work as hard as we ever can to do that. Obviously, we believe that it's possible to combine. What is the biggest threat? Now the markets are strong, but if the markets will not be that strong and we need, of course, we think that we will need financing, debt financing, not the least. If the markets are not strong, get the right financing at the right cost, at the right point in time is of course key for us. I think there are things that's very hard to control. You can mitigate it, but if the Third World War is a cyber war, maybe that could be a bit challenging. We're doing what we can to protect ourselves.
Okay. What types of individual assets or products would you be interested in going forward? Are you interested in underperforming with an upside, or products with already a strong momentum? Could there be no personnel at all included in the acquisitions? What is the rationale behind that?
We very much believe in that good companies and good talent are even better when you start to interact and work with them. That is why we are so proud with Nadir and Perry being also here, perfect examples of good companies that have been successful for years, and now we think mutually that we can elevate and achieve greater results together. We focus on things that already works, and we identify how we think it could be even better. We don't go into distressed situations. Can we acquire only assets? Yes, we think we should do that, and we are looking into that.
Of course, that comes with some different attributes than acquiring a full studio. I think that's another opportunity that we so far haven't really taken on.
Thank you. Thank you, Jörgen. Thanks for the questions. We're happy also to come back to you with answers on other questions. Our next speaker is Alexis Bonte. Alexis is the founder of one of our studios, eRepublik Labs, that joined the group two and a half years ago. Last year, he stepped up as our Group COO. Please go ahead, Alexis.
Thank you very much, Sofia. Thank you, Jörgen for your presentation. I'm going to focus, as Jörgen was saying, more on how our operations at Stillfront are functioning. Of course, we still have our key values of entrepreneurship, scale, and structure. I will basically take you through how we're basically really using this and driving this within the Stillfront model, and how that is going to help us execute on the vision of getting to SEK 10 billion by 2023 in terms of revenues. First of all, I think if we look at the market, it's important to look that Stillfront is a hyper-growth company in what is already a strong growth industry. If you look at the mobile games market, it was basically just five years ago, it was a $30 billion industry. It had 1.5 billion players.
In 2020, we're looking at 2.5 billion players and a $77 billion industry. It's actually about half of the total games industry. The games industry is growing by about 9.3% in 2020, whereas the mobile market or the mobile industry is growing at 13.3%, faster growth there. During the same five-year period, Stillfront has grown its market cap by more than 190 times. More importantly for us who work here every day at Stillfront, is that in the past 12 months period, Stillfront has grown both revenues and EBITDA by more than 100%. That's following from strong organic growth and also successful acquisitions. What are we seeing here? If you look at the strong growth and how much the industry has changed in the past five years, it is difficult for anyone to predict exactly what the industry will look like in the future.
We do see a number of key trends, on which we're going to be able to surf, to basically achieve the revised targets that are really driving the industry in the short to medium term. The first thing that we're seeing is really a continued convergence. We're seeing the large AAA players that were mostly focusing on premium games, that start working on Games as a Service, and they're trying and starting to move to free-to-play. We're seeing also the large free-to-play players that are increasing production values, increasing investments, and needing more and more scale to succeed in the market. What is clear, as Jörgen was saying, is that the data-driven free-to-play model is taking market share and is an important hedge here.
Another trend that we're seeing, and that has greatly increased during the lockdown period due to the COVID issues, is the social in-game experience. If you look at the games, the whole industry has grown during this period, but if you look at the games that have grown the most, that have had the higher levels of engagement, it's the games that have a social component in them. As you know, the long-term free-to-play games have very strong social components in them. Obviously, mobile gaming, we believe that that's going to continue to be leading the growth in the industry. It's going to continue to grow faster than PC and console. This is why it is still our main focus. If you think about it is totally logical. Console game and PC games are great industries, but they're what I would call rendezvous gaming.
It's almost you take a meeting with yourself to find two or three hours on a Saturday or an evening to play a game. Whereas, a mobile game, that device, that mobile phone will always be in your pocket. For obvious reasons, it's always easier to access. We're also seeing increased decentralization. That's not just about people now working from home due to the COVID epidemic. It's actually more than that. If you think about, a long time ago, I used to be in the tech background, and I was part of a company that was an internet startup, and we would say, "You cannot build a billion-dollar business if you're not in the Silicon Valley in tech." Well, now that's not true anymore in tech, and that's definitely not true in the games business. You can really start multi-billion dollar businesses basically in many locations.
Whoever has the organization to be able to leverage these multiple talents and these multiple locations in a decentralized way will benefit the most. Another thing, obviously, and you've seen this just very recently, just with the Microsoft deal and some of our also acquisition of Nanobit last week, there's a continued consolidation in the market. Very clearly, there will be less and larger players that will take a bigger piece of the pie, not only just in the general games market, but also in the mobile games market, which takes me to the last point, which is growing moats.
You will be familiar with the fact that in the AAA industry, premium industry, yes, there are big barriers to entry, big moats in that industry because you will say, "Well, you have the big franchises, the very large kind of games, the huge marketing budgets to launch a game, the years of development, the large teams." You might think that for mobile games, that's not true. Yes, it is true that a five, six, seven, 10-people team can build a game in mobile games. You can still do that. The challenge is how do you scale that game? What you need to scale games right now in the mobile games industry is very different to what you needed just a few years ago. You basically need to have access to successful engines and frameworks. You need an intimate knowledge of a particular game vertical.
You need to understand what that audience needs, not just with your hunch or what you think they need, but with data. You need the Live Ops experience. You need to be able to operate the game over multiple and multiple years. You basically have to have scaling know-how, and then you need to be able to do performance marketing, not across one or two or three channels, but across 20, 30, or 40 channels, as Jörgen was mentioning before. This makes it extremely hard for small and medium-sized studios right now to grow and scale. Actually, if you look at the data from App Annie or other providers, you will see that on the Google Play Store or on the Apple iOS store, the number of new games that are launched every year is declining constantly for the past three years.
That's a clear sign of the increasing and growing moats in the industry. We think that Stillfront is at the forefront of this conversion games industry. We think that we're very well-positioned to stay at the forefront and to accelerate our advantage for simple reasons. The first thing is we come from free-to-play. That's our background. That's really our DNA. We understand free-to-play. Basically, by leveraging and continuing to leveraging our free-to-play expertise, we really think that we can build a strong position. We have a unique decentralized organization that is particularly attractive to the best game talent. The best way to explain this is this inverted pyramid that we use to basically describe how our operations work.
Basically, this is all based on one thing, is you need to take the decisions, at least all of the product decisions, as close as possible to your players, basically to your gamers population. That's why, really in our structure, the people who really take the decisions day-to-day about what a product should be and where it should go are the game teams. Then the studio heads are there to support the game teams, then the HQ is there to support the studio heads. One thing I often say when I meet other people is Jörgen and myself are probably the least powerful CEO and COO combination in the games industry, because most of the decisions, almost all of the decisions, at least all of the product decisions, are taken as close as possible to the players, and therefore, they're taken by the game teams.
Of course, another thing that we're doing that really kind of helps our model is this is very attractive for entrepreneurial talent, also as we expand through M&A, our portfolio and expertise, this really scales in a positive way. Another thing that this helps to do is by having a lot of the decision-making as close to the product as possible, is it allows us to basically stay fast, stay nimble, and also leverage what we're calling centers of excellence. That's our things that are helping us stay ahead of the fast-growing mobile market. At the last Capital Markets Day, we explained a little bit this unique model, now I'd like to explain how the fact that we're unique in doing this, we are able to successfully scale our business while keeping our entrepreneurial DNA.
We really are a group of studios that are built for decentralization. What we're building is a platform for the best game talent. To build a free-to-play powerhouse, it is very important to have an organizational structure and DNA that establishes the correct foundations for a platform to really kind of scale. This is why we're making sure that we keep our highly efficient model that is built for decentralization. Decentralized approach secures key things. It secures speed, it secures market proximity, as we explained before, and it gives us agility. If you look at group resources, they're really centered around providing support and governance to the studios and freeing time at the studio level so they can focus on what they really love, which is creating great games and running those great games for the long term.
Yes, of course, there is structure in our organization, but only where needed and when needed or wanted. As a former studio founder and CEO, I know exactly what kind of support is needed and when you don't really need support. What is something that is truly helpful and what is something that is maybe not that helpful? That's why, if you look at basically our structure, there is no forced integration that allows us to have a scalable organization. We really focus on the entrepreneurial DNA that basically then gives us a real sense of ownership at all levels that basically Jörgen was talking about. Also that allows us to work with autonomy and trust, which is very empowering for the game teams. That allows us to have basically free-to-play power house where the best game talent can truly thrive.
It is very attractive for our future acquisitions. Whenever I talk to other founders from companies that we'd like to see and join the family, and I explain to them how our model, our organization works, they're very, very attracted to the concept. Let's look a little bit at how are we making sure that our model accelerates in a positive way, because the beauty about this model is it just naturally creates synergies. In particular, we are basically really having a scaling network of expertise that we can leverage and by basically through several collaborations. If you kind of look at our synergy and collaborations flow, it all starts with, at the base, shared data and tools, which is extremely helpful.
The next level will be basically what we call Stillbase, which is a tool that we've developed in-house where there's multiple ways of sharing knowledge within Stillbase and also other things. One simple example of where Stillbase can be quite powerful is if you think about the fact that we're now soon to be over 900 game talent people, if you are in one single studio and you're one of two game designers in the studio, and you have a very specific live operations problem that you're trying to think about your own game and all that, and you want to get further knowledge, you want to get further input, you can simply search in our skill-based search in Stillbase, who are the people who have skills in the type of feature that you're trying to build, find the experts, and talk to them.
You could simply go to one of our Slack channels about live operations and just blast the message that you need help, and you will see tons and tons of help all the time. That basically continues in the flow with our Centers of Excellence, of which we have six. Five are studio-based, and one is group-based, and I will go over two of those Centers of Excellence in more detail. One Center of Excellence that I particularly find very interesting as well is the fact that we now have a Center of Excellence that's able to take games and operate the live operations for those games to allow the other studio to focus on new games when they don't have the resources to do the live operations there. There's multiple other Centers of Excellence.
We also have what we call certified experts or expert nodes, which also drive potential strong benefits to our infrastructure. Also shared services, mostly from Group to the studios, but not only. The secret sauce here is really happening in the hundreds of collaborations that happen every day between our studios, leveraging some of these tools or sometimes simply leveraging the communication tools that we have at the disposal of our talent. If we move on to specific Centers of Excellence, a good example of a Center of Excellence that is driving both cost savings, speed to market, leveraging expertise, and significant positive revenue impact, that's the one from the Bytro and Dorado grand strategy game engine framework.
This center of excellence started back in 2016 already with the browser version of Conflict of Nations, but it has now scaled further with the successful release this month of the mobile version of Conflict of Nations, whose progress you can monitor on App Annie or other such services. Let's say that we're very happy with how that title is performing during launch. We are working on other engine-sharing opportunities across the group inspired by this framework. It's something that we can show to the other studios who have their own engines, and they can basically start discussing other collaborations, and that is exactly what we are doing. Another center of excellence that you will be more familiar with, some of you, is our performance marketing center of excellence at Goodgame Studios.
We've used it successfully for Babil initially for really scaling "Nida Harb 3" to the top of the charts in the MENA region. More recently, it's also been used for another Babil Games title called "Strike of Nations," that is an international title that has been scaling also very nicely. It's also being used constantly to test new potential titles that Babil Games is considering to publish. Also, that Center of Excellence is used by KIXEYE and all of our studios, notably for "War Commander," "War Commander: Rogue Assault," and to scale that game. Many other of our studios have been using occasionally that Center of Excellence.
If we look at other collaborations that we have that maybe are smaller but have a large impact in terms of cost savings or potentially in terms of reach, that is our Goodgame Studios webshop that is for our browser games, a business that is a very profitable part of our product mix. The webshop is used by GGS, but also by Bytro and more recently by Playa, and it has helped our studio, Playa, reach and leverage new markets for their hit title, "Shakes & Fidget." This is a Stillfront organizational foundation to build a leading free-to-play powerhouse by assembling the world's best game talents and entrepreneurs. Again, there is lots of other collaborations and shared services that happen spontaneously. For example, last week, we actually had the Nanobit introduction call to the other studios.
Basically, the founders of Nanobit presented the Nanobit business to all the other studio heads across the Stillfront Group. What I loved about it is right away, the people that you're going to hear after me among others, but the Storm8 founders and the CANDYWRITER founders started talking about potential collaborations that they could do together with that new studio that just came on board. What I loved about it is some of these collaborations are collaborations that neither Jörgen, Phillip, our CPO, or Marina, head of M&A, or even myself had thought about when we were doing the due diligence with Nanobit. That kind of shows you just the bench of talent that there is beyond the people that you're seeing today is really another part of the secret sauce that makes Stillfront what it is.
As we scale positively with every new studio, I think it's always worth having a reminder of our criteria to add new studios to the family. We have a very clear set of five criteria when we consider an acquisition. The first thing that we look at is we want to make sure that it's a stable and well-matched gaming studio. We want to make sure that there is proven experience in developing and scaling successful games. We look for profitable studios. As Jörgen was saying, we don't look for turnaround situations. A third very important criteria is we look for studios that report stable revenues and have a lower player base. It's the evergreen games component. A new phenomenon that's appeared in the games market, as I'm sure you know, is the upper casuals games that have grown in importance.
That's an interesting model, that's a good model, but it's also a very risky model because you're on a constant treadmill where you have to launch a new game after new game after new game after new game to stay on top and continue growing. Whereas in our case, if you think about it, one of our games that is now 30 years old, recently had its best month ever. Very different model, very different approach. Fourth thing that we look at is for a strong management team that are motivated to stay and that bring new expertise to our platform. I'm sure that when you listen to Perry and to Nadir present, you'll understand exactly what we mean about this.
The final point, which is extremely important, is the cultural fit with Stillfront's core values of responsibility, competence, trust and humility, as well as with our decentralized business model. Quite often we've seen companies that were potentially a good fit from a deal and finance point of view, but we were not sure about the culture. We were not sure that these were teams that had experienced success and failure and that the humility to basically embrace a model where you learn from others. If they don't have that cultural fit, we simply walk away. We've done that multiple times. That's basically what I have for you, but now I think we have time for some questions before we have Nadir and Perry talking to us.
Yes. Thank you, Alexis. Yes, some questions from the audience. First one, on group synergies. We understand that you have a large amount of projects running right now. Which are the areas that will contribute most to the group's growth and profitability in the coming years?
Basically, I think the areas that, in terms of synergies that will contribute the most, some I've mentioned already. I think there's a lot of further potential in terms of engine sharing across the different studios. That gives us so many advantages in terms of speed, understanding, using proving models. Very often if you have a different team from a different studio, that gives its own little touch.
We say sometimes the most successful games, if you look at them, it's like 80% is almost a reuse of existing formula, then 20% is kind of something new, something inspirational. I think there's a lot of potential in terms of this engine sharing that we're doing right now. I'd say that'd be the first one. The second thing, of course, we think there's a lot of further potential with basically using our performance UA, Center of Excellence with Goodgame Studios. I think there's a lot of other studios that can benefit from it. We never force it either way, I think there's a lot of potential there. Goodgame Studios is accumulating so much knowledge, so much data, so many relationships with different channels that I see a lot of potential there. I also see a lot of potential with localization.
Not just with Babil, bringing some of our titles or external titles to the MENA region, but also some of our studios that have a lot of experience in terms of localizing their titles in multiple regions. We have newcomers, other studios that maybe are smaller, that don't have as much experience, that don't know that a specific market can actually drive massive revenue if you do it in a certain way. Sharing that knowledge, I think, can bring many benefits. To be honest, to answer that question, the difficulty is actually to focus on the top ones because there are so many opportunities.
Talking about localization, I got another one here. When growing geographically with an existing game, does the company outsource the localization?
It depends on the studio. Again, we don't impose any special formula in terms of doing that. Goodgame Studios has a very strong localization team that works very well, that is partially insourced and partially outsourced. Really it's a mix, and it depends on the specific challenge.
Okay. Some questions here. What are the main challenges in running a free-to-play studio today? What would you say, coming from that experience?
I think it's always about experience, talent, and I think the main challenge is getting that first profitable working game that you're operating in live operations. We're very lucky. In a former life, I was a venture capitalist, and so I understand a little bit about portfolio theory. The problem when you're a venture capital, or the good thing, is you're looking for great teams that have a great track record and have a game with really good KPIs that you'd like to invest in. The challenge is, are they going to be able to scale? Is that really going to work when it hits the public? You don't know. You really don't know. The beauty with our model with Stillfront is we basically are finding great teams with a great track record that have interesting games in the pipeline with good KPIs.
More importantly, that they've shown and proven that they have games that are profitable, that have been operating for years, and that are stable. That's really the challenging thing, is to reach that level.
Once you have that level, then it becomes a lot easier, and then it's about getting access to special expertise so you can really scale it further and further and further. That's what we can bring with Stillfront.
Mm-hmm. Good. Let's take one here. Which is the most frequent questions that entrepreneurs ask you before entering into a tighter dialogue with Stillfront?
Yes, the most frequent question I personally get asked.
actually is, why did you do it? Why did you sell your studio to Stillfront? You had a profitable studio.
It was growing fast. Everybody knew you in the industry. Why did you do it?
The real answer to that is I just fell in love with the model that Jörgen presented to me.
It just made so much sense to me. I just saw the power of it.
I'm seeing every day, as we grow, as we have more talent that joins the family, I'm just seeing how powerful the model is.
That's my answer to that question.
Good. Yes, one final one, that is a little bit tricky to answer, of course.
Yeah
What are the average multiples that you pay for acquisitions?
I think that's a better question for Jörgen and for Marina, to be honest. I focus more during the acquisitions on making sure there's a good cultural fit.
making sure that the teams are really, really strong. Quite honestly, the multiples that we pay are fair.
Good. Thank you so much, Alexis.
Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, after the update now on group strategy with Jörgen and Alexis, let's enter the core of Stillfront, our studios. We have a very interesting speaker calling in from Miami, Nadir Khan, Co-founder and COO of CANDYWRITER. I'm just waiting for a final call to see if we have Nadir with us.
Hi, Sofia. How are you doing today?
Good morning, Nadir. Welcome.
Thank you very much. Good morning to you as well. Thank you for having me. First, I want to say again, thank you for the wonderful and warm introduction. My name is Nadir Khan. I'm one of the co-founders of CANDYWRITER. Before I tell you about who we are and what we do, I wanted to take a moment to thank the Stillfront leadership for giving us the opportunity to introduce ourselves, and thank the investor community for their time as well. We're really excited to tell you more about ourselves and why we're thrilled to have joined the Stillfront family earlier this year. Hearing Alexis speak about the need to find a cultural fit with the new members of the family, it really resonated with me, having gone through that process ourselves most recently.
There was definitely a focus on kind of a two-way relationship, to understand whether we fit together as two companies. We're very happy, and luckily for us, we were able to find that path together, and super excited and super thrilled to tell you more about how we got here and what we're planning to do with this opportunity in the future. A little bit about ourselves. CANDYWRITER was founded in 2006, predating the App Store. We're 100% founder-owned, completely bootstrapped. In our first 10 years as a company, we kind of grew organically 100%. When we first started in this business, user acquisition wasn't really a thing. All users had to come via either App Store optimization or through the use of virality, or leveraging virality.
I'm excited to tell you a little bit more about how we look at virality and how that's played into the growth of CANDYWRITER. We've been a profitable company since day one, luckily for us. We've been able to find opportunities that provided good return on value since the beginning. We're a highly motivated team based in Miami, Florida. Alexis touched on this during his segment where he talked about the idea of decentralization in the industry, and I think we're a really good example of that. We have been based in Miami since essentially our founding and have been able to not only compete but thrive in the industry from this location. I think that part of our success is due to the fact that we're one of the bigger and more successful game companies in the southeast U.S.
It gives us the ability to find talent and retain talent, and as talent joins our team, they can identify and realize that they're part of something bigger. That trickles into their work ethic, it trickles into the product at the end of the day, that love and that enjoyment of being part of the industry. I think a lot of that comes from our decentralized nature and being here in Miami. We focus on evergreen casual titles and mid-core games. We like to look at our specialty as really pioneering new niches and trends. As I move through some of these slides, I'll be happy to expand on what I mean about that. Our company motivation ethos is all about achieving maximum results with minimal resources. When BitLife became the number one app on iOS and Android, we were just a team of six.
Since then, we've scaled up considerably, but it really speaks to our drive to see how much we could do with as very little resources as possible, really to keep costs down and keep profit up. BitLife achieved number 1 overall on iOS and Google Play. It wasn't our first foray into the top 5. I'll get into that in just a second, but it is definitely our most recent success and a long-living success at that. The senior management team includes myself and my partner, Kevin O'Neil. Both of us come from a business background, but with a technology focus. We studied information systems while we were in college, and it really gave us the ability to look at business opportunity first, and try to understand where we could use technology to thrive or drive business forward.
That resulted in us being one of the very early adopters of the App Store in the app ecosystem. Kevin himself has a very deep engineering background that facilitates the implementation of code with a business focus first. That's evident with things like how we approach users to leave reviews on the App Store. We combine a business kind of strategy with when to approach that user with very intelligently designed code to make sure that we're engaging in those opportunities at the best moment for the consumer and for us. Kevin himself is a former security consultant, and his main focus day to day is really driving the engineering team forward and making sure that we're getting the most out of our team on that front. Myself, I have a business background from the University of Miami, an MBA.
I was in the stock market in a previous life, very happily moved over to the game industry more than a decade ago. My main role is to make sure that the Miami headquarters is moving in the direction that meets the business objectives of ourselves and the Stillfront Group as a whole. Going into our company history, you'll see that in 2008, we were invited by Apple to participate in the original iPhone SDK beta program. We had that opportunity because we've had written high-quality software for Mac computers for several years prior. Apple identified that gave us the opportunity to join in on the App Store essentially before it opened. Our game Imagine Poker was one of the first 552 apps on the store.
As Alexis was speaking about how the industry has changed, at CANDYWRITER, we've had a front row seat for that for the past 12 years. Seeing the advent of everything from user acquisition to in-app purchases, and adapting our business with each of those changes as they were presented to us. In 2013, we had one of our really early successes, What's the Pic?. This was noteworthy because it really showed us the fact that virality could be engineered. It's not something that you essentially stumble on, but it is something that you could consciously go after, consciously attain, if gone about in an intelligent way.
The lessons we learned from that app stayed with us all the way up until 2020 today, where a lot of the work that we do is focused on viral engineering that allows us to grow our apps organically, keeping UA costs down. We could see this in BitLife, and I'll be getting into that in just a few minutes. Moving on, we had a game called What's the Difference? Another opportunity for us to break into the top five. It was the number one overall free app in the U.K., number two overall app in the U.S. Moving on, 2015, we came out with an app called Adult Coloring Book. This app really showed us that growth is all around you. You just have to seize it. We noticed that at that time, physical adult coloring books were very popular. Kevin and I said, "You know what?
We could bring this to the App Store. We could bring this digitally." We came out with Adult Coloring Book, which dominated the niche for quite a while because we were bringing something new to the market, something that people already wanted but wasn't on digital. Again, a lesson that we took with us into creating BitLife. Fast-forward to 2016, we revolutionized the word category with this game, Letter Soup. If everybody on this call is very familiar with the gaming industry and knows that right now the popular game mechanic in word games is letters arranged in a circle, swiping between them to create words. Letter Soup was the first game to leverage this game mechanic. We enjoyed first-mover advantage on that for quite a while, eventually, many competitors came in and saturated the market.
Going back to what Jörgen was saying at the beginning of his presentation, and Alexis touched on as well, the importance of learning from your errors or missteps or things that you could have done better historically. Letter Soup taught us a wealth of valuable lessons, and in 2016, we became committed to finding synergies with a bigger company that would allow us to take our next hit to the next level and not let competitors come in, saturate the market, and basically take our own game idea and make it too competitive. 2017, we were honored with the Game of the Day feature from Apple, which is one of the highest level features that a game can get. 2018, we shifted away from word games to develop BitLife. BitLife, again, achieved number 1 overall in the U.S., U.K., Canada.
What's important to note is, and tying back to what I was saying about viral engineering, is BitLife achieved this number 1 status without any user acquisition spend on our end. It was all viral engineering inside the app that caused people to share it with each other and rocket to number 1 on both platforms. Since then, we've supplemented the virality with user acquisition to keep the game on top and really make the most of the opportunity. That was the road behind us, and now we look at the road ahead. On the road ahead is where we're most excited to leverage the synergies that being part of the Stillfront family offers, whether it's the localization expertise of Goodgame Studios or the MENA publishing experience of Babil Games.
Each of the 14 other studios have a unique area of skill that we could tap into to really help drive our own products forward and drive the family forward as a whole. Our road ahead includes continuing to develop this open world narrative that we created with BitLife by adding further layers of life simulation. We want to create additional IAP that leverages the BitLife simulation engine, bringing new themes and gameplay mechanics. Our experience in the App Store has shown us that the App Store itself or the industry itself is capable of sustaining many games of the same kind of theme, the same type of mechanic. We want to be the company that brings multiple titles in this narrative experience, this text-based narrative that we helped pioneer on iOS.
We want to be the studio that brings multiple titles on this front to the App Store, and therefore, reap the rewards that come with being the first mover on this type of new niche. One of the key factors of success in the future, we feel, will be leveraging Stillfront's expertise via the individual game studios in localization to bring a number of language options to BitLife. Right now, it's only available in English as a text-based game. It's highly leveraged in language, but the appeal extends beyond English to many other languages, and we're excited to bring that to the future. Ultimately, we want to test all new game concepts and leverage our millions of social media followers to launch all new titles. Again, I'm going to mention our focus, and our belief that viral engineering is key to success, at least for our company.
Part of that is storing the success essentially into a battery of our social media accounts, which have millions of users. I'll get into that in a few minutes as well. BitLife was launched in 2018 on iOS, 2019 on Android. Its real key innovation was an all-new type style of simulation for mobile. By no means was it new to the world. Text-based simulation has existed for many, many years on older computers, even in the form of print books. Choose Your Own Adventure, for instance. We identified that this type of game was not brought to mobile, and we saw the opportunity to deliver something to the population, which they've already indicated many, many times before that they wanted. The text-based life simulator niche that we created really shook up the interactive genre for young adults.
People were surprised to see that a game that was essentially text-based, with little reliance on graphics, could get to number 1 and stay up there. It remains a top 100 game right now because of its strength in this new niche that people have already indicated that they wanted, but it was never brought to them. Back in November of 2018, it climbed to number 1 on iOS. In February of 2019, it got to number 1 on Android, as we developed and released that, the Android version specifically in 2019. At the end of 2019, we were ecstatic to learn that BitLife was the number 5 most downloaded free game on iOS, an accolade that is definitely something that we're going to remember for years to come, and a validation of our efforts and our belief that text-based life simulators were here to stay.
The beauty of BitLife, and its engine that drives it forward is it's extremely vocal in contributing social media base. We're very active on social media, connecting with our users to make sure that we're delivering the content that they want, that they're requesting, and not delivering content that we feel that they want and may fall flat. When we release an update, we know it's going to be successful because we're delivering what the user community has asked from us. BitLife is a very deceivingly complex app. Its simulation engine is difficult to clone, we can see in the industry that fast followers are often the bane of the existence of many developers, including ourselves.
They come out with a great idea, like we came out with Letter Soup. Based on the ease of replicating the mechanic, you're going to have a lot of competitors come in and try to essentially take your lunch. That's really when synergies and aligning yourself with a company like Stillfront is very important to help yourself defend against that. We look to the App Store and we could see that the game has been out for quite some time now, but there is no viable clone. There is no viable fast follower to come and compete with the title. Really that's due to its deceivingly complex nature. To weave this web of narrative as we did in BitLife is no easy feat. I'm sure many competitors have tried and failed to bring those products to market.
As we make our engine more mature, we're looking forward to taking the opportunity to be the only name in this particular sub-niche of narrative, and really take advantage of the opportunities that are provided for us there. The phenomena of BitLife can be really seen with the user reviews. The iOS version has over 1.1 million reviews and maintains a nearly five-star rating, speaks to how much love the user community has for the game. The Android version, 4.5 stars, over 700,000 ratings. Hopefully, we're going to break that 1 million mark soon. As I mentioned before, the social media is a huge component of the success of BitLife. We can see here where we're storing that potential energy that comes with social.
We have nearly half a million followers on Twitter, nearly a million followers on Instagram, 100,000 followers or members of our Reddit subgroup, and then finally, nearly a quarter million TikTok followers, TikTok being the youngest account among this group. Tying back to the same concept of social media being such an important part of BitLife, all one has to do is look to YouTube to see why people are so attracted to this game. All of the names that you see here on this list have created at least four BitLife videos, and they're completely unsolicited from us. We do not interact with these influencers.
We don't pay them, we don't incentivize them to create content for their YouTube channels, yet they choose to return to BitLife time after time, including some of the biggest names on YouTube, including Jacksepticeye, with over 24 million followers, subscribers, nearly 25 million. Why is this? Why are YouTube influencers so attracted to this game? Really it's because of the open world nature of it, the endless possibilities that one could find themselves in BitLife make for an entertaining video, for not just the creator but the subscriber as well. When they play the game, they know that the reactions that they're going to get are natural. They don't know what's around the corner. It's completely unexpected.
The subscriber likes to capture that essence when they're making a video for themselves, and the follower, the watcher, just is so entertained by that they feel compelled to continue making BitLife videos time and again. This all ties back to what I was saying about viral engineering and how that is a core component of our strategy here at CANDYWRITER, figuring out ways that we could add users to our user base without having to essentially pay for them. Here we could see the concept that I was referring to earlier with the community-driven aspect of CANDYWRITER and BitLife. You could see here that essentially when we create a new aspect or a new feature in BitLife, we ask the user community what it is that you want. A great example is the current update that we're working on, bringing in pro sports into BitLife.
This is something that the user community has told us time and again that they wanted. When we come out with this update in the very near future, we're going to be delivering that content that they hyped up themselves. They were excited about what they told us they want. Essentially, it ensures that the update or the new content that we put in is going to be received well by the user community. This is what really drives BitLife and our company as a whole is listening to the user community and bringing them what they want. Future strategy and vision. We want to extend BitLife into derivative products. We want to solidify and build on our position as a market leader in a hot new text-based narrative genre. We've established ourselves as essentially the only name in text-based.
We're going to continue to build on that and make sure that we stay there. We want to compound learnings from each new narrative game and incorporate that into the next. Tying back to what Jörgen and Alexis were saying earlier, it's important to learn from both your successes and your failures. Through our Stillfront family, we want to enhance our UA, our Live Ops, our monetization, and our language availability. We've only been part of the Stillfront family for about four to five months now, and we've already had a number of great conversations with partner studios that have told us their experiences, shared with us their successes and failures to help us drive our own decision-making going forward. We want to continue this conversation with our Stillfront family members to identify these synergies and extract new growth and efficiency opportunities for us.
What's amazing is how Stillfront and the leadership have essentially created colleagues out of competitors. We at one point would've considered Storm8 a competitor, or we would've considered Nanobit, who is very active in the narrative space, a competitor. Through this mutual group that we're in, we've transcended above that and have become colleagues, where we could share information with each other, where we could identify what the other partnered studios are doing correctly and replicate that behavior ourselves. We're particularly really excited about our future with companies like Nanobit who are operating in the same space as us and trying to identify how we can help each other out, how we can move forward together. That's essentially CANDYWRITER and our experience with Stillfront right now.
We're really excited about the months ahead, the years ahead, with Stillfront and everything that is available to us now with all of the knowledge that comes from 15 studios working together. With that being said, I'll turn it back over to you, Sofia.
Thank you so much, Nadir. Thank you. A couple of questions. Speaking about localization of BitLife to new geographies, I have questions on how would you say that this work has progressed so far? We have heard before that it might be interesting to reach out to Spanish-speaking populations, for example. What sort of potential would you say that these new populations would have?
Well, I definitely think there's a huge potential in language options. I think that the availability of BitLife in English has shown the marketplace that text-based narratives are something that they want. This desire probably transcends the English language into many other languages, and Spanish being such a huge opportunity, the Spanish language being such a huge opportunity for us, we're really excited about getting into that. Furthermore, as a company being based in Miami, Florida, we're very well-connected with the Latin American community. Most of the members on our team are fluent Spanish speakers. We're hoping to tap into this as we develop the foreign language versions. The kind of secret sauce of BitLife is its ability to take individual story elements and link them together to create a continuous story.
If you look at it almost like a train, two train cars coupling together, it's important that we engineer that coupling component very thoughtfully, very with consideration for the future. Right now we're in the process of retooling aspects of the app to make sure that these couplings will happen with any language that we decide to bring to BitLife. We've added resources to the team that are dedicated to this process, and it's moving along very well. We are really excited about the future and bringing that to market.
Thank you. Just two brief questions more. There has been a larger focus on in-app purchases lately within BitLife. How would you view the revenue mix going forward?
I think because of COVID, we kind of accelerated a plan to bring in more IAP availability or price points to the app, to the user community. That's worked out very well for us. Nobody could have seen the pandemic coming, furthermore, the effect that that would've had on ad eCPMs. I think as a team, we took that systemic risk, and we were able to mitigate that very well in the first few months of the pandemic. Very early on, we pivoted into focusing on in-app purchases, and that's paid off for us pretty well. It speaks to our ability to move quickly and to adapt.
We saw the difficulty that the ad industry was going to have over the course of the next few months as lockdowns and people tightening their budgets related to COVID would have an impact on advertising, and we shifted our strategy away from being more ad-focused to being more of a mix. Right now we've achieved essentially a 50/50 mix, and we're really comfortable with that. Want to keep that mix, but raise the tide. Move IAP and ad revenue together in lockstep, but keep that even mix between our revenue streams.
Okay. Thank you so much, Nadir. Just very brief, there's one question. Do you see a potential to increase the ARPDAU levels for BitLife, the average revenue per daily active users?
I definitely believe that there's a lot of opportunity for that. Without getting into too much detail, we've discussed many different strategies to do exactly that, including bringing in more price points, being more aggressive with our ad delivery, using data to identify non-paying users to ensure that we're monetizing that non-paying user appropriately through advertisements. There's many opportunities on that front, and it's a consistent drive for us to do exactly that, is raise that ARPDAU, and we're very optimistic and hopeful that we'll do exactly that.
Thank you so much, Nadir. We could go on with many questions for you, but unfortunately, we have to say thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
our final speaker with us. We have Perry Tam, our CEO from Storm8 calling in from San Francisco.
Hi, Sofia.
Hi, Perry.
Great to be here.
Hi, good to have you. Welcome. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Perry Tam. I'm the founder and CEO of Storm8. First of all, thank you very much to everyone who is joining us today at the webcast event. I would be super happy to tell you more about Storm8. Let's get started. Storm8 was founded in 2009. This is our 11th year in business. We have always been a profitable company since the beginning, similar to CANDYWRITER. While there are some really big numbers here on this slide, such as the 1 billion download and SEK 1 billion revenue, the numbers that I'm most proud of is actually a small one, is the 70 people that we have at Storm8. Our small team has been working very closely together for a long period of time.
The median employee tenure at Storm8 is more than six years, and we deem this as the key ingredient for our success, and you will understand more why this is the key ingredient as I discuss more about Storm8 with you. Having a long tenure allow us to invest into our employees and train the team to succeed in the ever-changing mobile gaming development company. I would like to give you a little bit more history of how Storm8 came about. Along with the three other co-founders, we bootstrapped the company out of my living room back in 2009. We launched our first games in early 2009 when Apple just opened up their App Store for developers. At that time, there was no in-app purchase.
In order to collect money from our users, we actually have to make multiple pay apps and put it into the App Store so that our users can keep purchasing the different pay app in order to pay us, which is a very different world than today. Out of the four founders, three of us joined from Facebook. I still remember that when we told our friends that we were going to leave Facebook to start a gaming company, they were all very surprised. We kept on telling our friends that we believe mobile gaming market is going to be a huge market when the iPhone was just in its infancy. We also believe that we can quickly learn how to make great games even though we didn't have any background in gaming.
Apparently, we were right about the mobile gaming market being huge, but man, we cannot be more wrong about us learning game making quickly. Over the last 11 years, we have made more than 50 games across three different genres, and we have collected over one billion downloads. Today, we are still learning about game making. However, through all those exercises, we have built expertise in Live Operations, user acquisition, ad monetization, and analytics. Another lesson that we learned about mobile game ecosystem is that change is the only constant. Storm8 has observed and lived through many platform and market changes in the last 11 years. We find that the only solution to cope with the constant change is to be adaptive and nimble.
For example, in around 2016, we noticed that our game development process was outdated, and it was no longer effective in coming up with hit games. We invested a lot of time and resources into coming up with a new R&D process that would work for us. With the tremendous amount of hard work from the team, we arrived at this small team prototyping process, which eventually led us to creating Home Design Makeover and Property Brothers. At this moment, we continue to double down on "Property Brothers" and "Home Design Makeover," which are very early in their game life cycle. Before I tell you more about "Home Design Makeover" and "Property Brothers," let me tell you more about our rapid prototyping process first.
While the rapid prototyping process seems relatively simple, as you can see on the right-hand side of this slide, and it is certainly not a proprietary formula to Storm8. Anyone can easily copy and do the same thing as we do. However, it is very hard for teams to internalize this concept and this process, and continuously apply it. Every time when I show this slide to a group of game executives, they always ask me, "How do we get the development team to kill their own games?" That seems to be a really difficult thing to do among a gaming studio. In our opinion, the key success for Storm8 is that we have trained our team such that they cannot be afraid to kill its own idea if the greatness is not achieved.
It requires a long history of the team, a lot of experience in the team of the game makers, and it shows maturity and confidence in the team to really embrace this idea. That is, again, why I'm so proud of the team we have at Storm8. The strong team really makes the process of rapid prototyping works. Now that we have gained the insight of Storm8 game development process, let me tell you the output of what this process get us, which are the great games. The first game I would like to show you is called "Home Design Makeover." It is a match-three puzzle game. In case you have not played before, I have prepared a video to showcase some gameplay and give you a sense of how the game works. Here is the video. Great.
Very similar to Nadir at CANDYWRITER, at Storm8, we see game development as a continuous process of improving game making. For a game maker at Storm8 and CANDYWRITER, you just never know where the inspiration comes from and when it will come to you, when it comes to making a great game. "Home Design Makeover" actually was inspired by one of Storm8's earliest game called "Home Design Story," which was launched in 2012. While "Home Design Story" was not a commercially successful game, although it was beautiful game, but it just never really gained any commercial traction for us to continue supporting it.
That game provided so much learning to our team, and the learning that we have garnered from Home Design Story, resurfaced itself after six years when we started embarking on the creation of Home Design Makeover. Home Design Makeover was released in 2018. The successful launch is the culmination of Storm8's 10 plus years of experience in launching 50 plus casual games, and building thousands and thousands of casual puzzle game levels. People often ask me what made this game so special and successful. While it is really hard to have a definitive answer for such a difficult question, I think by looking at our design philosophy might shed some light for finding the answers to this question. The first design philosophy is that our artists made sure all the rooms would look absolutely stunning. The games allow players to choose from many different design options.
We took extra care in crafting the options such that all combinations, any combinations, would look beautiful and enjoyable to our players. Here are some screenshots that you are seeing on the screen that just speak loudly about the quality of the room design that we put into place. The next design philosophy is about storytelling. On top of enjoying the beautiful design and the fun puzzles, the players are also immersed into many fun and relatable storylines. We like our players to feel the emotion that are embedded in the story. They are not just here to look at pretty pictures or play the fun games. If really they are here to feel something. We believe that the storytelling is the way to deliver the feelings to them.
The last design philosophy is around keeping the game fresh for our players, we do that by keep adding new features, extending the game play. Our team release regular bit of game features to drive consistent player engagement and monetization. This goes back to the strength of our live operation the team has fine-tuned over the years so that they can consistently deliver on feature development as well as content pipeline. Next up, we're going to switch gear to talk about "Property Brothers." Property Brothers is a follow-up hit to our Home Design Makeover. As a matter of fact, both Property Brother and Home Design Makeover were built based on the same engine that we have built in-house to power and create these two games.
In case you're not familiar with Drew and Jonathan Scott, they are the two TV stars behind the hit series called "Property Brothers," and several spinoff shows. Their shows are aired in over 150 countries, and they have over 18 million monthly viewers. The brothers are incredibly active in social media. In total, they have over 10 million digital followers. Not only that, they also have their own furniture line, their own children's books, and they have a podcast as well. Now you have a little bit more background about the brothers. Let me show you the videos of the gameplay. As you can see, we have added a lot more new details to this game compared to Home Design Makeover. For example, in order to match the show, we invested a brand-new 3D fly-through of space with blueprint of before and after to show the contrast.
Another thing to note here is that Property Brothers has a different puzzle mechanics, it's called the blast mechanic, as opposed to the Home Design Makeover, which has a match-three puzzle game mechanics. In terms of design philosophy for this game, the first principle is to integrate Property Brothers into the game. We try to make the player feel like they are creating an interactive bond with the brothers through this game. Here is an example where the brothers will interact with the players and enhance their experience inside the game. Let me show you the video.
You are a rock star of the design world. If you text me right now, I'm going to give you two hours of infinite energy to help you design.
This type of interaction really enhances the player experience with the game because they feel like they're talking directly to the brothers. Another example is that the brothers will make special videos to celebrate important milestones or achievements for our players. Let me show you a video of that too.
Level 2,000? No way. You did it. You are amazing. Holy moly. Wow. Yeah, I knew you could do it. Champion. Yeah, exactly. Thank you very much. Really, you are the best. Seriously, I think we are over-complimenting. No, no. You are so cool. Yeah, cooler than a cucumber. Cooler than a polar bear. That was too much. That was too much. Yeah. You are cool.
This is yet another example of the brothers really working closely with us to create a special video just to celebrate some milestone for our players. The next design philosophy that I would like to talk about is the design aesthetic. In order to be true to the brothers' brand, we worked very closely with the brothers to deliver on that design sense. The brothers worked with our team on each and every single room. The brothers actually personally approved the design of every single room before we launch it to the user to ensure that the design is true to their brand and will be embraced by their fans. It is a true collaboration between the brothers and Storm8 on this game.
You can see the pictures that I posted here on this slide, they are all looking very stunning, and it is not just the work of Storm8, it is the brothers has a lot of input into this so that we can create such amazing looking rooms. Last but not least, since we have this superpower of the Property Brothers' personality and characters, we certainly would love to leverage that, and one of the ways to leverage that is to create marketing materials that really showcase their fun personalities and integrate that into our marketing. By doing this, it led to a lower user acquisition cost for us, but also it created higher value players from those user acquisition. Let me show you a sample video of the advertisement that we made for this game.
What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt. Ooh. What did the strawberry say to the peach? If you weren't so fresh, we wouldn't be in this jam or something like that. You know, I should just stick to design. Yeah. I need to do more levels of Property Brothers Home Design. Yeah.
Absolutely. They could stick to design and leave us to make the game at Storm8. With that will be all the content I have for today to share with all of you. Thank you again for your time, and thank you for tuning in. I would love to get into the Q&A section of this presentation. Hi, Sofia.
Hi, Perry. Thank you so much. Great to see all the videos as well. Okay, let's shoot. With the Property Brothers Home Design being a big success, what do you see as the key driver behind it? Can you say anything about your games pipeline, and are you looking to release similar games in the future?
Yeah, sure. I think we cover a lot in this presentation about what makes Property Brothers Home Design a huge success. To reiterate those points, I think it's about leveraging the fan base of the Property Brothers, being true to their brand, and entertain and embrace their fan base. Also, leveraging their personality and characters to improve our marketing, so that we can deliver a lower cost marketing but generate higher value users. That, in my opinion, is the reason why Property Brother Home Design being a huge success.
In terms of our game pipeline and what we are looking forward to, as I mentioned earlier, both Home Design Makeover and Property Brothers are still pretty early in their life cycle. Our current focus is to continue to improve those two games by adding more features, creating more content for it, because we still see there is a huge opportunity for us to continue to push for these two game and improve the two games. Beyond that, obviously the team, being in a gaming company, being a creative team, our team constantly have very exciting ideas about new games and new game pipelines that we constantly discuss within the company. Unfortunately, I am not prepared to share anything today. Please look out for future new games like this coming out from our Storm8 studio.
Thank you. Will do. Competition seems to increase within the genre. How will you continue to stand out in the crowd?
Yeah, that's a really good question. Like I said earlier, we have been around over 11 years, pretty much since the beginning of the App Store get started. Not as early as CANDYWRITER, because they were actually the cooler because they are the launch partner of the App Store. We joined very shortly after that. Having seen the whole thing evolve in the last 11 years, I think there are, again, two main thing that we really remember. One is be nimble, and the second one is be adaptive. Those two things continuously help us staying ahead of the game in the App Store. I would say that in order to continuously compete with other people, we just need to continue to stay nimble and stay adaptive. It is also important to be humble in this space.
We are constantly learning from the market and learning from our competitor, which is yet another really main reason why we could grow and continuously stay ahead, is by observing what happened in the marketplace and observing what our competitors are doing, and then try to do something a little bit better, a little bit faster than the rest of the peers.
Thank you. Would you say that competition in home design categories of games are increasing in various regions?
Not all. I think that would happen just naturally, just like what we always see. There are lots of information about our game that is just not proprietary, that everyone can see. People can see the success of our games and start trying to imitate and create their own version of a home design game. Again, it just come with the territory of the mobile gaming market, and we have seen it play out many, many times. I think the true gem or true value of our game is really rely on the fact that we have a really strong team, which can continuously improve and push the game to a higher ground.
Okay. Thank you. What are the Storm8's long-term key competitive advantages, and what does joining Stillfront do for you?
Yeah, that's a really great question. I think in the last 11 years, we have seen a lot, and particularly in 2019, I think we are seeing a lot of consolidation in the marketplace. Being a independent company become a harder challenge, as opposed to the early days of the App Store, being independent give you a lot of flexibility, allows you to do a lot of things. Nowadays, being independent would be a little bit challenging too, in terms of buying user acquisition. Scale does matter. It helps you in a lot of ways, such as going to the platform, asking for featuring, and also just looking at the market, buying user acquisition, buying users. I would say by joining Stillfront, we certainly gain that scale as a bigger company.
The secret sauce of Stillfront really is the fact that even with the bigger scale. Each studio has its own autonomy, and we could make decisions just like we were independent as a single studio. It allows us to move fast, but yet maintain that scale, which is a really great combo in this marketplace. I would say that really is what defines the going forward for Storm8 and a lot of other studios who have joined Stillfront. I would say having the capability to go into the market, and nowadays figuring out the user acquisition is yet another competitive advantage that Storm8, along with Stillfront, can bring to the table to be competitive here.
The mobile game market has changed in such a way that from a lot of so-called creativity, lots of new apps, new people trying out different things, trying to climb the App Store and get users, to nowadays, as Alexis Bonte was saying, we see less and less new apps every year. It become a much more formulated game where you just have to meet your KPI and be able to spend your money effectively to attract new players using user acquisition dollars. By having the strong scale that we have as a Stillfront family and the strong capability that we have built up so far in the last 11 years on the user acquisition, those two really help us to stay competitive in this new landscape.
Thank you. Just one final one before we're wrapping up. Perry, are there any plans to grow the long-tail series of games that you have? Is the plan to slowly phase them out?
The plan is definitely continuously maintain those games and get as much as revenue and EBIT from those games as possible. Our current focus is really a lot of our development resources do go into the two new games that I just talked about, "Home Design Makeover" and "Property Brothers Home Design." I would say that would continue to be the main focus that you are seeing from our studio.
Thank you. Nadir, Perry, thank you all for listening in. It's 5:00 P.M., so let's wrap it up and have a good day.