Hello, everyone. Awesome to see you today here with us personally and via the internet. Especially, it's awesome to see you after such a long break. We have a lot of great stuff to show you today, so just let's start with the presentation. Yeah, as you can see, we'll talk a lot about the future today. That background is not a coincidence, by the way. Stay curious. You will find out more in a few minutes. It was a huge break between the presentations and the conferences like that before. We have a lot to tell what happened. Let's begin with that. It was like 22 months of the break between us and all meeting with you, with you guys. Let's sum up what happened. First of all, the games, the dev and ex-dev, what happened.
You know that we've published and released five games in that short period of time on all major platforms. That was intense stuff and a huge achievement for 11 bit studios. We also published 18 updates. I'm not talking about fixes. Those were just like some solid major updates for all of our games. That's a lot of work that happened. Received 34 award nominations. What is important here is every game received an award nomination. That is something that tells that those games were good. From that nominations, we received and won 12 nominations with one really crazy one for us, the Game Award for Best Strategy Game, the Frostpunk 2. That is something. That is like Oscars for the movies. That is for a game. That's a big thing for us.
You know the games, The Invincible, The Indika, Frostpunk 2, Creatures of Avalon, and of course, The Thaumaturge. Those are all awesome games. Not only we think that way, but also that is what players think and what reviewers think. That are games that we are proud of, and we did it good, and we are so happy about that. As you can see, the scores from the users and the reviewers, that is something. We really made good games. What's more, it's like you make a game, but then you need to tell that to the players, show the game to the players. As you can see, those numbers mean we really contacted with our players. They knew about our games. They've seen a lot of trailers. They see a lot of materials, content that we generated. We were able to connect with them and talk with them.
That was really great stuff done by our marketing and PR department. You know that last year, we did first time ever a meeting with the press and the YouTubers, et cetera, et cetera, and 100 people visited us. We will continue to do that. More on that, you will hear in this presentation. On that side, we are so happy on what we did. Yeah, of course, there is also an organization that is around that that helps those games to be published, delivered, produced, et cetera, et cetera. We had to grow. You knew that. We told you about that the last time that we are growing. We grew. We hired new awesome team members. We promoted almost 200 people. We learned a lot of skills. That is important. I will cover that later on also.
What is great around that is we have for the last year, we have 6% voluntary turnover. From what we know and how we look at it, from what we learn, that is a good balance, natural balance. People want to work at 11 bit studios. We also did a lot of lectures. We have skilled people at 11 bit studios that want to share their knowledge with the rest of the world. On the other fields, those are also important fields. You know we have this meaningful approach to things. We are also active on that field. We've backed, for example, three summer camps for Ukrainian kids. Of course, we've gathered a lot of money for the charity. Only during that time, we are talking about only during that 22 months that passed.
That is also something that is a heart of 11 bit studios. Yeah, not everything was great. You know that. You've heard a lot about this stuff that we talked about, the Project 8. That was a very difficult decision for 11 bit studios and for our developers, et cetera. You know that that happened. We delayed most of our games. Yeah, that's development. That's just like we are ambitious. We do a lot of stuff. We delay that. Of course, The Thaumaturge and Creatures of Avalon are far from recoup. That is something that is a part of that period with all those awesome releases, all those growing, scaling. We also had some problems. In all, when we look at it, that was an intense time. That was like one of the most intense times in 11 bit studios. It was that time.
We did that here with the team of 11 bit studios. I'm so proud about it. That's our past. A brief few slides about the current situation, where we are right now, for you to understand what 11 bit studios is right now. We have a great team. Yeah, I already mentioned that. The balance is good. The proportion is good. We have 177 devs versus 93 operation people that help all those devs to deliver those projects, games, so the product we do. We also have three plus, as you see here, our strong own IPs. Those are This War of Mine, Frostpunk IP, of course. We strongly believe in the Alters IP, IP that will be published in the coming months. It is something that is a great achievement for us that we learned a lot during that time.
We already have a good experience in strategy, survival, city builders, and narrative and TPP games. Those last two experiences came from the P8, of course, that we decided to close, and from The Alters that also has a lot of new stuff going on there from our development perspective. Yeah, when we look at a team and when we look at the competition, when you look at the other studios around the world, we see that this is a very unique aspect of 11 bit studios. We are able to do games in parallel. That is something that we see as a great advantage of 11 bit studios. We are able to do, we were able to do Frostpunk, Frostpunk 2, The Alters that will be released very soon. Even, yeah, we closed P8.
We still were able to do simultaneously a few projects at once. We want to keep that. That is something that we learned, and it worked. What is more, we have a great ex-dev. A lot of publishers want to talk with us. We even hear like we only want to be published by you, 11 bit studios, because we see what you are doing, guys. They come to us. Rufus will tell you more about the ex-dev, but we are respected a lot as a publisher, not only as a developer. Yeah, we are independent. You know that. We have spoken about that for years. We want to keep our independence. We have independence in all of the aspects of the organization. That is something. The last thing, we already have 18 games published, and they constantly sell. That is great stuff.
That is some kind of a backbone for 11 bit studios, a strong aspect that is currently supporting us in everything what we do and what we dream of. Let us now switch to financial stuff. Martin, your turn.
Thanks very much, Przemysław. Let's take a look and see how 2024 looked in numbers. It was a record year for 11 bit studios. We had revenues of PLN 140 million. That was the best revenue number in the company's history, almost 2.7 times the revenue that we generated in 2023. Equally, 2024 was a very difficult year for the company. The closure of Project 8, the impairment charges on The Thaumaturge and Creatures of Avalon, and the change in our depreciation policy all meant that our operating expenses for the year came in at PLN 143 million. Therefore, we had an operating loss of PLN 2.8 million for the year. When you take in financial costs, financial income, tax, and the deferred tax effect, we still reported a net profit of PLN 6.9 million for the year.
Coming very quickly onto our balance sheet, non-current assets of PLN 169 million. Within that number, we have PLN 129 million, which represents the work that is being carried out on all our upcoming titles, as well as those titles which have been released and are currently being depreciated. Current assets, PLN 92 million. Within that figure, cash and equivalents, PLN 70 million. Liabilities, PLN 32 million. Equity, PLN 229 million. We also have a very small loan, which we took out to partly finance the purchase of our office building here in Warsaw. That is being repaid. The point that I'd like to make from this slide is that 11 bit studios has a very strong financial liquidity position.
Taking a slightly deeper dive into the sales revenues by titles, then Frostpunk 2, clearly PLN 70 million, 50% of our revenue for 2024, which we think is a great result. Also, if you look at Frostpunk, the original Frostpunk, that represented 20% of our sales last year, generating in 2024, PLN 28 million. That is more than the sales it generated in the previous year. Again, we're very proud of that. Other titles continue to perform well, such as This War of Mine, which still is generating sales for 11 bit studios, even after all these years following its release. As I mentioned, 2024 was also a difficult year for the company. The closure of Project 8 resulted in a non-cash charge of PLN 48 million.
The impairment losses on the impairment charges, I beg your pardon, for The Thaumaturge and Creatures of Avalon, total PLN 18 million, of which PLN 11 million was on The Thaumaturge and PLN 7 million was on Creatures of Avalon. We also changed our depreciation policy. We are now recognizing a greater part of the depreciation amount much earlier in a project's life than under our previous policy. The effect of that on last year's number was to increase the depreciation charge on Frostpunk 2 by a further PLN 9 million to a total of PLN 12 million in total for the last year. What does the future look like? Here, I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Łukasz.
Thank you, Martin. Hello, everyone. We have went to the past, went through the present, and now what about the future? Before we go to the future, I want us to have a quick break, actually. We are doing an entertainment business, and we are creating games. What I wanted us to go now, where to go now, is to actually check out some of our games. I wanted to talk about two of the upcoming games that are releasing later this year. First off, we will start with The Alters. I would like us to keep us in the entertainment mood and see a short clip from the game. The Alters, our own developed game, is slated to release on 13 June, both on consoles and PC.
As you just saw in this short clip, we are going to start the pre-orders for PlayStation 5 and Xbox later today. What is happening on the dev side? The team is actually finishing touches to the game. They are testing the balancing, polishing the game, and preparing the Gold Master to make sure that everything is ready for 13 June. At the same time, we are constantly doing some focus tests where we already gathered a lot of valuable feedback from the players. The big thing for us, and I hope for the players as well, is that everyone who plays the game has a very positive reception. We are very happy with that. Before we put the game out first to the press and creators for their reviews and then to the players, we have one more stop that Przemysław already mentioned a bit.
We are, once again this year, running a hands-on event here in Warsaw for media and content creators from all around the world. This is going to be happening in May. We're inviting many people to play a big chunk of the game and see things that were not shown in the game yet. At the same time, we did push back the release from 2024 to 2025. We see this as a positive outcome, as the additional time allowed us to expand the gameplay elements, make the game more enjoyable, more engaging, more fun, a bit more complex. All of it brings the gameplay element that is very important for us once we create games. At the same time, we also made adjustments to the marketing strategy to make sure that the complexity of the game and its uniqueness is actually communicated properly to the players.
We managed to reach even wider audiences. I am happy to say that The Alters is the second most wishlisted game in 11 bit studios history, just behind Frostpunk 2, which is a huge deal in itself. All of this makes us believe that with The Alters, we have something special in our hands. We are very excited to put it out in June to the players. Now, moving on to the other game. This one comes from the publishing division, which will be described in more detail by Rufus in just a second. Moonlighter 2 is the sequel to the most successful release from the external development side.
Currently, Digital Sun, the developer of the game, is working on a beta milestone that will be delivered this quarter, which will be followed by broad focus tests for us to gather the feedback on the game and on its current state. We've already shown bits and pieces of the game. Moonlighter 2 expands on the features and mechanics that were introduced in the first title. What we already see is that the community sentiment around the game and around the changes is very positive, which also translates to a steady growth of wishlists. At the same time, we also see significant bigger spikes in those numbers with major marketing beats, like, for example, the latest trailer and our activity with the III initiative, where we actually announced the release window for the game, which is summer this year.
Additionally, last year, the revenue from the Moonlighter IP, only for 2024, brought us more than PLN 80 million, which gives us also a good prediction on how the sequel can perform. Moonlighter will be launching later this year, summer this year, on Game Pass Day 1. We are extremely excited and happy to put it out to players, to enjoy the game, and share their feedback. Bef ore I move to Piotr and to finish the entertainment part, let's look at one more trailer from Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault.
Hello. Before I will continue, just one clarification, because Łukasz misspoke that PLN 81 million was actually lifetime revenue for Moonlighter, not just the last year. It's still very impressive. We are super happy with this result, just to be sure. On slide, it was spelled properly.
Coming back to that question about the future, we need to start with one comment on the industry situation. The gaming industry, as you know, is facing challenging times. It's a moment of transformation. We see that strong IPs dominate the market. We see that game fans are becoming fans of the specific game. We also see that last year, 15% of time, only 15% of time on Steam was allocated to new games, while 50% of playtime was allocated to games that are eight years or older, which is crazy, because 13% of playtime last year was Counter-Strike. All the releases that happened last year on Steam had the same playtime as Counter-Strike, which means all of that, the games do not grow all this quickly as before. We do not have those generational changes anymore. We do not have such big technology leaps.
Also, developers are committed to develop the games even eight, ten years after the releases. We also see the increasing number of game releases. Each year, more and more games are coming to Steam and consoles. Shifting player preferences, player tastes, and trends are evolving quickly, very quickly. They can change from one year to another, from one quarter to another. Industry challenges. We are experiencing layoffs and studio closures around the world. We see also a stagnant growth in funding. There is less money on the market at the moment. The important thing is that the games industry is still huge and prospective. There are still major new games releasing each month, each week almost. Steam concurrent users reach an all-time peak each month. Each record, which seems super high, is beaten the next month.
Yes, the general growth is slower than expected by some analytics a couple of years ago, et cetera. The mobile is slightly shrinking post-COVID times. Our market, PC and consoles, is growing and is going very well. The problem is that times are less predictable. That is a challenge for us. Those were challenging years. Last years were challenging for us. As a company, we have scaled a lot. We have learned a lot. We have very good games that we talked before. We have very strong IPs that we talked before as well that fit into those shifts. In order to move forward, we need changes. The world is changing, and so we are. This is the old model that we had. We had the old two legs model, internal development and external development.
We are doing a significant change here. Instead of two legs, we'll have three pillars from now on. Those three pillars mean new games from internal development, platform games from internal development, and external development. As you can see, the new pillar is platform games. What does it mean? It means that we want to make a long-term development of selected games. We've planned a multi-year development cycle of updates, DLC, and changes for players who have become attached to our specific games, who love those games, who want to spend more time in those games. We want to provide them with more content and to provide them with long-term attachment. At the same time, we want to maintain freshness for new players. Because, as I said, new players are coming each quarter to Steam, to all the platforms.
We want to maintain the game fresh and be able to reach a new audience with it. Those three pillars, to sum up, we have new games from internal development, so completely new games, but can be based on our own IP. New games based on our own IP or new IP with a chance for a big success. Platform games, which we call the stabilizing pillar, reducing risk and expanding on IP. That's very important. That's a very good tool to expand the IP as well. External development that Rufus will tell us more in a moment, where we want to publish mechanically engaging games from ambitious creators around the world. This is a diversifying pillar for us. I'm super happy to announce that our first platform game is, and here we have a trailer.
It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. Brace yourselves. Save yourselves. Save the children. Save the children.
This was a teaser trailer for our new game, Frostpunk 1886. What is Frostpunk 1886? This is the new platform game that we are developing. It will be reimagining the original Frostpunk. It will be rebuilt in Unreal Engine. On top of Frostpunk 1, we are adding new content, new events, new mechanics, new buildings, new technologies, new lots within a completely new purpose path. The purpose path in the first Frostpunk was order and faith. Here we will add a totally new purpose path. It will be a great platform for newcomers and also an expansion for die-hard fans. We will add mod support, a feature that was heavily requested by users to add to Frostpunk 1. All of that will give us a possibility for further DLCs, which was not possible with Liquid Engine with Frostpunk 1 anymore.
It will be designed hand in hand with our community, with quarterly iterations and community updates. To sum up, we are respecting the legacy of the original Frostpunk. By new additions, we will enrich the experience for hardcore fans and new players. Frostpunk 1 was a game that was played and loved by millions of fans. We have more than 7 million copies sold across all the platforms, not to mention the subscriptions we are in, with an average playtime of 23 hours, which is an impressive number because to beat Frostpunk 1, you need 10 hours. Twenty-three hours of average is pretty crazy. We are committed to release in 2027, with more to be revealed at the beginning of 2026. The store page, as you could see at the end of the teaser, is going live today. Players will be able to wishlist the game.
From now on, we have two paths, something that we planned for years and finally is happening, two paths for the Frostpunk IP's strategy. We will have Frostpunk 1886, addressing the genre of city builder and society survival, and Frostpunk 2, addressing the grand strategy and society survival genre. Both games develop simultaneously, carrying each other to the top of the algorithm and to the players. Now, Rufus will tell you more about the XDEV evolution. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Piotr. Hello, everyone. Lovely to be here. Lovely to have you here as well. As Piotr said, and as all of them actually teased, I would try to tell you more about the evolution of XDEV, which is our publishing department, basically. Because we believe overall that XDEV and publishing, our heart is in a good spot.
The extension of 11 bit studios as publishing is something that we know we do well. We need to do some small adaptations to perform it better for the future and make it more future-proof. Starting with, as already was mentioned, publishing is becoming our diversifying pillar. Chasing Frostpunk 2 and the others, our internal big games, is very hard for a smaller department as XDEV. We decided that we need to do something more innovative, maybe find ambitious, slightly maybe crazy projects that are out there, but are still very potentially great opportunities for success. This portfolio of our XDEV titles will be precisely created by my team. I love those people. We have a small but very specialized team of specialists: XDEV production, XDEV product, XDEV QA. I think we are very much able to precisely choose very good titles for our publishing.
That's one of the biggest changes that is very necessary to make nowadays. We want to stay focused on mechanical drive in our games and a very clear design of our games. Our games have to be interpreted very quickly. When you see a game, when you see a screenshot, a quick teaser, you should understand what the game is about. We are also aiming to make games with slightly lower budget. That means not only lower risks for us, but more agility and more space for buffers. When we have a smaller project, we can easily move some things around, move the release date even, or something, because it's not so expensive to produce. We still believe that based on our research, and we did very deep research of the project supply of the market, we still believe we can create games that have very great market potential.
This is something that I slightly covered already. We want to create games that have this very quick, instant broad market appeal. They have this slight additional uniqueness. That is something that is supposed to quickly resonate with people as well. That is a special bonus that we kind of reserved. Like Martin covered, we are in a very good financial situation. We reserved ourselves a special wildcard budget for some opportunity signs. Those signs can be projects that are slightly maybe different from our core strategy. Maybe they are smaller, bigger. Maybe they have a shorter production time than we would normally consider. We have that additional budget to spend on them if we see the opportunity in those projects. The kickoff project for our new approach is a game that you probably already know, Dev Howl.
Dev Howl is a game. It's a souls-like deck builder game made by three people from Copenhagen. It's a unique mix of souls-like and card building. We believe that merging those genres is not super common nowadays. We see that it resonates with people already. We already have that proven because we did extensive focus testing. We also did the public demo. Based on the results of the public demo, we noticed that a lot of people love the game. We got a lot of 9-10 scores for Dev Howl already. As I already mentioned, I'm sorry, we believe that the game has a double appeal. It will appeal to card gamers, to deck builder fans. We also kind of hope that it will appeal to souls-like fans as well. It's coming out this year.
We don't have a date yet, but we will choose it pretty soon. Now it's time for a short trailer as well. After this, Marek will join me. Thank you.
My turn for the third change, the evolution of our games. We want our games to be driven by passion. We want our games to be driven by ideas. We want our games to be driven by emotions. What's equally as important, we want our games to be driven by gameplay. This is our propriety mix, opposing the current hollow production value trend that's all the way out there. This is also an approach that worked extremely well for us in our greatest hits, such as This War of Mine, Frostpunk, and lately, Frostpunk 2. We also want to keep the current scale of our games.
Actually, The Alters, that's releasing soon, is now treated as our development size reference title. Why? Because this is the scale we excel at. This is the scale we feel best at. Perhaps most importantly, this is the scale we simply like. We also decided to evolve a little bit our approach to meaningful games, so that it becomes interpreted in a little bit different way. Before I jump into that, I'll explain the reasons behind that. We think that meaningful games, it's a phrase that has been traditionally very important for us at 11 bit studios. We feel it's starting to get a little bit of weight. It's starting to be a little bit abused out there on the market. There are some games that people might label as maybe a little bit boring. That's very far from what we're doing.
That is very far from where we want to be. This is why we have decided to craft this new term, relatable games, where both of these components are equally as important. Now, why relatable games? Because we want to constantly remind ourselves, but also our audience, that our games are about these important elements. We want the relatable to be demonstrating that we are making games that are supposed to be resonating, intuitive, humane, emotional. We also want to remind everyone, including ourselves, that we are making games that are supposed to be entertaining, appealing, mechanical, and emergent. Of course, in the nowadays market, we cannot be thinking about the future of our games without thinking about social and/or multiplayer aspects. This is something that we want to be introducing in our future productions. This is something we cannot be, and we will not be forgetting about.
Now, introducing these changes into our games will not be possible without the evolution of our processes inside of the company. We've talked about a few already in the past. I'll also jump to some of the most important ones from my perspective. There's a lot happening right now in the company. A lot of different areas of the company are evolving. A lot of different processes are being tweaked and sharpened. These are some of the most important ones. First of all, we want to really stress the prototyping phases of games. We want to start prototyping in smaller teams and the more streamlined development models. Why?
Because we want to give ourselves more time to come up with great ideas, to prove these ideas early, to make sure that they're really valuable, and that we have the possibility and ease to be changing and fighting for better concepts when it's still possible, when it's still easy, when it's still cheap. Second of all, we are enhancing our greenlighting process because we want to be choosing only the best game concepts. Choosing a game is a very important part of our job, obviously. It requires a long-term commitment and investment. We have to be sure we're choosing the best ones. Another element, another change that we're introducing is a stronger presence of producers in our projects. Why? Because we want to be even better at managing the unknown. Development is hard. It's complicated. We need all hands on deck there.
Of course, an element we will not be forgetting about and we will be focusing on is growing our leads, growing our experts, growing or cultivating our know-how. Because we understand that this is truly where our competitive advantage lies. Now, to summarize our strategy that we've been talking about during this presentation, we will be working in three different product pillars. We will be focusing on games that we call relatable from now on. Those will mostly be single-player games, but with multiplayer and/or social elements. Our sweet spot for project size is around 30-60 people in development cycles that take around four years. Our XDEV division will be focusing on quality first, still indie size, but mechanically driven games. We've budgeted new signings. We have this wildcard budget for special occasions. We're introducing a series of organizational tweaks and changes inside of the company.
What is perhaps important and stays constant and the same as before is that we are keeping a very stable financial situation. We are still very responsible when it comes to budgeting. We cannot imagine operating and living without our operational and creative independence. We understand we might have to further grow. This growth is going to be stable. Now, the plan for the future in a nutshell. A lot of details. I will try to quickly drive you through those. First off, Frostpunk 2, as mentioned by guys right here. First off, three major content updates coming within a few weeks, followed by a console release of Frostpunk 2 later this year and DLC 1, as well as a free update that is going to be accompanying it still in 2025. In 2026, we are planning other two DLCs, DLC 2 and DLC 3, both again accompanied by free updates.
In 2027, which we do not know exactly what it is going to be at this particular moment of time, we are still observing how the game performs, how the DLCs will perform. There is a possibility that Frostpunk 2 will change into a platform game that we have explained a while ago. This has to be tested. This has to be proven. We have to see how it performs from now on. Next off, The Alters, a game that is going to be released very soon. That is a simultaneous release on three platforms, so PC and consoles all at once. We are also planning for a major update 1.1 before the end of the year. This will be followed by a DLC in 2026, around the middle of the year. What happens next? Again, we will see.
We'll have the market and the community guide us to how to further develop and expand this product. Another title, P12. This is something that we've been already hinting, although we've never explained what exactly it is. We want during this presentation, but we want to highlight that it's something that we were already working on. This is a project that's not virtual. It's already real. We're in a design phase that has already started, moving soon to prototyping, and then to all the other stages of production for pre-production first around beginning of 2026, and then jumping to production in 2027. This is a major new game that we're currently already developing. Two new titles, again, new titles planned to begin very soon, P13 and P14. P13 is a title that will be developed by the team behind Frostpunk 2.
We will be moving to pitching and design phase very soon, soon after the free content update for Frostpunk 2 starts. Actually, we already have some solid ideas of what that's going to be. Of course, they need to be sharpened. We need to pass the greenlighting process and then move to prototyping, start pre-production, and production somewhere in 2027. P14 will follow a similar process, although it's a little bit delayed in time for obvious reasons. Frostpunk 2 has been released already, whatever, half a year ago. The team is kind of ready to pick up the new challenges. While The Alters team is still working on finishing the game, then we'll need to be updating it, giving ourselves a bit of space before we start jumping into new pitches and designs.
I'm personally very excited to see what actually comes out of these two processes because we hope that they will be very, very important for the future of the company. What else? P11, which has today been decoded as Frostpunk 1886, this is our first platform game. Also, it's already being worked on. It's currently in a design and porting stage. This is a stage that has already started. We will be expanding and growing the team throughout 2025 to reach production size by the end of the year or very beginning of 2026. That is supposed to be a pretty quick production process with reaching beta and a launch window in 2027. This is possible because of, well, the type of a game Frostpunk 1886 is. That's not all. We also want to be starting soon another platform initiative, another platform game.
There's a solid idea behind this one, although the development has not started yet. We are planning on starting the design phase in the second half of 2025 and then again moving to production. This is also supposed to be a title that will represent our new platform approach. Naturally, this is not all. There's the XDEV division, which we've been commenting on a little bit earlier. There are currently three titles that we have signed: Moonlighter 2 with a launch window in the second half of 2025, Death Howl, which we've also been commenting about, very excited about this one, also planned to be released by the end of 2025 and the second half of the year. There's also a brand new signed project that's currently scheduled for 2026. We did not announce this one yet. We will not do so during this presentation.
We want to stress that it exists and that we will continue on bringing great games through XDEV. Naturally, this is not all. We have planned in our budget and our plans new slots for signing projects. On average, this will be probably two projects per year with the wildcard budget used every now and then for a special initiative. I cannot promise if it is going to be exactly two each year because it depends on the type of a game that we will be finding. We are quality-driven, which means sometimes we will find three exciting games a year. Sometimes we will find one. That is the average that we are targeting. That is the whole roadmap for just the upcoming three or two and a half years. There is a lot going on.
Those are very, very busy years ahead of us with a lot of games, a lot of initiatives, a lot of different actions that we have to start and perform in all of the three pillars that we've defined during this presentation. Our goal is to deliver those efficiently and flexibly. Now back to Przemysław.
Thanks, Marek. You already saw a lot, and I hope you liked it. What I want to add before I switch to the goal is that also what we showed for the first time, because you asked for that, we showed a lot of data for you for the future, how we look with our plans, what we are going to do, when we are going to do the stuff, and where we are. It's much more than what we showed before.
To add to that, before I go to the goals, let me tell you a bit about our financial expectations. When we look at this year, we have an expectation that our profit and income will be better than last year, 2024, even if we subtract all the deductions that we've made. We don't want to show more because we have a huge premiere before us. Plus there is this instability of currencies right now that can both affect us. Still, we have great expectations, and we believe that this year will be really awesome for 11 bit studios. Summing this up, like you saw a lot, a lot of games that we are planning, some new stuff you heard for the first time today. What's the goal? The goal is quite simple and summing it all up.
We really want to be the best independent studio creating many of our relatable games at once. This relatable element at once and many is very important. We have this experience. We can do many games at once. We have our agenda and our approach to our games. We have the team that has an experience for that. We just want to focus on what we do the best. We did a lot of that kind of games, and we want to do it more. Yeah, why four? What's four? Of course, to have a chance for a frequent huge success for us, for the players, and of course, for you, for the investors, while keeping all this innovative approach, while keeping our efficiency and being stable as a company. That's our goal. We totally believe in that.
Yeah, we talk a lot about the far future. What is going soon and very soon for you, just to bring us here to the current times, we will have the major update on May 8. That is very soon, very soon. Everything is finishing right now. We will have the media event in mid-May. You already heard that from Cookie. Of course, The Alters release, awesome game before us, very soon. Moonlighter and Death Howl will get demos very soon. You will hear about that. We will have new demo for Death Howl, even much better. Still, this one was very well received. You know that. Of course, Moonlighter release, of course, Death Howl release. We are starting that today, the board game second edition campaign, because the previous one was so well received. We believe that this one will be very successful too.
Almost the end, but there is the one thing, and not a thing, but this is one game. You know the game that we all love, that we all did once a while ago. We found a way on how to grow that. More info soon. We know how to do it. We'll talk later about that. Thank you, everyone, for the conference. It was a pleasure to meet you today and show you our plans. Let's switch to QA. Thanks.
OK, hello, everyone. Let us start the Q&A session. We will surely have questions both from here in the studio and online. I will do my best to accommodate each and one of them. We will start with the guests here at the studio. If anybody has a question, please raise your hand.
Then we will pass the mic to you and a small remark and request to make the question in English. Anyone? Please.
Yeah, hi, Tomasz Rodak, Dan Investments. Yeah, I just want to ask about this new project, Frostpunk 1886. I just want to make sure what it's going to be. Is it going to be some kind of, I don't know, remaster, remake of Frostpunk 1 with some new content, or it's going to be a completely new game, like a sequel to Frostpunk 1? And is it going to be priced regularly, like $30-$40 per game? Yeah. I can tell you about the game. I think Piotr can talk about the price point, but I'm sure we won't say what will be.
OK, so imagine there was Frostpunk 1 and the game that was, as Piotr told you, it's like 7 million players already have the game and love the game. We will take the Frostpunk 1. We will, of course, transfer it to Unreal for us to be able to grow it, have DLCs, updates, et cetera. We will, of course, redo the art, et cetera. It will be Unreal stuff. That is not all. We will add really a lot of new stuff to the game, like new purpose paths for the players, new laws, et cetera, et cetera. In a way, it will be kind of a mix. That is why we are hesitant to tell if it is like a remake or remaster. It is even called in a different way.
We'll add a lot to Frostpunk 1 for the players to see that this is, but we will keep the Frostpunk 1 as a base. This will be a base. The base will be Frostpunk 1. Imagine Frostpunk 1 redone, but with really important new stuff that we already have in the works right now. I know if it helps you, but it's Frostpunk 1, but like a new Frostpunk 1 in a way with new stuff. Piotr, I don't know if you can add more.
Yeah, yeah. As you said, it's like on the market, there is remake, remaster, and reimagination. It's closest to the reimagination. Of course, as Przemysław said, the main plot, we want to have the same.
We built up on the first Frostpunk, but there are some things that we could not add due to the engine limitations, timing limitations, things like that that we see the community wants. It is a combination of all of that. It is not a separate game per se, but reimagined is the perfect name. Regarding the price point, it will be a separate SKU. I am not sharing the price yet. That is something that we will have to test on the way. For sure, it will be a separate SKU sold separately, as you can imagine, probably with some discount for the owners of Frostpunk 1 because there is like a love letter for them for start. We want to engage them at the start.
Yeah, from what you said, it seems that it is going to be a separate game, a full-scale game.
Yeah, so it's like probably like eight, ten, I don't know, twelve hours of gameplay. If yes, how come is it possible that you can produce it within just two years?
It's like what Piotr already said. The story will be the same. It will be the same scenario, the same base mechanics. It's what Piotrek also said. It's a love letter already. We already have it working on Unreal, to be honest. It's working. Not everything is working already. The plan is to just, first of all, what was already said at the presentation, port it to Unreal. It's just already being done by the team. It's still like a small team, but it's growing substantially very soon. It's like we will port it, and then we will grow it, reimagine some of the parts of it.
We will keep the same scenarios, et cetera, et cetera. It is like we have the 70\30 you also saw. We will really keep the 70% of a game, of mechanics, of the setups, of the scenarios, et cetera, from Frostpunk 1 and work on that 30 as new stuff. That is why we are able to do it much faster with a small, even smaller team.
OK, thank you. If I may, just one more, more philosophical question regarding the debut of Frostpunk 2. If you were two, three years before the debut right now, what would you do? What would you have done differently? Or maybe not.
Yeah, philosophical question. Thanks for that. I will tell something else. I can distract for a second. You are seeing the Frostpunk 1886, 8986. We already thought about that more than a year ago already.
It's not something that we are doing some kind of, wow, we need to do that. We knew that more than a year ago. We knew more than a year ago from the tests, et cetera. We are doing a different game. We still have a huge fan base for the first game. We knew, OK, we are going to have those two paths. That is what Piotr showed in the presentation. We decided we will have two paths. One path will be for the more grand strategy kind of games. The second path that now we are growing in a way will be for the survival city builder kind of games. We are happy with that. It is still ambitious, but the IP is growing. That is not all, by the way, around the IPs. I think we are happy about that.
We could make some things better, definitely. At the end, we are in a place we are happy about. I think.
Thank you, Przemysław. Piotr, we will move to a couple of questions from the online public, starting with the first one. Should we expect the results for 2025 to be burdened by one-off events as well? Martin, could you answer that one?
Yeah, thanks very much for that, Gabriela. It's a good question and, of course, perfectly understandable in the light of the one-off events that we had in our 2024 financial results. What I would say is, from my perspective right now, I do not foresee any one-off events occurring in 2025. I would just add to that that the company, two times a year, does conduct impairment tests on all its titles. We will continue to conduct those tests.
Thank you, Martin.
Moving forward to the next question. You say that investments in the publisher will not exceed $1-2$ million per project. Is it possible to make a game for this amount, taking into account inflation? After all, every game you've released recently has been more expensive.
OK, I will take this one. Thanks for the question. First of all, the last sentence is not super correct because not all of them were more expensive. More importantly, what I said in the presentation about $1-2$ million, it's a sweet spot. We believe those projects exist in that sweet spot. We can create very good opportunities in that budget. It does not mean that we will not look beyond that budget. We can find cheaper games that can be also very great opportunity games and also larger ones.
We see more than 1,000 projects a year in our publishing division. We do a lot of research in terms of what games are being crafted right now by indie developers and what the future can bring to us. I'm not that worried about the budget limitations or the inflation at this stage.
Thank you, Rufus. Moving forward, should we expect any flat fee contracts similar to the Microsoft deal in 2025?
OK, I will answer that one. Not such a big deal, probably, because the Microsoft deal that we have signed was for Frostpunk 2, The Alters, Moonlighter 2, and Ava. It was a huge one. Of course, on the daily basis, me and my team are searching for any deals possible. We will soon have some smaller deals for some of the games that will be announced. That's it.
We have some new upcoming games. We have connections with all the partners. We will see what the future will bring.
Thank you, Piotr. Maybe one more online question before we give room to the studio again. What is the price of The Alters? How long will the game be?
We can finally tell that, I think. Or not yet. I do not know. Yes, it is $35. It is a very good price for that game, in my opinion. It should be very attractive for the players, especially with a 10% pre-order discount. How long will the game be? It is very long. It is like 25 hours to finish. For some, it is even longer. It is a very complex and big game. That is why we are very, very confident that it will be well received, especially after people playing the demo. People loved the demo.
They were very excited about the game. They have seen only a fraction of the game.
Thank you, Piotr. Back to the guests at the studio. Are there any questions at this time? If so, please raise your hand.
[Foreign language] ... Sorry, in English.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much.
Looking at your pipeline that you have presented and your core pillar and the new pillar, we are seeing five titles. Should we be thinking about your studio right now working on five games instead of three games in parallel? Starting from now, is it fair to assume that at some point there will be production of five games? I'll take this one. Or even more.
I'll take this one. This is a correct calculation. Yes, the short answer is yes.
If we include two titles that will be released both soon, Frostpunk 2, which is already released, and The Alters, but both will be supported, this makes it almost seven titles supported in a way in parallel. Two in post-release support, three new initiatives from the new game branch, and two new platform games. Yes, this is the target. This is what we're planning for. Yeah, that's the short answer.
OK, looking at your experience so far with those three titles in parallel, excluding the publishing segment, do you see any major challenges in growing the scope, not in the number of people to be managed, but in the number of the projects to be managed? Any risks in this area that you see or challenges?
Yes, of course. This is a challenging industry. Even with a single project, it can prove to be very hard.
I know we have a lot of experience now in managing multiple projects at once. I know not all of them have succeeded, but this is the reality of our industry. We can't guarantee everything will work out exactly as we want to. That is what we're fighting for. I think these past years have taught us a lot. We've evolved. We've changed some of our processes. We've changed our approach to titles that we have under our control as board. We've rearranged the team. We will continue to do so in the upcoming months. We think we are prepared. Of course, it's a challenge. It's a huge burden, even I would say. You've seen the map. You've seen the pipeline. There's a lot. We are here to fight with these challenges. We are here to deliver.
We think that it's an optimal and smart way to move forward for the company. We think we can handle that. We think we are better prepared than ever in the past to handle such a pipeline. The results? We will see. I think the beginning is very good. It's very good and very promising.
If I can add to that, I totally agree with, of course, what Marek said. To add to that, right now, we have more experienced directors. We have new directors right now that learn together with us. Some of those games will be less, not at that scale. For example, Frostpunk 1886, it's around 25 persons. It's not that every game will be the size of The Alters, like what we said already. Also, what is happening right now, it's like the past years was heavily growing in size.
Right now, we don't have huge plans for recruitment. Probably in coming years, we'll probably increase in around 30 people. In the coming years, when you just watch your show, we grew for around 60 people in less than two years. This will be much slower growth in the kind of number of people we have internally. What I want to say, we have right now a more experienced, better team. We have that team right now. We right now see how all of that will be divided. We believe in that plan we have.
One more thing I'll add, because I think it's also quite important. It's one of the solutions that we have for managing this complexity, is the fact that these games that are a little bit different, meaning, well, A, they have switched phases.
They don't all start at the exact same moment. They will not follow the exact same tempo, which means some projects will still be medium or small size, while others will already be bigger and require more time investment from our side and more managing. Also, not all projects will have the same development length, meaning that some will finish early to give us more space to finish the other ones. There is this extra element that we're considering here when it comes to the possibility of delivering all of that.
OK, thank you. I promised two questions. Maybe one more kind of follow-up. Making sure we properly understand this first pillar, the new pillar of platform games.
Basically, should our thinking about this pillar be that it's going to be kind of remakes or remasters of your previous titles purely based on those three IPs that you hold for now?
I can answer that one. We start with remaster. I hate the name of remaster because it's underselling what Frostpunk 1886 is. We start with that one. It's not something that will have to happen in the future. As Marek presented, we are already thinking, should Frostpunk 2 become a platform in the future? It's more about our approach to long-term development support, something that we didn't have resources and time to do with the first one properly after the third DLC. There was still a place on the market for the fourth, the fifth DLC, further updates of the Frostpunk 1. We didn't have a possibility.
We start with that remake, remaster. In the future, it can be a natural evolution of one of the titles as well.
Adding up to that, yeah, we will more or less pick some of our games from our portfolio and think of them as platform games. That can be one approach. Future games can be also platform games. That is it.
Thank you.
Thank you. Let's go back to the online audience for a moment. The next question will be, what will happen with the mobile game Frostpunk? Do you regret working with NetEase? Is there a chance for the company to make money from this project?
OK, we do not regret working with NetEase. Is there a chance for the company to make money from this project?
Yes, we already got profit from the project that, as I said on the presentation, I think two years ago, investor conference two years ago or three years ago, there are no costs on our side regarding the mobile version. It's on the NetEase side. We already received profit from that project. Of course, we're expecting higher numbers. It was a long shot for us. We are expecting better revenue coming from that project. The future is still important. Like all the mobile games, they tend to work slightly different than PC games, where there is a release. Then you cannot change the game. You cannot reach new players, et cetera, et cetera. In mobile world, it's different. That's what NetEase is doing at the moment. They are analyzing the statistics.
They are trying to rebalance things in the game, reach out to new players, acquire new users, et cetera, et cetera. They are also preparing for the release on the Chinese market. Hopefully, the future will increase the revenue stream coming from that project. The bottom line is that we already got the profit from that. It was worth it. Thank you.
Moving forward, do you have any ideas for mobile versions of your games on Switch 2? What about co-op? Lords of the Fallen recently showed that it can boost sales.
OK, sorry. Yeah, I can. The mobile versions of our games, yes. We are constantly thinking about that as Frostpunk Beyond Earth presented. As Moonlighter, that is added to Netflix, Moonlighter Mobile added to Netflix. This War of Mine Mobile, that was one of the best-selling indie games on Apple.
Yeah, we are absolutely thinking. We are observing what are the possibilities here. We co-released Children of Morta. We've played Digios as well. We are constantly thinking about the mobile and potential money coming from that market. Switch 2 and Switch, in general, yeah, naturally, we want to port our games to Switch when we see it will make sense money-wise. Same goes with Switch 2. Co-op, OK, that's a broader question for the future, I think. No plans at the moment to add any co-op to our games.
We mentioned that and promised to ourselves as well that we will be taking extra or investing extra energy in delivering social and/or multiplayer elements to our future games, which might result in that kind of mechanic in one of them. We don't know exactly yet. This is on the table.
We'll see how the situation evolves. Definitely, we understand the importance. We understand the reason behind this question. Exactly. We see the value of co-op. Absolutely.
OK, thank you both. Next one, how many premieres can we expect in 2026? The presentation shown only one. It was a new game from the publisher. Does this mean that the results will be much weaker one year from now on?
I can comment first on the releases. Yes, currently, we have one scheduled. The XDEV division is looking for more games. Sometimes these games are quick to go to market. There is still a possibility, we are in the first half of 2025, to find a game that will make it to the market in 2026. This is an open topic. Internally, we do not have other games planned for 2026 full game releases.
Please remember that we have DLCs planned. These DLCs are sometimes or often the size or even bigger than some of our publishing titles. They are not to be ignored, absolutely, and their results. Plus, what we have currently in the plan in terms of DLCs might be changing, might be a little bit more intense, depending on the performance of The Alters and the requests from the community. These DLCs, for sure, will keep on driving our sales and become the new initiatives that will start selling. I'll let Piotrek probably comment more on the sources of revenue in 2026.
I think there is nothing more to comment. I'm not sure I remember. I think that one of the best years in the history of 11 bit studios was the year we did not have any releases. Exactly that.
We'll have The Alters being monetized, Frostpunk 2 on heavier discounts, DLCs, all of that. Hopefully, it will be a very good year still.
2025 titles from XDEV being released in the second half of the year, which hopefully means they will still be very popular in 2026.
OK, thank you. Thank you to you both. That was the last question that we had time for during this investors conference. What I would like to say at the end is that it was an honor to host you here this year, both in the studio and online on stream. Should you have any additional questions that we did not have the time for, there is always the investors relations website. We are always eager to answer any inquiries. All that is left to say is thank you. See you next year.