It is high noon, so welcome to the conference call of Ten Square Games after the first quarter of 2025. My name is Andrzej Ilczuk, I am CEO of Ten Square Games, and joining me today are Magdalena Jurewicz, CFO, and Janusz Dzimidowicz, CTO. We have Nina Grabos with us as well, our IR and PR Director. Welcome. Two months have passed, only two months since we last met, but we are very happy about it, actually. We are happy to meet you again because a lot has happened throughout those two months. We are a success, but honestly speaking, we also had some failures on the way with some initiatives and with some ideas, but this has all led us to where we are now today. That is a search, a lookout for people who will help us to go through this major change in the market. Successfully.
What did it look like in terms of the process? How did it look like in terms of the process? What were we guided by throughout the past three months? We have been through several stages. Actually, for the three months past year, we have been through a lot of stages, a number of stages. It started last year. We, first of all, prepared a map of the market: who fares better, who is not that successful. Based on that, we have mapped our products that we feel are worthwhile to look at, look into, especially in terms of leadership. These products fare better than other products. Based on that, we launched the recruitment process, which included those products. We wanted to meet those people, to talk to them, to see what they do differently than we do. Based on that, we shortlisted a product.
We had a short list of products and people that we wanted to talk to and wanted to talk about. We launched the recruitment process, having something in the back of our head that is the gaps and competencies in our company, because each company, every company has some gaps in terms of competencies and skills, and so do we. We decided to fill in those gaps with our new hires. Again, we wanted to find people who are team leaders, who grow despite certain market trends and despite the segment trends, the people who are highly analytical in terms of their skills, who understand the segments that we operate in. This is something that you can learn, obviously, but the people who have already worked in similar segments with similar players, it's obviously difficult to find the same thing, but we're trying to do that.
We are looking for people who are hungry for success, not those who rest on their laurels or they actually. A major challenge to an organization. On the one hand, it is difficult, but on the other hand, it is highly interesting. It is difficult because we have new people, new talent, new hires. Some people have higher expectations. Some people look at things differently. A/B tests is a good example. We so far were not eager to test new features, so to speak, because we were afraid how players would react to that, to the fact that. We have new features. What makes us really happy is the fact that we have a number of similar products, and we can share our experience. Obviously, the changes will not be the same for Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash, but they will be similar.
This will shorten the time of those implementations of those upgrades, so we can test certain upgrades simultaneously. What we need as an organization is the, so to speak, support and time for the onboarding of the new hires, to combine those two worlds, to combine the two methods and ways of work. They are effective and efficient, but maybe in some other way than we would have expected. For instance, in terms of development of new products, the development of new products has changed over the years, and the management of games has changed over the years as well. Having new hires in the organization, the new talent pipeline that we can use, that we have already been heads of projects and the projects that were successful, we know that the decision that we have taken was the right one.
Now we need time to introduce those people, to onboard those people, to increase the, or actually raise the bar in terms of the standard and teamwork and the speed of delivery. These are all the works that we still can work on. Moving on to our products and the performance of our products.
As you can clearly see, we have reduced our marketing expenditure. What did we? That was one of the first decisions of our product officers. That is because after we have mapped our products and took a good look at our strengths and room for improvement, we noticed that a lot of features are built around the initial stages of the game.
As we all know, in the first seven to ten games, the revenue per instance is high, and the signals that we send to advertising networks such as AppLovin or Google, that's very fast. If we add bookings in these first seven days, if we improve retention, then marketing will work much better. If we look at the list of our initiatives, you will clearly see that there is a lot of room for improvement, and the team believes in it. That is why we spent, sorry, we reduced our marketing spending. When we feel the blood, when we see that these changes deliver results, then the marketing expenditure levels will be restored, or perhaps even will exceed the historical levels. Let me quickly comment on April.
In April alone, marketing expenditure affects our monthly performance, and this is surely one of the key reasons behind the month's performance. However, in April, in Hunting Clash, we also tested a new feature that's the bullets. We wanted to see if the main feature from Hunting Sniper works well with Hunting Clash, and the response was very negative. Our players did not like that feature at all, which was counterintuitive, but it also shows us that Hunting Clash or Trophy Hunter are completely different products, and the cadence of the content is greater. New locations appeared every 45 days, which also has a bearing on our revenues in our games. Now, let me move on to our A/B tests that we have done over the last months and weeks. Previously, we mentioned segmentation.
Segmentation is one of the major working blocks for us, and the first results showed a great uplift on lower segments of payers, but in higher segments, there have been essentially no changes at all. This is why the time we need to introduce certain things into the game is what it is. To some extent, we succeeded, but we want segmentation to work with all segments, to be positive across all segments of our players. If we look at the performance of the new segmentation in Hunting Clash, we also started doing the same thing with Fishing Clash, and it's starting to bud. This week, perhaps next week, we will tweak some features, but over the next two weeks, we should start full speed ahead with our A/B tests. We've also tested many different hypotheses recently.
As many of you must have seen, there's been some artwork changes to Trophy Hunter, major changes. That was. Now the game looks like a high-end product, and this is, well, the credit goes to the new people and the hard work of the whole team behind Trophy Hunter. They really did a good job, and the product looks fantastic. Interestingly, the visual changes also improved our other KPIs. The game is much better received now. Down that line, down that road, we focused on improving other products, including Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash. With that, we have our content, our event blocks, our difficulty, our first segmentation. This is all wrapped into one bundle of experience for each of our players.
Now, Wings of Heroes, as we've spoken recently, we are at a stage where we are making sure that the product is market-ready, and in six months from now, we will probably scale it up even further. We are happy with the progress, but the team needs another few months to fine-tune the product and to make it perfectly scalable. Once we are satisfied that the job has been done, we will relax our marketing benchmarks. They're very conservative now. Now, let me swiftly move to new developments. We have two games in the pipeline. Let me start with Real Combat Simulator. We will be taking new decisions towards the end of August. Right now, we are testing the game, adding new content. We are monitoring the reception among players. So far, so good, but probably somewhere towards the end of August, we will have more news to share.
When it comes to Trophy Hunter, we are currently talking to Google and Apple about the timeline. We will launch the global test towards the end of the third quarter, but featuring is not yet confirmed, so no commitments here about the dates. Once we confirm the dates with Google and Apple, then we will be able to make some commitments. Yesterday, as some of you may have seen, we had another update. We have in-game ads and a number of other improvements. We've heard questions about cannibalization between Trophy Hunter and Hunting Clash. As I mentioned, I spoke about the unsuccessful attempt to add bullets, so a feature from Trophy Hunter that we wanted to use in Hunting Clash. The test showed that Hunting Clash players really did not like that feature. The conclusion is simple.
When you look at how the games are designed, starting from whether it is vertical or horizontal, this may seem trivial, but picture this: you are on a bus or a subway. It is much easier to play vertical games. They are more casual, more accessible. Games like Hunting Clash need more time. You need to sit back on your sofa. You need to have half an hour, an hour to get immersed in the game. Those two games, the only reason that makes them similar is that you shoot animals, but underneath that layer, these are completely different products. We are not afraid of cannibalization, but the whole global test will give us more insights about whether cannibalization actually exists.
Moving on to the project that we are really happy about is TSG Store. Just TSG Store.
At the end of March, we reported the record-breaking level of bookings at 19% attributable to TSG Store. We are working constantly on the development of TSG Store. The latest additions include a complete redesign for Fishing Clash, so as to look for it to look better and feel better. This was received very well by the players. In Hunting Clash, we have introduced a special loyalty-based currency. This obviously increases engagement. We are working on optimizing the commissions from the commission providers. Last but not least, something that calls for more commentary maybe, at the end of April, we had the decision of the court in the U.S. The appeal was closed. The appeal process was closed. In the case of Apple Platform, they said that in Apple, we are free to promote some alternatives directly in the games.
This is an example for us as well. In May, after the May break, spring break, we communicated this to our players in the United States, and we have acted promptly, and we are keeping our fingers crossed now that we can advertise more broadly in the U.S. Obviously, the situation dynamic can change, but for now, our players were informed of this possibility. In terms of the percentage share, broken down into games and Fishing Clash, it's 26%. For Hunting Clash, we started a little bit later, so it's catching up, and now it is at 17.5%. We are keeping our fingers crossed that these levels will rise. Ladies and gentlemen, let's now move on to our financial results, what Andrzej and Janusz have said in a nutshell, in a big picture. We are closing the quarter with a downtrend in our bookings.
This was explained based on the performance of the games. In terms of revenue, the level is a little bit higher due to deferred revenue, and in this case, rebooking to P&L on the plus side. The next important item in our PLN is marketing spending, and we want to emphasize here that they were considerably lower than in the first quarter, and this translates into the level of Adjusted EBITDA closed at PLN 30.5 million. This is a solid EBITDA as a result, adjusted EBITDA result. Obviously, this would not have been possible had it not been for a strong cost discipline. Every spending is verified in terms of whether it is justified or not. We are trying to keep costs under control. In terms of our net result, net profit is much higher. Again, this is due to a number of drivers.
This applies both to higher EBITDA and lower financial costs. No write-offs, write-downs, and one-off events. This all added to our high performance on the net level. What we always emphasize when we talk about our business, we generate a solid EBITDA, and also this translates into solid cash flows. In quarter one, we reported a positive result here as well. We are closing the quarter with PLN 172 million in cash and cash equivalents. What about earnout? People ask. Earnout was paid in May, so we will have an outflow of cash in the second quarter, and the dividend will also be an important element that will be responsible for the outflow of cash in the second quarter. As a summary, we are a profitable company. We generate cash.
We are trying to look at the business from the perspective of a self-propelling machine, and we are able to work, invest, and run the business effectively and efficiently. This has not changed. Moving on to other important information, we want to emphasize that we have just had the general shareholders' meeting. A resolution was adopted on the payout of a dividend, so PLN 100 million will be paid out to you as our shareholders at the end of June. This goes in accordance with the plan. The other resolution that was adopted during the last annual general meeting was the confirmation of employee share-based payment. This is broken down into three tranches. This resolution has already been adopted, as I said before. We have two goals, financial goals.
This is the EBITDA, 80% of the weight, and the market goal that is outperforming the VIG index by our price, but the price of our shares. In terms of the numbers, the first goal, the financial goal, the three-year level EBITDA was supposed to reach PLN 438 million, and we have a minimum level to meet in order to ensure that shares are allocated partially. PLN 438 million is a figure that represents a 15% growth year on year, so 2025- 2024, 2026- 2025, 2027- 2026, and so on. Every year, we need to increase by 15% in order to reach 100% allocation in our financial or performance goal. This is the average goal, but we also have a minimum target. The minimum target is 5%. The average target is 10%. Obviously, we do not want to have that. We want the business to grow.
This is what we decided to build in terms of this program, assume based on this program. Nina, over to you. Thank you very much. What is ahead of us then and how we will communicate and when we will communicate our performance? At the beginning of July, as usual, we will give you the preliminary report and a current report on our performance. The report for quarter two and the first half of the year is expected to be published on the 25th of August. We are very happy to meet you all the time and answer all the questions. The next opportunity is going to happen in the Carpacci Wall Street Conference. We will be there, all of us. We will be very happy to respond to all your questions. We will meet institutional investors still this month in Warsaw at the conference, which is organized by ERST.
After summer holiday, at the beginning of school year, we will meet you courtesy of Bosch. We will need you to answer all the questions as well. Moving on smoothly to Q&A session. I would not like to repeat what we have said before. I believe that we will be able to answer all your questions to clear all your doubts. Let us start with the questions on your main flagship titles because we have a lot of these questions. Let me start by talking about the flagship games. Your rankings in terms of revenue for Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash are worrying. Fishing Clash went through a major upgrade, and the decision process is supposed to start in the second half of the year. That is for Hunting Clash. What about Fishing Clash?
As I said before and during this presentation as well, I repeated in both products in the fourth quarter of the year and the first quarter of next year, we actually worked on retention. We focused on retention, so we did not expect any fireworks for both titles. We fought for engagement parameters to improve them. Monetization itself was not at the heart of all those efforts. As I said before, in quarter two, starting with segmentation and the work that was needed in terms of the difficulty of the events and improvements of all the other parameters, this fits very well within the monetization efforts that we are engaged in as we speak. We do hope that this is a good answer to that question. All right.
Okay, we have a lot of questions about the key products, but all of them, all of those questions are related to the monetization of the flagship games and the decrease in monetization and its reflection in KPIs. A general question: when will the changes translate into more bookings? Will it be in the second quarter already? Why are the reductions in bookings or revenues so high? Let's start with marketing. Whenever we reduce our marketing expenditure by a few million, our cohorts are smaller, and this is noticeable in our revenues. Cadence of our content is another thing. When we extend the cadence by 15 days, we have less content in each new month. New content generates a lion's share of our revenues. Thirdly, live-ops. When we test new approaches, new events, this always carries some risk or another.
Last but not least, that's the new features. I'll take the bullets. At some point, we were so dissatisfied with the new feature that they did not want to play the new location at all. That is a risk you have to accept when you are a game developer. We borrowed a proven system from Hunting Sniper, and the players voted no. They did not like it. Sometimes you are so certain that you will succeed, and you fail even when you have a premium feature like this. Another question about Fishing Clash. When will you add new content to Fishing Clash? Will it be still in May? If I am not mistaken, we will be aiming for June rather than May. As we mentioned, the new content is very heavy, and there is this temptation to add it towards the end of the month to improve the month's performance.
I would not like to control our content in such a way to artificially inflate our revenues. We want to make smart moves. We want to launch new content in a smart way. We have to resist the temptation. It is not easy. If you look at the performance and when in the back of your head, you think about another million or two that you could earn. Thank you. A question about the ammo feature in Hunting Clash. Why was it so negatively received by the players? Do you have any other plans how to monetize the promising beast mode? Yeah, lots of ideas. We have never been short of ideas when it comes to creating our gameplay. The ammo system took us by surprise. We were 99% certain that this would be a hit, but the players actually did not like it.
I wouldn't like to delve too deep into the details. That would be oversharing. But we surely learned an important lesson. We drew important conclusions about Hunting Clash and Trophy Hunter. We are now certain that these are two completely different players, even though the target audience is similar. The players themselves are different. Thank you. We also have a request to repeat or re-elaborate on the reasons behind the poorer performance in key products in April. Number one, marketing. Less money spent on marketing. Each new cohort that is smaller generates smaller revenues. Cadence is longer. That would be the revenue side. New content usually generates most revenues, followed by marketing. The third reason is mistakes in live-ops. These are the three things that weigh heavily on our revenues from games. There is another reason, reason number four. It is not very common, but it is.
With things like the bullets in Hunting Clash, a new feature repelled players. Yeah, when you add up these four things, you come up with a poorer performance, as we did in April. Thank you. A question about Wings of Heroes. You seem to have some hiccups when it comes to in-app payments in the beginning of the year. Talking about Wings of Heroes, this may sound strange, but we're not looking at that game from the revenues perspective. In this product, we look at lifetime values, value curves, and how they change. We look at whether the new features improve that curve. If you look at April performance in Wings of Heroes, the battle pass that we were so optimistic about turned out to be poorer than expected in terms of performance.
We have a few observations why, and now we have to test whether this feature actually fits into the game. And if we tweak some of its components, can we improve its performance? And frankly speaking, I believe we can. To wrap it up, the most important thing is to drive the curve even further, to retain players as long as possible. When we move on to aggressive scaling, this will be very important for this product. Whether it is plus 200,000 or 300,000, it does not really matter now. If the curve grows by a few percentage points over the next month, that is what matters. Another question about Wings of Heroes, that is the company's plans about more marketing expenditure, scaling up the game. We are approaching the end of earnout for Rotros owners. What are the plans of the company?
This will be the result of the team's work. We expect that the product will be ready for scaling mid-year. Perhaps we will not relax the conservative marketing benchmarks from day one. We will do it step by step. We will increase marketing expenditure slowly, not to disturb the algorithms. We want the growth to be slow but steady. Whether it is going to be in January or March, hard to say now. It all depends on whether the team delivers the goals. Thank you. Now we have a few questions about marketing in TSG Group. That is a group of diverse questions, such as when will the lower advertising spendings affect performance? Where can we expect monetization offensive? Were marketing expenditures in April as low as in the first quarter, or perhaps in April and May, where you spend more on marketing?
Will that spending be greater in the second quarter? Second quarter, no comments on that. We do not comment on ongoing quarters in aspects such as performance or marketing. The monetization offensive has been launched already. The changes in our games, the A/B tests that are running underneath, some of our players must have seen them. This is already going on. As we mentioned, some A/B tests do not always conclude, and the gain is not immediately visible. Take segmentation. In lower segments, we can see considerable growth, but in higher segments, the growth is not there yet. We do not want to replace our segmentation here and now, for we do not want to give up on this major chunk without first achieving our objectives. We want segmentation to be effective in all segments, across all segments. We do not stop.
We will keep working hard. On top of this, a few other changes in our games, such as conversion, more bookings in the first seven days, the difficulty levels of our events. Some A/B tests show that there have been positive developments. It is too early. The problem with A/B tests is that they usually take weeks or even months to make conclusions. We are very happy that those tests are alive, that these changes are not ± 1%. Sometimes it is tens of percentages. Even if you cannot see those changes across all the segments, there is an abundance of life there, and we are very happy about it. The first results? I do not know. If the second segmentation test is successful, then segmentation is in the bag. If not, we will move on to test three.
It's so hard to say. With every test, we assume that it's going to work, but sometimes it does not. We work hard. We have dry runs that show us anomalies or pathology in those tests. If there are, then we make improvements. After two or three weeks, something else crops up and stops the A/B test from being as positive as we would like to be. Fishing those little things along the way is the most important thing because in the lower segments, we've been successful. In higher segments, we're still working hard.
Thank you. Another question about marketing from another perspective. Due to the trade war, did you see any downtrends in terms of commercial activity and activity in general in the United States and the related CPI drop? Is there a chance for upscaling maybe in terms of your marketing efforts?
Will you be expecting this to persist, or maybe it was just temporary? We do not see anything like that, actually. Maybe for single companies that decided to reduce their marketing spending. In general, in the U.S. market, this is not a noticeable trend. We will have some more questions, but not to the CEO. Let him rest a little bit. Let's move to TSG Store. We have a couple of questions on the Epic versus Apple case. How will the decision affect your expectations as to the share of your own store in your revenue mix? Did you already have you already reached the target for Fishing Clash, or maybe you will raise it? Let me remind you that our goal is to reach 25%, but it is not a one-off thing, one-off target.
We're talking about 25%, which should be a repeatable and reiterative target for both titles. We still have some room there in terms of our expectations and forecasts. We do not share any forecasts, as you know, but we will take every opportunity. We will tap into every opportunity to promote our store. As I said, next week after the revamping of the regulations for Apple, we will promote our store. Let me remind you that we also have a proceeding that is ongoing in the European Union. Apple was subjected to certain sanctions, and they need to meet the expectations and the requirements of the EU. We'll see what happens. If Apple revamps its policy in the European Union, we will definitely tap into that as well. Another question on TSG Store.
Do you have any plans to introduce Rortos games into your own store? Will it depend on the type of a game or maybe on a revenue level on a game? It depends on the revenue level. We have our benchmark. When Wings of Heroes reaches the benchmark, then we will see that game in our store as well. Thank you very much. We discussed big platforms, Apple and Google, but we also have a question on Google. Another question on Google. What is the timeline for the implementation of the privacy policy at Google? In terms of the new privacy policy for mobile platforms, invariably we have no news here. There were no updates. The official website does not share any updates. The last updates were published last year, so it looks dead, if I'm honest.
If anything happens here, we will comment on it. Right now, there is no information to share with you. A whole group of questions. Trophy Hunter. Let's start with the first question, which does not actually apply to the product itself, but product information. Will you have SP that will announce the global launch of Trophy Hunter? There is no information on the development of prototype and SP, so this is pretty frustrating for the investors. Ladies and gentlemen, SP has some requirements. We need to have this information, but it needs to be very specific in terms of how it affects the decisions of investors. We do not have that yet. SP is not a channel to promote our company, to use it as a marketing tool for the company.
The mere fact that something was released in a given market is not enough, and you should not expect it because this does not mean that one day we can have a revenue of PLN X million and we will sell that and that amount of our products. We do share that information with you. We have other means of communication, channels of communication that we use. We have a newsletter, we have Twitter, we have our game profiles in social media. This information is there. You can find it, but not necessarily through SP. A couple of questions on products specifically, Trophy Hunter. KPIs for this game, do they still outperform Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash or Fishing Clash, actually, at the similar stage of the game development? Let me put it this way.
We're looking at a product, especially a new product, from a very specific perspective. First of all, we need to have a scalable marketing framework. Secondly, the product must have a marketing framework that actually ensures returns in a specific time. Some offer returns quicker, some offer returns a little bit later. It depends on the product. When we have a small number of players, a product is very successful. We're talking about several thousand players from all around the world. We can have the so-called golden cohort, so a phenomenal performance for a couple of thousand players. In fact, we will see how it will look for a larger group of players, for a larger number of markets, and we'll see what it will look like for a larger pool. At this time, at the moment, it looks better.
It's even better than for Hunting Clash or Fishing Clash, but this is still a very small scale. Is it a blue ocean situation? How large is the blue ocean? We will probably be able to answer that question after the summer holiday break in Q3 or Q4. We will have to wait for us to see what the lifetime value looks like, the lifetime of a player, how much they spent, how the competition looks like, what it does look like when the number of players is higher. We will be able to take a decision whether or not the marketing effort is actually a good idea in communications. Therefore, we are pretty prudent, and we have been pretty careful because we are not talking about TSG games. A lot of companies, we are talking about a lot of different market players. We do believe in that product.
We believe in our team. The game has changed for the several past weeks, but it looks great now. It's a high-end product. The quality is fantastic, and we do believe that it stands a chance for success, but this will be verified by the market.
Is Trophy Hunter ready? Is it more of a demo product or a ready-made product? It is ready. Can you tell us more about the global launch of Trophy Hunter? Will it be backed with strong marketing, or will it be the strategy we saw with Mix of Heroes, the step-by-step scaling? The beginnings are always the same. We are very careful because we need to have a large sample of players, and we need to see how they behave, whether they stay or leave at what stage problems arise.
This is the first moment when marketing expenditure should grow as long as the game is well received by the players. We do not want to launch the game and spend millions on marketing. Our marketing budgets usually respond to the game's performance and whether the game is popular with the players. We want to be common sense about it. We try not to burn our money. The announced global launch of Trophy Hunter, will it increase the team behind it to deliver more content? Have you increased the team after the last conference? The team is more or less the same size. Will we need more people? Again, time will tell. If the content shortage is the biggest concern, then we will increase the team. When we have a larger sample of players, then we will know for sure what the game needs.
Maybe we'll need huge meta features or more advertising placements or more content, more live-ops, and so on and so forth. With that sample, we will identify our directions for development, just like we did in the past. Maybe we'll have more social aspects in the social layer. Once players start populating the game, we will test different solutions. What we think is not the most important thing. The most important thing is what the players will tell us. If they like our features, great. If not, then we'll change them. What we think doesn't matter. We have to respond to the players' needs. If Trophy Hunter is unlike Hunting Clash, so it's definitely unlike Fishing Clash, aren't you afraid about your lack of experience in casual games? So far, you've specialized in mid-core games. No, we're not afraid.
As of now, what we can see now and the reason for concern. We do not want to come across as stress-free. We keep consulting these things, things such as ad monetization or user experience management in the first couple of days. We are prospecting the market for this know-how. In a couple of months from now, we will be smarter. If there are any skills gaps identified, we will fill them in. If the product performs well but needs some fine-tuning, then we can handle that. Farewell. Questions about another prototype being developed by Ten Square Games. What are the KPIs of Real Combat Simulator right now? If it is based on Real Flight Simulator, will the launch come earlier than in Trophy Hunter? Less than 12 months.
We have two ideas of how to approach this game, and in the months to come, we will know which way to go. I have to leave you with this. Hopefully, in August, we will be able to tell you more. There is a universe possible where this information will not be available in August. We are testing two different hypotheses, and we will see what happens. The feedback from the players will tell us which way to go. The players will vote with their money, with the time they spend in the game. Thank you. Another question about GameShare. What GameShare product is the most promising and why? What GameShare is now working on new products? When you look at that company, when we look at that company, we keep hoping for a killer product that will drive them forward.
As of now, that company is not losing money. It's actually saving a bit of money. We've walked a long way from the stage where it was capital-intensive. Now, new game ideas have to grow, mature, and turn into scalable products that generate more revenues. We are still at a stage where we are looking for a major idea for itself. Thank you very much. We also have a series of questions about dividend and what the company does about it. The first of those is as follows. More and more Polish companies pay dividends quarterly or every six months. Do you consider this in the future? It's quite stressful to wait 12 months for dividend payout. Perhaps not this year or the next one, but I can't say that never, ever.
We can think about it, but dividend payouts are subject to lots of regulations and limitations, including those in our articles of association. It is not something that we can decide on today. Not this year, but perhaps at some point in the future. Another question. Dividend payment in 2025 for the company's performance in 2024 and the previous years. The question is as follows. Do you think that paying such a high dividend is reasonable? Could you think of a better way to spend that money? Acquisitions, new products, buyout of shares from the market? A suggestion. Perhaps you could divide the profit into dividend, prepayment for dividend, and share or stock buyout. Would it be a good idea? Have not you thought about it? Trust me, we have heard so many comments saying that this is the best possible dividend or payback.
There are many different perspectives, but we always decide on what's the best for the company. If you think, if someone thinks that we pay too much, let's look at the end of March, PLN 170 million, and the dividend will be paid as of the end of June. PLN 100 million is acceptable. We still have enough cash to pay for our operations. We are safe, and we generate cash every quarter, and we share this cash with our shareholders. Last year, we had a payback, which is pretty much equivalent to dividend payout. In this way or another, we share the cash with shareholders, and we want to do that because we have enough money to sustain our operations, and PLN 100 million dividend will not change that.
When it comes to the way we want to grow, this dividend payment does not mean that we do not want to grow. Let me give you an example. We keep hearing that prices are low in the marketplace. Bankers tell us about the benchmarks of most recent transactions. This does not mean that prices are low in the marketplace. When we speak to possible acquisitions, it appears that when we calculate EBITDA for tens of years, it seems that we have two different worlds. In one world, people do not want to reduce the price. They keep believing that they can succeed themselves. M&A transactions are always highly priced. I would not say that you can buy companies at a bargain price. Perhaps in other segments, there are those diamonds in the rough, and transactions like this may happen here and there.
In our target area, this is not happening. Some companies really expect exorbitant money for their own shares.
Also, talking about outflows of cash from the company, I am sure that we have a number of people representing from various banks. We could talk to them, and if we needed capital injection to finance a certain M&A transaction, I am very sure that 90% of those banks would be very interested in helping us finance the transaction. The capital injection is not a problem. The problem is that, as I said, market caps, valuations are horrendously high, or that companies are not ready to be involved in an M&A transaction. We are waiting, keeping our fingers crossed, but we are looking at the market, but the situation is what it is. Last question on profit development, sorry, the distribution with the shareholders.
What made you change this decision from buyback to dividend payment? During one of the last conference calls, you said that you would recommend payback as the best way to go. As I said before, let me repeat it again. We assume dividend or buyback. This is not a change of our previous decision. We will go with the flow, adjusting our decision to the current situation. Payback was made and recognized in February. The dividend is usually paid out in June or July. You asked about maybe a quicker dividend payment because you do not want to wait for a year. You know, as I said before, we have some ways to go, some decisions to take. These are all valid. Let me go back to what you said, the CEO said about potential acquisitions. This question has come up as well.
Has anything changed in terms of potential acquisitions? Why don't you have any acquisitions right now? We don't want to do it because we don't want to pay on ten-year EBITDA. This would be unreasonable. If we decided to go for such a transaction, then you should go to the prosecutor's office and report it. We do not do it. We do not recommend it. Of course, there are some companies probably somewhere that are really interesting and attractive. So far, we don't see them. The will is there, and if it's reasonable, we will go forward with a plan. As I said, it takes two to tango. We have some questions on the new hires, but also concerning the people who have been with the company for a long time. A question directed to Magdalena Jurewicz specifically.
First part of your name, last name. Are you in any way related to the founder of the company and the majority shareholder? This is Mr. Maciej Bobowicz.
This is no secret. It's my brother. It does not have any impact on the company's performance. It does not have any impact on how we manage this company, how we run our business. Please stick to performance business-related questions only. Thank you. Speaking of people, human resources in the company, and new hires, we have a number of questions on new specialists that joined TSG, new talents that joined the company at the beginning of the year. What is your assessment of their work and what are they working on currently? Can you, as a management board, evaluate the effect of those works and show how it contributed to the game's performance?
I have had this conversation. I talked about it a week ago with Diane and Klaus. The very same conversation. I'll just repeat what we talked about. My takeaways and their takeaways from this discussion. What we managed to achieve, and this, I believe, is the most important part of the change. It looks like our organization is more and more effective in terms of how we tap into their experience. This is the most important and the most difficult part of this process, the human factor, how to onboard new people with very high expectations. Sometimes they ask a lot of questions, but sometimes we feel that they tell us that our business might not be the prettiest one, so to speak. This is not true.
The human factor here and the way they were received in the company, we can evaluate it after a couple of months, and it is a positive evaluation. This makes me very happy because sometimes the onboarding that goes wrong can be really a source of a failure and unwillingness to accept the new hires. I believe that we are over it. Secondly, the changes that affect our product-specific work. We see a major change in the pre-production, pre-development process. The way we select or pick ideas, how we evaluate them, how quickly can we evaluate them, how we work with them in order to make sure that an idea translates into reality. This change is a breakthrough change. I would say that it's the major change in the process and the most important development in the process. Analytics is also important.
We see that there were some things that we turned a blind eye to or just did not notice. Very quickly, in the first two or three months, we were able to identify them. This is really interesting. We can look at certain things from a very different angle, and you can identify many interesting attractive aspects. I would not like to drop any examples here. This is very specific information, but our product team was really reinforced, and we, as the management board, directors of the business at the helm of the company, see that the quality of product work improved or has improved considerably. Can we now evaluate what will be the actual impact of that work on our performance? I believe it is still too early to do that. We are still in the implementation phase.
We are still in the process of combining the DNA, our DNA and external DNA. We have the first initiatives that we have already launched and the way we approach them, the way we fight for them to be successful. It is a brand new level, frankly speaking. We are very happy with the change. As I said, two months have passed since our last meeting, last conference call. It is very difficult to evaluate the situation after such a short period, after one reiteration. We cannot really say that we have, yes, we have an enormous win here. All right, thank you. We need to wrap up. We have a number of questions still. I do hope that I did not skip any question, but if I did, please send it over directly to me, and we will try to respond to that question as well.
The next question is about Fishing Clash 2. Any news about it? Any works underway? No, sorry, no comments about this. I am not authorized to give you any comments about Fishing Clash 2. Another question. TSG Store, what is the share of revenues from VIP players? This is confidential, unfortunately. We do not want to share this with our competitors, so we do not disclose such details. Are you planning on returning to China? Right now, we are not working in that direction. So far, we have suspended all those efforts. We will see what the future brings. Can Apple affect negatively the monetization of your games? They could do damage to you to the benefit of others. No one really knows how Apple or Google algorithms work. Only insiders know that. The world has seen it all.
I'm not expecting this, but I won't be surprised with anything in the free-to-play market. I think this is a reference to the Epic story. The whole gaming market in the U.S. has taken the opportunity. I don't think we will be punished more than other game developers. Yeah, as Janusz said, if they wanted to punish anyone, to give an example, Epic is exactly the story. Epic was punished for stepping up, and now the focus would have to be 5,000 game developers. We don't have any problems with our revenues from Apple. Question about foreign exchange differences, revenues in euros or dollars. Are they also going down in the first quarter? What's the effect of foreign exchange differences? We are an exporter. If the exchange rate goes down, then our revenues go down as well. 40% U.S., 40% Europe.
Yes, we suffer from foreign exchange differences, but the same is true about our expenditure. If you look at the financial notes, you will find the details, but we cannot express the actual figure when it comes to the effect of foreign exchange. The last question, a historical question, so to speak. Could you explain the arguments behind killing Deadlander or Fishing Masters? Did you choose to do that because the KPIs behind these games were poor, but then picked up, but not enough, or perhaps they were just not performing well? What was the reason? This is true about every our product. Whenever we launch a game, it has to be easily scalable. What does that mean? When we increase our marketing expenditure, the CPI must not grow too much. Secondly, the game must be able to retain and monetize players.
There have been millions of games that retain players but do not earn money. It has to be scalable. It has to earn money in this way or another. In the beginning already. The players that we attract have to be ready to spend money. If those two conditions are true, then we develop the game. Whenever we play a game, even if we like it, we are not always ready to pay for it. We have to filter our individual bias. We want to aim at games that attract players who are ready to pay. This is why we gave up on these two products. Perhaps in two or three years, these products would start bringing money in, but maybe not. At the time of taking the decisions, they were not scalable enough and were not profitable enough.
One more question we have to respond to dispel any doubts. The question just follows: Have you been contacted by Synthelia Family Foundation recently? Added to the register of shareholders. And that foundation is associated with CD Projekt. If you're interested, please differentiate Synthelia Family Foundation from Synthelia Foundation, period. You can check the details online. Family foundations are not that easy to look up. You can't do that online, actually. You have to go physically to a certain court. These are two different foundations. One of them is a family foundation. The other one is not. You can easily see which one is which. Thank you very much. We have been with you for 75 minutes, actually. We have to finish now. If you still want to ask your questions, or maybe you did, but we missed them, please contact us.
Please write those questions to me directly. Thank you for your attendance and hope to see you next time.