Hello. Good afternoon. Welcome to Q1 2021 Results presentation of Ten Square Games. I'm Maciej Zużałek, CEO of Ten Square Games.
Hello. I'm Wojciech Gattner, Chief of Product Strategy.
Hello. Marcin Chruszczyński, CFO.
Anna Idzikowska, Chief Growth Officer.
Hello. Andrzej Ilczuk, Chief Production Officer.
If we can start with a few highlights for Q1. I think there's three key areas we've been focusing on in the business. First of all is the performance of our games and also getting them ready for the next phase of development. We had a very good Q1, we think, especially given the fact that the year 2020 was a year of excellent growth. We think that during that year, the business has grown probably faster by about 18 months, we think, versus what it would have done normally if there was no COVID. That's been all great news for us. We scaled up, but we have a very high base for the future growth. Despite that, we have a lot of faith in the future of our product. A year ago, we had one product that was pulling the entire company, that was Fishing Clash.
If you look at the performance of Q1, Hunting Clash, our second Clash title, is already 20% of Fishing Clash in itself. We've been focusing a lot during Q1 on thinking, discussing, and working actually on scaling up the teams and thinking about how we can grow in the future. The Fishing Clash, the way we see it, is that the product is coming from a high growth, and it will have a stable, maybe slightly declining performance over the next few months, but we then believe it will stabilize and then go back to growth over the longer term. Hunting Clash is at early stage. We've invested a lot in marketing in Q1, and this product will continue to grow. There's lots to go for in terms of production feature. The second area of work was some serious product decisions we've been preparing for.
A very important thing is we came up with a new game. Fishing Clash has been all ready for us, not for us, but for the players, is one of the top three sports games worldwide. We've been iterating with moving into sports with other products. Football Elite is our new sports product, and Wojciech will talk more about this product. The second product decision we've taken recently, and we were debating it during Q1, is the decision to discontinue Golf Royale. It's a highly competitive segment of golf today. We have lots to go for within TSG, and we decided to stop this development and relocate teams to places where we believe there's more value to be created for TSG. The third pillar is an ongoing work at TSG in preparing for the next phase of development. There's a great opportunity ahead of us.
We've increased the team by about 50%, and that's something that we've been working on across the organization to be able to further scale up the business. We'll talk more about it, and I hand over to my colleagues, to Wojciech to talk about our new product.
Okay, our new game, that was technically launched a few weeks ago, is called Football Elite. It's a beginning of our, let's say, further sports journey. We want to create a game that joins strong social mechanics, with a lot of competitiveness and a lot of slot mechanics as well. We believe that American football is a great theme. We did a lot of research on that, we will have a roughly target of 150 million that plays or watches this sport. For us, it's a very huge potential, and it opens up a bright strategy for developing further into the sports genre. I will just talk a little bit about the production of this title. Basically, in the incubation period, we did a lot of research. We did a lot of internal pitching and discussions.
We created a few prototypes. Those prototypes that scored the highest in our ratings were moved forward to the next stages. Based on that, we decided to do the American football. Once we started the production, it took only seven months to create this product, so which was the fastest in Ten Square Games history. In May, we launched the title in the United States. Right now, we are gathering a lot of data. We are, of course, polishing the game. It's still the early stage, but we want to really create a strong franchise. We plan to soft launch the title on broader markets in second half of this year. I can maybe add a little bit more about the mechanics that we will add there.
We want to use all the knowhow that we gained in Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash, and combine it with the slot mechanics. We really believe that there will be a lot of synergies in that genre. In this very moment, there is not too much competition. The other news is that we decided to discontinue the Golf Royale. The competitive landscape changed a lot in the recent months, with new titles arriving every month. We found ourselves, I would say, cornered with our feature set, and we decided that pursuing something new in this Golf genre is almost impossible, and we were around 12 months behind the curve.
We decided that we can spend the resources much better in different projects, especially where we want to grow the teams of Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash, and that spare capacity will help us grow in more efficient way. This slide, as Maciek said before, with the COVID situation, we accelerated our growth, in our estimations, by around 18- 24 months' time. It was an exceptional year. We reacted quickly to the market situation and to the market opportunity. We can see that right now we have the stable with a small decline of revenue in Fishing Clash that should come back to growth in six to nine months' time.
If I may just reiterate on what happened with Fishing Clash and what happened with the roadmap, we had the strong feature offensive in 2019, 2020, that we could capitalize on with the extra marketing spend. Right now, we are in the phase where we want to boost up our technology, when we want to boost up the production capacity. We have basically a very big bag of ideas and the features, and this capacity will help us create those features to the highest standards, to the highest quality, and in the fastest pace.
Let me continue now the summary of Fishing Clash with more detailed information and data related to bookings and marketing expenses in the first months of 2021. As you can see in the slide, we were increasing the marketing spend for Fishing Clash in the last two months, in March and April. Actually, the marketing spend in April was the highest since October 2020. To summarize the first quarter of 2021 versus the first quarter of 2020, we went up by 55% with our bookings. When we compare to the fourth quarter of 2020, we decreased by 15%. Regarding the marketing spend, we went up 23% versus Q1 2020, so before COVID, and we were on a stable level of marketing spend.
When comparing Q1 2021 to Q4 2020, it was a slight decrease of 2.5%, but as I said, we started increasing the budget starting from February again. Yes, we feel that we have very strong, high-quality cohort performance. Yeah. Thank you for this one. Let's continue with the numbers for Hunting Clash, the second biggest title in our portfolio that is already contributing to profits, to Ten Square Games profits just eight months after its global launch. The story for Hunting Clash is that we increased the bookings in Q1 2021 versus Q4 2020 by 118%, while we increased the marketing spend in the similar period of time by 100%. We have a good traction. The curve is optimistic, and we are increasing our involvement into the title. We see that the growth of bookings is dynamic.
It's supported by significant marketing budgets that went up significantly, as I said, between the first quarter of 2021 versus the fourth quarter of 2020. I think the big message here is that the game is already contributing to the profit of Ten Square Games. Here I would just like to confirm and repeat what Maciek already said. We see the increase of Hunting Clash is very stable, very solid. When it comes to bookings, in Q1 2021, it was already 20% of what was achieved in terms of bookings in Fishing Clash in Q1 2021. When it comes to marketing spend, it's already around 75% of what we've been spending in Fishing Clash in 2021 in the first quarter. We are investing a lot into this title, and we are planning to keep on investing into the title in the next months. Thank you.
Yes. From the product perspective, Hunting Clash is still early on in the growth path. Yes. We have a lot of features to add in the upcoming months. It's still a lot of low-hanging fruits that we want to pick up. There are still few sure bet features that will be taken from Fishing Clash that will help the product grow. We want to optimize on the Live Ops. We want to optimize the game on the UI, UX. We will do a lot of matchmaking, improve the matchmaking system, and the other features that are on the roadmap are Battle Pass, seasons, new power-ups, new gameplay modes. To put also a different perspective, as I said before, as we see, Fishing, it's not a fishing game. It's a sport game. Hunting, we don't see that our target group is only hunters.
This is like, if we look at the charts, it's right now in the U.S., the fourth largest first-person shooters, and our aim is to grow even further.
As we are growing, we really believe in long-term. Currently, we are focusing a lot on growing our teams. Right now, we are focusing on the technical improvements, but also on scaling up the teams. As of right now, when we look at Fishing Clash as an example, we are combining Golf team with Fishing team and adding extra 20%-25% of capacity to the team, making sure that the features and the content is going to be produced in a quicker manner. This is also very important for us, if we look at the future of our products, that the teams are delivering more content and more features to our players, that the games are interesting for them. We are creating another forever franchise in Ten Square Games.
What is also very important, and I have to add it, our roadmap is very packed. We see that for the next 12 months, there is a lot of things we need to deliver to our players, and make our games even better. If we look at our legacy portfolio, we see a very nice trajectory. The games are still making historical records. We see that the teams are doing a great job. We increased the revenue year-over-year by over 27%. We see that these games are going to hopefully last forever. When we see the diversification of our products, we can see an increase. Currently, Fishing Clash is less than 80% of our bookings, which is, again, a very good news.
Hopefully our other products are going to be growing even more, but we make sure that we don't forget about Fishing Clash.
It's time for a quick recap on the financials. To summarize what has already been said regarding the specific titles, this slide summarizes the bookings in total, consolidated bookings in total per month. In all months of 2021, the monthly bookings were at the level of slightly below or around PLN 60 million, with the exception of February, when they were significantly lower. That's mostly due to the 28 days in that particular month. As for a geographical breakdown, we can see a gradual increase in the importance of the North American market, with North America accounting now for 45% of total bookings in Q1 this year, comparing to slightly over 40% similar quarter previous year. A major reason for that is the growing importance of "Hunting Clash." In "Hunting Clash," we had 62% of players coming from North America in Q1 2021.
Considering the trends that we can see in our products, we can imagine that the market share of North America might be still increasing in the future.
As for the cost analysis, we have seen a gradual increase in the operating expenses over the past couple of quarters, which is obviously due to the fact that our team has been growing strongly throughout 2020 as well as in 2021. This increase mostly is visible within production teams, hence the increase of cost of services sold is the largest one, as well as the marketing team, which we can see in the selling costs, while the increase in the supporting functions is slower than in the production-related functions. As for the selling costs, we can see an increase in the selling costs as a percentage of bookings, especially in Q1 2021.
There's one major reason for that, namely the increase of importance in Hunting Clash. Hunting Clash is a game at an early stage, so obviously, the margins we get on Hunting Clash are significantly lower than on, for example, on Fishing Clash. To give you the numbers, in Q1, we had PLN 1.5 million of the gross margin on Hunting Clash on PLN 27 million of bookings, while the margin on Fishing Clash was PLN 70 million on PLN 131.5 million of bookings. Obviously, while the importance of Hunting Clash grows, and in the initial stages of the game it only generates small margins, then the percentage of selling costs as a percentage of booking goes up.
Regarding our profitability in terms of Adjusted EBITDA and net profit, we see the Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of bookings as slightly deteriorating from 40.5% in a similar quarter last year, 33% in Q4 2020, and to 38.5% in Q1 2021. The two major reasons for that have already been mentioned. The first one being Hunting Clash and its growing importance in our product pie, and the other one, that Andrzej was also talking about, that is the investment of growth that we've done over the past quarters. That is the increase of the TSG team. As for the net profit, because of these non-cash items that we have, that is the share-based program as well as deferral of revenue, this KPI is a bit, let's say, detached from our actual performance.
You see the decline in Q4 last year and the increase in Q1 this year. We see the net profit going up by 50% as compared to a similar quarter last year. The high profitability we have mentioned that we had also in Q1 obviously translates strongly into the operating cash flows. We had PLN 50 million net after tax operating cash flow this year compared to slightly below PLN 30 million in Q1 the previous year. The percentage how EBITDA translates into cash flow remains on the similar level of roughly 77%. As for the balance sheet structure, no surprises or no new items here. The balance sheet structure has been reflecting our performance over the last couple of quarters. The major item on the balance sheet remains the cash that makes up roughly 75% of our total assets, similarly to the previous quarter.
Here I would like to say a few words about the share-based scheme that was approved in April this year by our Supervisory Board. This motivational scheme has been set for two years, 2021 and 2022. The Supervisory Board approved the Adjusted EBITDA, which is the target that has to be met in order for the scheme to be effective. For this year, the target EBITDA is PLN 249 million, and the next year, slightly more, that is PLN 251 million. In this scheme, the management or the company can issue up to 100,000 of new shares, which over this two-year period can result in a maximum dilution of 1.37%. What is important to say or to add is that the shares are locked up, so they cannot be sold by the employees to which they are granted.
The lock-up is until January 2024 and 2025, respectively, for those two years. The number of employees that is to be covered by the 2021 program and 2022 is 16%. 16 people, sorry. Obviously, for 2021, there can be some additions of employees to the program. One thing that is not on this slide is that the total non-cash cost of this program in Q1 that we booked in our P&L is PLN 5.7 million, of which PLN 3 million is charged to cost of sales, PLN 1.4 million is charged to selling costs, and PLN 1.3 million to G&A. The last slide covering the financial part is the management board proposal regarding dividend and also share buyback.
Management board has proposed to the annual general meeting, and this proposal has been backed by our supervisor board, that the company pays roughly PLN 73 million of dividend, that is PLN 10 per share, having a payout ratio of 48%. Obviously, we had some discussions regarding the dividend amount because, on one hand, we've generated lots of cash, including the PLN 50 million in Q1 2021 that I mentioned before. On the other hand, it is still possible that we would perform some M&A transactions later this year, for which we would obviously need cash. The right choice that we think we've made is to propose the PLN 10 or PLN 73 million in total of the dividend, with the dividend date to be proposed of July 5th of this year.
Another proposal that we had on the same day actually, was to allow the management to exercise a share buyback option. We, as the management, we see that if we had the opportunity to buy back some shares on the markets, that might help us in possible M&A transactions, future M&A transactions. We might be able to use such option, especially if there are bizarre or unjustified downwards trends in our share price. Obviously, the focus of the management remains on creating, developing, and enhancing the mobile games. That is the primary objective of what we do. We propose to our shareholders to open such option to enable the buyback whenever it would be needed. Thank you.
Thank you, Marcin. Okay, coming back, the summary of Q1 from management perspective. The number one is the performance of Q1 in itself. I think the way to look at it and the way we feel about it is, if we compare it with Q1 last year, the business has grown about 70%, and that's a very good progress. We have the base of 2020, exceptional year, and from that point, we're very much focused in Q1 on actually working on further building up the business. At the core of our interests are to our core games, Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash. We're working on both. We've taken the view that there's so much to go for in these games that we decided to increase teams in both cases.
If you compare Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash, we'll see if we can get as far as 90 people per team from currently 55 and 36 people in Hunting Clash. Fishing Clash is done at the back of the roadmap that we have, so is Hunting Clash. We think both have good potential to develop in the future. These are our core engines, and we will work on them to get the maximum that we can get out of these two products in sense of enjoyment for our players, but also, the revenue and profits for the company. The second topic was new development. We obviously are looking into the future. The Football Elite is a great move for Ten Square Games. I think we're stepping outside of fishing, moving into sports category.
This is very early days, but we have a lot of hopes for that. Not forgetting about our other products that are being developed in Wrocław and in Warsaw currently. There's been lots of work undergoing. Wojciech will talk a little bit more about it, but we are very busy with new development. The third element is we think we've built a lot, Ten Square, and there's lots to go for. If I was to use a sports analogy, free-to-play mobile space is 10 years old now, but it still feels like we're playing at the end of quarter one. There's three quarters to go for. We're gearing up for the next quarter, and we know we need to strengthen. It's a highly competitive market. There's a few companies, several companies, fighting for top positions in the gaming rankings.
We want to stay among them, and that means also investment. We found fantastic people that joined TSG over the last 12 months.
interesting candidates that we believe we can bring to the company and help us develop it further. That's been a focus of Q1 for us. Andrzej?
As of right now, we are seeing that up until the end of the year, we will be probably 500 people plus. We are highly focusing on making sure that our flagship teams, both Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash, are going to strengthen their teams. That we will increase the production capacities, both feature and content-wise. This is our goal up to end of the year, and that's about it.
Okay. I wanted to present the show recap of what's our new production pipeline at this very moment, so we are all on the same page. Basically, our biggest, let's say, title in Wrocław studio is Undead Clash. The production is accelerating. Let's say, I would call it on full steam. Everything so far goes as planned. We are very happy with the production progress and with the feature pipeline and already the features that we already developed. We test a lot of builds with our test players. The soft launch is planned on the verge of 2021, 2022. It all depends on some details. It's going to be, as we mentioned on the last conference, a zombie shooter with a clash metagame. The other title, Football Elite, we just technically launched it, but there's still a lot of work in front of us.
We want to really invest in this project. We want to gather as much data as possible. We want to use all our skills in BI and machine learning and game design, to develop this game to the highest market standards. We plan to soft launch this title later this year. Another project in Wrocław is Project Verne. It's still very early phase. We create a lot of prototypes. We try different clash meta, with different variations. We test those builds with some focus groups. We do a lot of market research. Basically, the soft launch will depend on some of the results of those research. Also on our, let's say, capacity, as we want to boost up the Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash teams first. In Warsaw, we have two projects, Project Tokyo and Project Osaka. The one is in the production phase.
We plan to soft launch it by the end of this year. Project Osaka is a product in the pre-production. We also carry out extended market research, player insight, and once we are happy with those results, we will start the production phase. The soft launch, I believe, will be not this year. It's going to be 2022. Thank you.
Okay, just a summary on where are we strategically. This is the summary of our strategy pillars. It's about Wrocław hub, spokes, and M&A. We've announced the current strategy about a year ago, and just looking at the progress we've made. We are very focused in Wrocław on doing and building a portfolio of games that are deeply rooted in the DNA of Wrocław team. We now have two Clashes year on. We're working on the third one, and that's very, very important. Super exciting for us to be able to actually work on building a family, which is built at the back of the core know-how of TSG. We moved outside of hobby niche into sports because Fishing Clash is a sports game. We understand the competitiveness that is required for sports games. We have one more potentially very interesting title in early stage of production.
That's for Wrocław. We're increasing teams. We're building that capacity in our hub. As for the spokes, Warsaw is working at full speed on two titles. That's just several months after we started, which is great news. We're planning for Berlin to go strong. I think, we said on previous slides that by the year-end, we'll have about 60 people between these two studios, which again, is a very interesting development for us. As for M&A, we've been working. We gave you a kind of a thorough feedback six weeks ago, or a month or two months ago. I think M&A in gaming industry and free-to-play especially is a very interesting adventure. There's a lot of transactions that are going. Price expectations are pretty high, and we've learned our way, and we know always that we like.
I think, the promise of TSG will be, we'll only do the things where we believe we can create value between our platform and potential company joining our family. We're working on that. We're very, very selective. We have strong conviction that in time it will bear fruit. There's nothing that we can tell more about M&A. That's unfortunate. We are operating under NDA, and we're talking to different, very interesting companies. Okay. I guess that's it for now. There's an investors calendar for TSG, and I guess we can open up for questions.
Okay. Just like I've written on the chat, please ask questions on the chat and we will answer them now. Okay, let's start with English chat. First, [audio distortion] , "Did I get it right that you expect Fishing Clash sales to deteriorate for the next six, nine months? What's the reason for such a conservative outlook?
I think it's not that we expect the revenue to deteriorate for six to nine months. All we're saying is we have a program to develop Fishing Clash, and it's going to take six to nine months for us to bring all the things that we want to. That means reconfiguration of the team. Also, kind of reigniting the feature production, fixing some of the technical topics. That is the period of six to nine months. We can see when we look at our cohorts, the natural trends following COVID, we can see a decline over the next few months, but then obviously we will be working on trying to reverse some of these trends. It's a live organized game, so it's a function of feature production, the kind of eagerness of players to play, and our ability to scale up marketing.
We're working on all these levers.
Okay, thank you. Maciej {audio distortion], "Can we get any details about planned acquisition transaction?
Planned acquisition transactions?
Yes.
Yeah. It's very hard to talk about plans for acquisition. I'd say, I'll just repeat what we said. There's dozens of companies which are on our map. We're speaking with several, and we have some advanced dialogues. That's all I can say. I said it before, I think we're expecting that to continue. We keep our pipeline alive, and naturally, we'll be engaged in discussion. We have our M&A team scaled up a little bit, so we now have three people on the team. We started with one person, so we have higher capacity to review more potential opportunities.
Thank you. "Why was Hunting Clash revenue in April flat versus March? Shall we expect some rebound in May already, or are there some long-term factors causing the top-line deceleration?
From the product perspective, the product is improving. There is always a fluctuation on how many new players who join the game. Basically, in the midterm, the growth is going to be super stable. I want to say that the growth will be stable, and also might be boosted by improved game itself.
It's fair.
We are very early. The cohorts are building up. Let's say if we buy more players, if we get more players in January than in February, it fluctuates, but the midterm trend is going to be visible.
Yeah. Let me add from marketing's perspective, I think we have already shared that information before, that the effect of increased marketing spend is kind of postponed in time. We were increasing our marketing spend starting from November, when it was the lowest during the last month. Now we are building a bigger user base, and the effects of increased user acquisition, for example, from February and March, will be visible in the upcoming weeks. That will be the additional part too, as an answer to this question.
Thank you. Could you please comment on iOS 14 changes impact on Ten Square Games' customer acquisition process?
Sure. I was expecting that question today, even though we are not ready yet to answer it fully because the adoption rate of iOS 14.5, because that's the one that is lacking IDFA, not iOS 14 in general. The adoption rate is not high yet. For global markets, it differs between geos. There are markets with higher adoption rate and lower adoption rate, but in general, it's between 15% and 20% for now. Looking at our titles, Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash, the adoption rate for new players, what we see in our game, players who installed the game after introduction of iOS 14.5 is even lower. That is between 10% and 14%. It's like when we look into the active players from the last weeks, it's also between 10%, 12%, 13%.
There is not much we can do with this traffic because in general, the world didn't become iOS 14.5 yet. We started our campaigns. We are well-prepared. We have everything in place. To get more data, to go through more data coming from campaigns, we need to wait until probably June at least, because we need to gather some data, because it's not that we can work with the total number of players. We are just working with some small share of the market that is available for us when it comes to iOS 14.5 campaigns. I will ask you to wait for more news coming in the upcoming weeks.
Thank you. Could you please comment on online advertisement prices trends in last couple of months? Do you see strong growth in ad prices?
As always, the answer will be yes and no. We are comparing quarters to quarters, months to months, weeks to weeks, platforms to platforms, geos to geos, marketing partners to marketing partners. To be able to compare apples to apples, we would have to go very deep with data, and we cannot offer it today. In general, we are looking in different KPIs. We are not looking into CPIs only. Of course we do, but we also look at CPUs, for example. The cost of paying user joining our games. We obviously compare between the games. The answer will be different for different games. They are in different stages of development. In general, what we've seen were that CPIs were going up slightly, but what we are focusing more are different KPIs.
It's because of the loop of our game, it's because of the structure of our game and our players. What we've seen regarding CPIs, that is that actually, the prices here during the first quarter of 2021 were lower than in Q4 2020, and it was both for Hunting Clash and Fishing Clash. What we started observing also because we are following the changes in the market, that are a result of iOS 14 changes that are not only for iOS, right? They can also be for Android, because we've seen, and we know that from our partners, that there are more and more players in the market, that they are buying more and more traffic on Android.
In general, what we've seen during April was that the prices went up slightly on both iOS and Android, but it didn't really have a big impact on our activity. What we are seeing during the last few weeks, I would say, is rather the prices, they started going down. We are observing mostly CPUs, not CPIs. That's the answer to this question. We will probably know more in a couple of weeks because all of these things, they are interrelated.
Thank you. When would you like to go back to spending more on "Hunting Clash" user acquisition?
As always, I'm sorry for saying it again, it's strictly connected to our smart growing strategy. I may be boring, but it actually works for us, and we want to follow this strategy. Once we see the market opportunity, the product being ready to increase the budgets, and marketing team in general being also able to increase the budgets, we do that. What we did in the last few months, we were increasing pretty aggressively the budgets for Hunting Clash since November 2020. We went down in April, as you have seen in the presentation. Now we are working on looking for a new space to spend more in Hunting Clash, but we don't want to go for any risky moves. We want to follow the data. We want to follow our experience.
What I can say, though, is that we start introducing new marketing partners, tested and proven in "Fishing Clash." We are looking for new marketing channels as an opportunity to grow. We expect to have more chances to increase budgets for "Hunting Clash" in the upcoming weeks.
Yeah, I think just if we may stop you, because I think it's important to reiterate that the way we work is there's a lot of companies working with marketing budgets being set per month, per quarter. We don't do it. Yes, we follow the market. We look at LTV curves. We look at the potential of individual campaigns. On that basis, with certain thresholds, we're investing money in user acquisition. That's how we've been operating for many, many years now. That's been bringing great results. It also brings a little bit frustration because we could have keep the pace of investing and provide guidance with that. We just don't do it. We do it in a very open way and transparent for ourselves at the back of our knowledge of how much is it worth to invest. That's how we've been operating.
Also 2020 was a result of that. Yes. The fact that we've grown 2.5x was only possible because we've reacted to the market opportunity.
I think the results of "Hunting Clash" are repeating what we did with "Fishing Clash," are also proving that this strategy works for us and for our title. We would like to keep on doing that in the future.
Thank you. Another question, I would like to ask for an update on M&A processes. Any advanced talks? Are you performing any due diligence? What is the reason of no success here? Valuations or lack of good enough companies?
The first part, I've answered to the extent we feel we can. In terms of availability of interesting companies to invest in, I think from our perspective, in particular, there is a scarcity value. We believe that there's particular companies that we can invest in. There's vast majority of companies we're not interested in investing because we don't believe we can create value between the platforms. That's a kind of fundamental reason to invest. Whenever we can help with our systems, whenever we can help with our growth competencies, if we can share our infrastructure to help these companies to grow, these are the reasons to invest. If we cannot deliver on these levers, then it's harder for us to imagine we can create value and then match the market expectations in terms of pricing. Yes, the market is quite expensive, the M&A market.
Thank you. Now about the product. Do you plan to soft launch Football Elite before the NFL season starts? Could you comment on competing games within that category, especially considering Golf Royale was behind the curve, as mentioned?
Okay. Answering the first question, I think we will be looking to soft launch the title when we feel it's ready to be soft launched. Yes. We are always looking in the long term, not in the short term. If we are ready and if it fits the NFL season, that's perfect. We will be looking from our side on the data to see if it's ready. It doesn't mean it won't be ready, but I just wanted to reiterate that we are always looking in the long term perspective. From the competition perspective, I don't want to say there is no competition. There is always a competition in the marketing everywhere, but from the typical product perspective, I don't think there's anything similar on the market. The games with the NFL teams are there. They are different types of the games.
We have "Madden" from EA, which is a pretty realistic simulation that is taken from the consoles and PC platforms. I don't want to say it fits perfectly into the free-to-play journey, because it's a very nice game, but we are tackling this topic from the different angle. Direct competition, I don't think we have there. Definitely the team competition. The team by genre, I mean. Yeah, there is some competition. It's not like in the case of Golf where there were a lot of titles that basically they had a pretty similar feature set. We tried to pivot the game a few times during our production when we saw new titles coming to the market. From the strategic perspective and from the product perspective, I think our feature sets were pretty unique.
In the recent months, in the recent three to six months time, we saw newcomers that basically filled those gaps that we were aiming at. We got a little bit cornered, and that was the reason why we decided not to continue on Golf Royale.
Thank you. Another one about Football Elite. Do you think that the launch of this game might be more affected by new iOS policy, considering iOS has a high share of market in the U.S.?
I might add something. I think from that perspective, I don't think it's going to affect it, as Google Android is growing in U.S. market as well. It's not disproportional.
We've seen that in other games from our portfolio, that the Android share of our players and our revenue in the U.S. is growing bigger. There are new devices, high-end devices coming from the Android angle. I also think the other part of the answer is needed. We still don't know what are the exact reasons of iOS 14.5 being introduced. We will be following the market. We will know more probably during the next few weeks. In general, the target audience in the U.S. and in the whole world, for this type of games is really big. We've seen that already delivered some first traffic to the game during the technical launch.
I don't think we are afraid of that, and we will be looking for players on both iOS and Android, and not only in the U.S. but also outside U.S. It's not that American football is just for American players.
Thank you. On the Polish chat, we have a question about M&As that we've already answered. There is a new one. What does May look like when it comes to bookings and user acquisition for Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash? I'm not sure we can answer that.
May is not over, so maybe it's not.
Yeah
Good to comment it yet.
It's not a public data yet. Also about iOS 14, we've already answered that. Okay. Could you give any update regarding Fishing Clash in China? There are no updates since March.
There were no additional batches of foreign games approvals coming from the Chinese regulators since the beginning of February 2021, so we will have to wait for more official news to come and share with you guys.
Exactly. Thank you. Now we have some questions in the mail as well. When do you plan to finish technical changes in Fishing Clash? When new and updated version of Fishing Clash will be ready for gamers?
We are constantly working on the technical improvements in Fishing Clash, so it's not like it will be ever over. The game is going to be updated regularly. With increased capacity of the team, we hope to deliver more and more content and more and more features to the players. You can expect more to come in the future, also the bigger updates.
And yeah, we will be constantly working on improving technical quality of our games.
Thank you.
Yeah, maybe I can butt in. We will be adding features in the upcoming updates. If we want to release a very nice, super quality feature, the bigger one, that should strongly improve the KPIs, then we'll require some more time and more capacity, but it's coming soon.
Thank you. How long do you plan to keep high marketing expenses in "Hunting Clash"? When can we expect "Hunting Clash" to become more profitable game?
I think I will repeat our strategy. It's smart growing. We keep the expenses high when we see the curve is promising, and we bring value to the game. We will go down when we see we have to wait. We will be waiting for new features to be added to the game. I don't know if I can elaborate more on this question because it's like already repeating the same thing.
Yeah. I think we're going a little bit in circles here. Again, investment in marketing, we're doing at the back of our forecast for the monetization potential. That's how we do it. Then we're looking at LTV curves, and on that basis, we take a decision on how much we invest. Then we're doing it for future, for lifetime profits in the game, rather than looking at month to month. There is no direct correlation between that. For instance, Marcin talked about it, we had invested a lot in Q1, a significant marketing spend in Hunting Clash. If you look at the result of Hunting Clash, we haven't done it for Q1, we've done it for the following quarters.
Sure.
This will bring effects in the future. That's how we always operated.
Thank you.
Yeah, as we said, there was a question about the profitability. Hunting Clash is bringing profits to Ten Square Games already.
Yeah.
I think it's important to underline that part as well.
Thank you. We have another question about China, that is already answered. Now, does the decision to pay dividend and buyback of shares mean you currently do not see attractive acquisition targets? Do you treat buyback shares as your currency for potential acquisitions?
We decided to try and open up that buyback share option for the company just to have another instrument to be able to respond to the needs. One element is, if there were acquisitions where we could pay with shares or the other party would expect that would give us possibility to offer these shares from the buyback. The other thing is, it just gives us another lever to create value if needs be, so we can respond and do the buybacks. To be frank, this is not our business. The core business of TSG is to produce games, not to trade with own shares. If we have to use it, that option is open for several months going forward, and that's a good thing to have in volatile environment, as we've seen recently.
Thank you. When do you plan to start booking deferred revenues for durables in 'Hunting Clash?'
Okay, that's quite a good question. We have not decided on it yet. We definitely will discuss it with our auditors during the half year review. What is important to say is that in order to book this adjustment, there must be reliable data regarding the expected life of a paying user. For a game that has been on the market for a few months, you do not have such data yet. It's obviously just a matter of decision when the game is mature enough to be able to determine that. Hasn't been mature enough yet. Whether it will be at the half year or later, that remains to be seen. I don't have an answer yet for that.
Thank you. How do you currently see your stock option motivation scheme EBITDA target for 2021? Conservative, neutral, or challenging?
Yeah. I think we've communicated on that. The tool has two elements in it. One is to motivate people to be around in the business and retain them. If you look at TSG and what is that we want to achieve is a long-term growth and the perspective to be a significant player in free-to-play space for years to come. That's how this program was set up. The targets are not our ambition. This is not the targets for the company, financial targets. These are the targets for the share scheme option program only.
Thank you. Now, this question, I believe was partly answered, but a bit different. Why are you spending relatively little on marketing for Hunting Clash? Is this connected with new Apple policy?
No, it's not connected to Apple policy. I think that's the answer to the question that is missing here. The rest has been discussed. What I may add is that we were discussing the forecast for Hunting Clash here, but it's also that we are looking for more space, also working with the forecast. Forecast cannot be updated every two weeks. That's how the forecast works. We are working on it.
To find more space to increase budgets for "Hunting Clash." I think the history of "Hunting Clash" is showing that we've been already increasing it a lot during the last months. I think the change, the difference between Q1 2021 and Q4 2020, shows that we increased both the bookings and marketing spend significantly for this title. It's not that we are increasing week by week, but when you compare quarter to quarter, the increase was already significant.
Also to add maybe, because there were several questions on that, and there's this thought around it, we can hear it. If you look at history of Fishing Clash, which is the best reference point we have over the last three years, there's been periods where the game was growing. The most pronounced period was in 2020. There were periods where the game stabilized, so was the marketing spend. We always follow the smart growing strategy, and we will continue to do it. There might be periods where it slow downs, and when the opportunity is there with the game readiness plus the market opportunity in terms of market pricing, then we'll be using it. We're not that concerned, and there's been a concern about April revenue. That's still early in the game for Hunting Clash.
Thank you. One more question from Konrad Księżopolski from Haitong Bank, quite a long one. You doubled employment since IPO, while your game portfolio remains pretty much the same. You added "Hunting Clash," you skipped a few other projects like Game Factory, Games for Women. Now you plan further increase, pretty much doubling from 2020, while your game portfolio does not look to be doubled. If your current employment is not able to produce more highly successful games, what is the reason to double the team right now?
Okay. It's a long question. I'll start with the beginning. I think the answer to that is, a lot has changed since the IPO. As far as I can remember, we had Let's Fish and Wild Hunt as core portfolio, plus Game Factory, which were small products, which we still have at a similar level, actually. They're bigger than they were before. Fishing Clash was coming upstream. Today, we have Fishing Clash at full maturity. The stock price has grown, I don't know, 13x . The company has grown significantly. One pillar for the future is to increase our production capacity, also to work with current portfolio, but also to be able to strengthen across different areas to stay highly competitive. That's required. This is not just a linear function of a number of people and to produce certain number of titles.
We have to become stronger. We have to be stronger on BI. We need to have better systems. We need to strengthen our growth function, also our support services, that's what we need to do. I think, part of the answer you've seen through the presentation today. "Fishing Clash" and "Hunting Clash" in current environment, these are the games that can achieve much more by creating teams that have high production capacity. That's what we're doing. The best examples you'll find in the presentation.
Thank you. One more question from Generali Investments. How many developers are working on "Undead Clash" and "Football Elite?" How come "Football Elite" will have a soft launch sooner given you announced it later? Are you prioritizing this project, hoping on claiming this niche?
When you look at "Football Elite," yes, we were definitely working for a very long time in the background on making sure that we really spec out the best possible game, the best performing game. As you can see, it took us a while. When it went to the production process, we noticed that it was actually, maybe not easier, but with our experienced team, it was a very quick process. "Undead Clash" is a mix of newcomers and very experienced people. Also on the top of that, this is going to be a bit different game than just, for example, a "Hunting Clash" or "Fishing Clash." There is slight difference to the approach in development.
To not spoil too many informations, we cannot really compare these two games as apples to apples. Yeah, I might just leave you there. I'm sorry for that.
Thank you very much. These are all the questions. We've answered everything from both chat and email. Thank you very much. You can, in the future, always.
Thank you very much
find contact to Investor Relations on our webpage and our presentations everywhere.
Okay. Thank you very much. I guess that's the end of the meeting. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.