purchase any shares during the quarter and still have $50 million remaining in our stock purchase authorization. Our broader capital allocation goals remain the same: investing in our games, building and scaling playAWARDS, pursuing strategic and accretive M&A, and investing in our public equity. Finally, our outlook for 2024. We estimate that revenues will range between $315 million-$325 million, and Adjusted EBITDA between $65 million-$70 million. With the annualization of Brainium, these estimates are apples to apples and do not include M&A. This is particularly noteworthy for the revenue guidance, which implies organic growth, despite what we believe will continue to be a challenging industry and economic backdrop. Our guidance also implies continued Adjusted EBITDA margin gains. When modeling our 2024 results, please consider the following.
We expect many initiatives to gain momentum throughout the year, so you should assume a sequential pickup through each quarter. Other revenues will track closer to the quarterly rate generated in fourth quarter of 2023. This change will annualize in the third quarter of 2024. Thank you. I will now turn the call back to Andrew for some closing remarks.
Thank you, Scott, and thanks to everyone participating in today's call. Before we end our prepared remarks and open the call for questions, I'd like to reinforce some key points. 2023 was a year of growth, development and change. We nearly doubled our EBITDA, increased revenues in a declining market, and put in place the building blocks for substantial progress in the years to come. Entering 2024, our business is substantially more diversified than it was just a year ago. A majority of our games are outside the social casino category, and advertising revenues now make up nearly 20% of our overall sales mix. These new businesses are also our fastest growing, implying a continued mix shift towards higher margins and larger addressable markets. With our recent license extension in place, we're committed to establishing Tetris as a world-class mobile franchise.
We have exciting new games in development and are working towards introducing our first new title later this year. playAWARDS will begin qualifying its revenue opportunities this year. There continues to be a high level of interest in our program, technology, tools, and unique capabilities, and we believe this will be a meaningful driver of future growth. We're making progress in our efforts in myVEGAS and myKONAMI, and believe both games are on track for notable improvement in 2024. Brainium exited last year with substantial momentum as our efforts around new advertising initiatives began to take hold. We expect to see continued momentum this year. Our balance sheet remains strong, with $133 million in cash and no debt, and is supported by an operating business that generates positive cash flows.
Our plan remains to use our capital to make transformative acquisitions, and our goal is to make progress on that front this year. At the same time, we continue to look at other ways to use our capital to generate shareholder value, including strategic investments in our business and making use of our $50 million share repurchase authorization. Lastly, I continue to believe there's a large discrepancy between the core value of our business and the value ascribed to us in the public markets. While frustrating, rest assured, our leadership is aligned, our teams are focused, and we're all committed to strengthening our company. I want to thank you for your time today. We appreciate your support and hope you're as excited about this year as we are. I'll now turn the call over to the operator to take your questions. Operator?
Thank you, and we will now be conducting our question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press the star key followed by the number two, if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Once again, to ask a question, press star one. We'll pause for a moment while we pull for questions. Thank you. Our first question comes from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum. Please state your question.
Hey, good afternoon, guys.
Hey, Ryan. How are you?
Good. Good, thanks. I want to start with the potential commercialization of playAWARDS, as a loyalty, as a service platform. Is that just a focus area, or is the pipeline actively being, evaluated and worked on as we speak?
Look, it's been something we've been focused on really since the early part of this last year. We've done a lot to kind of qualify the opportunity and start to evaluate different commercial models. I would say we're still in that phase, but are encouraged by the feedback that we've received. I think that the level of interest and curiosity around the program and its potential impact has reinforced for us that there's value here, and it's now about resolving the right and best way for us to go and exploit it. And so we fully expect that we'll resolve that this year, and as we do, we'll share our thinking and provide a bit more of an outlook.
Switching over to the cost side, is there more efficiencies that you guys have targeted, or is primarily the operating leverage and margin expansion to get to that peer median, more so to do with operating leverage and revenue growth?
I think we're always looking at how and where we might be able to find new opportunities for added productivity and efficiency, but I think that really the more significant opportunity for us is top line growth. I think if you were to look at our fully loaded cost per employee as compared to our public peers, you'll find that we're in line or actually below where they are. So, we'll, again, continue to look for how and where we can be more productive, but our margin expansion going forward is going to come from top line growth and flow through.
... Makes sense. One more for me. Just as you think about the stock at this valuation, I know you, you had some prepared remarks, but are there any M&A transactions that could be more accretive than just going and repurchasing your own stock here?
Yes, we believe there are. They're obviously difficult to find in light of how and where we're trading. I think it's important for everybody to understand that while we're always going to be looking to ensure that the transactions we would do are accretive, we also want them to be strategically significant, and that they really reposition the company to enjoy yet even greater growth. I think sometimes you have to look past the immediate impact of the transaction and how it's engineered financially to what does it really mean for the company in terms of its strategy and how it's going to continue to evolve. Those are the factors that we consider as we look at our opportunities.
Great. Thanks, guys. Good luck.
Awesome, Ryan. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Aaron Lee with Macquarie. Please state your question.
Hey, good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking my question.
Sure. Hi, Aaron.
Can you just start, you know, turning to guidance for a second, can you just talk about the puts and takes that get you to the high end and the low end of the range? You know, what's contemplated from an investment and marketing standpoint, and you're just generally where you think the biggest buckets of growth will come from? Thank you.
Sure. I mean, I'll take this, and I'll ask Scott to add any further color. You know, the growth is really going to come from across the portfolio on the game side of our business. We further kind of qualify and look at our portfolio in several different subcategories. There's our core portfolio, there's our growth portfolio, and the products that we have in development. We see opportunities in our core portfolio, which have come under pressure because of the secular headwinds over the last two years. As we've talked a lot about, social casino has suffered some contraction, but it's been overcome by the growth in the casual categories that we're now very active in. With that said, we think that social casino is stabilized, and we're seeing signs of growth there.
So we think there'll be a modest amount of growth coming out of that portfolio this year. When we look at our growth products, they really relate to the current live products that we have in the casual portfolio. Our Tetris Prime product, which has grown meaningfully in the last year and continues to have great momentum, as well as the Brainium suite. And then we have a collection of new products that we're actively investing in development category, that it's hard to predict how and when they'll be ready to be launched into the market, but we would hope that one of them will be in a position where we can start to introduce it before the end of the year. So across the game portfolio, that's how we're thinking about growth. It's a bit moderated.
And then as far as the underlying investments and user acquisition and our budget there, we'll scale that up to support the products that are worthy of it, especially if we end up launching one of the new casual Tetris products this year. There'll be pretty meaningful investments on the UA side associated with that. Otherwise, we're focused on continuing to, as I alluded to a moment ago with Ryan, look for new opportunities to drive productivity and efficiency as we introduce these new products and continue to scale our existing ones. And so that's what's going to drive the continued kind of flow through and margin expansion.
The only thing I would add to that is, as we said, or as I said in my comments, you know, the way we're viewing the year is it's sort of going to be a sequential growth. You know, we're kind of on this trajectory to kind of look at each quarter, hopefully getting a little bit better as we go.
Great. I appreciate all the color there. And then just turning to playAWARDS for a second. Is there anything you can share in terms of how confident you are that this will materialize this year versus slipping into next year? And how should we be thinking about the reinvestment into the playAWARDS platform from here? You know, should it be fairly steady from current levels, or do you kind of expect to have to turn on the faucet a bit to accomplish some of your goals? Thank you.
Yeah, no, those are great questions. Look, I think that we are—we're pretty confident about the value proposition that we have with playAWARDS. We obviously have a ton of experience with it. The complexity is in making the transition to providing it as a service to other strategic partners and publishers in the industry. And so there's work to be done there, and certainly hope that we'll resolve our strategy and approach before the end of the year. As I said earlier, we'll provide some clarity in future calls as we resolve it. And then as far as the ongoing investments that we're going to continue to make in playAWARDS, they're fairly stable.
I think once we're in a position and we're ready to scale, servicing and supporting new game publishers as partners, there'll be some level of added cost, but we don't believe it'll be that material relative to our current run rate. So, the current investments are fairly mature, and they'll continue.
Great. That's helpful. Thank you very much, and good luck.
Yeah. Thanks so much, Aaron.
Thank you. Our next question comes from David Pang with Stifel. Please state your question.
All right, thanks, guys. Would like to hear your thoughts on what the implementation of the DMA in Europe means for PLAYSTUDIOS. Does it have any impact on your efforts on DTC?
... Hi, David. It's Samir. So you, you're just talking about the new regulations there with Apple?
The new regulations and the updated policies from Apple and Google.
Yeah. So I think, I think like everybody else in the industry, we're still, you know, waiting for this thing to fully form. I mean, obviously, it's quite fluid, and the litigation seems like it's still ongoing. So there's really nothing definitive there. But I think our DTC strategy is going to be much more related to what we do with myVIP and the integration into our games.
I can speak to that a bit, too. Yeah. Sorry, I, I didn't hear the acronym. So the direct-to-consumer proposition for us is something that we're obviously focused on.
We're going to continue to watch and see how the various disputes between the platform providers and Epic and other game makers play out. But our general view is that we have a really unique proposition with play AWARDS. And for a long time, we've had a web-based presence where our players can now interact with us directly in order to explore the full range of benefits that we offer through our play AWARDS program. We've incorporated into our web solution the capacity for our players to purchase with us directly. So unlike most of our peers in the industry, we can actually offer up really unique incentives and a value proposition that's very different from everybody else to actually incentivize and encourage that direct purchase with us. So that's a program that we're actively ramping up.
We're continuing to invest in new features and capabilities, so we would expect that our direct-to-consumer complement of our revenues will continue to grow. We think that there's a ton of room for us to increase the overall mix of direct-to-consumer revenue. And, of course, that comes with a pretty meaningful improvement in margin and gross margin. So that should be a driver for us going forward.
And just to follow up on that point, do you have a long-term target on what DTC might make up?
Well, we set goals for ourselves each year as part of our planning process, and we look at where our peers are, the ones that are, we think, more mature and have been far more aggressive in the way that they've approached appealing to their consumers more directly.
Playtika, in particular, has been a leader in this space, and, you know, I think something close to 25% of their revenue is direct to consumer. And so I would certainly hope that we'll be able to achieve rates that are comparable to theirs. But there's, there's a lot of work to do there for us to achieve that level of, of overall mix. But we... You know, our, our ambitions are certainly to be in line with where our peers are, at least.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you.
Just a reminder to the audience, to ask a question, press star one on your telephone keypad. To remove yourself from the question queue, press star two. Our next question comes from Greg Gibas with Northland Securities. Please state your question.
Hey, good afternoon, Andrew and Scott. Thanks for taking the questions.
Yeah.
I wanted to, you know, I think you said just later this year was kind of your commentary, but if you could go over maybe the rough timing of new game launches this year, and maybe if there are any modeling implications regarding marketing or increased development expenses during certain time periods.
Yeah, I mean, I think what we kind of signaled in our more formal remarks is that it's tough to predict when it is that we'll formally launch and start to scale up a new product. We have a few new products that have been in development now for over a year, both aligned with the Tetris franchise and brand. And we certainly would hope that we would introduce one before the end of the year, but the likely timing of it, we don't think will have any real meaningful impact on our performance for this year. So our forecasts and what we've shared in terms of guidance don't really take into account any impact from a new product that we introduce in the market, both top line as well as what we might do from a UA or a marketing perspective.
Got it. Makes sense. And I'm wondering if you could just address the overall interest levels from, you know, prospective playAWARDS and loyalty platform, you know, customers. You know, I know in past quarters, you've talked about it, you know, being strong. I wonder if you're seeing, you know, more interest there, or if it's kind of stabilized. And, you know, I guess, considering we've talked about it for a little bit now, like, you know, what's kind of causing maybe the delay in, you know, an initial customer there?
Yeah, I think what I'll do is I'll ask Jason Hahn, who's here with me. He heads up our corporate development and business development, who's really been leading the effort on qualifying those opportunities to kind of share maybe a little bit of the color. First, as I alluded to a moment ago, the interest in, I think, the value of our program is pretty universally recognized. I think the complexity comes in how we go about pursuing it. So maybe I'll let Jason speak to that.
Yeah, so I think on the feedback, given some of the things that are happening in the market, where it's becoming increasingly hard for mobile developers to acquire new users, I think everybody recognizes the value proposition of a program that allows you to hold on to users longer and invest in your loyal players that you already have, is tremendously valuable as a value proposition. And we've demonstrated that our solution does in fact do that. So we've had to spend, I'd say, the better part of the last 8 months building really tangible case studies to showcase with real data and A/B testing, that our platform does, in fact, undisputably create that loyalty lift, and we now have that.
So that was one of the pieces of feedback we got from the market, which was you need some tangible case studies. We have that. The other piece of feedback was making it very seamless for a third party to integrate the solution into your, your game. And so we spent also the better part of the last eight months working on the technology and refining it, so that any game developer can easily integrate this into their, their products. I think now that we've kind of addressed some of that feedback, we're just working on optimizing those things even more before we go back out to the market more formally and launch this as a formal product solution. But we're, we're kind of getting ready to productize it in that way, where we can actually launch it as a dedicated product.
Okay, that's helpful. Thanks.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll hand the floor back to management for closing remarks.
Just want to again thank everybody for their interest in the company and continued support, and we look forward to an exciting year ahead.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference. All parties may disconnect. Have a good day.