At a $3.50 price target. I encourage you to take a look at our research on the company on channelcheck.com. With us today are Heidy Chow, who is the Chief Financial Officer, and Peter Lin, the FP&A Senior Manager of Snail. As a reminder, if you have questions, please type those in your chat box, and I will get to as many of those as I possibly can. With that, let me turn it over to Heidy. Thank you, guys.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Michael, for the intro. Now let's dive into the details of Snail Inc. Who is Snail and what do we do? Snail is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ with ticker SNAL since November of 2022. Born to Dream has always been our slogan. A dream to provide high-quality, interactive entertainment experiences to our global audiences. We started Snail Games back in 2009. Today, we are a global game developer and publisher with more than 15 years of track record. More importantly, we are the leader of a sandbox survival genre with ARK. What have we done over the past 15 years? We leverage our MMO expertise to become one of the leaders in the sandbox survival genre. Snail Games USA was incorporated in 2009 and published Age of Wushu, Tai Chi Panda in the United States.
In 2015, ARK: Survival Evolved was an early release. Snail Games USA licensed the game from 2016. Ever since, we have been the sandbox survival genre throughout the years. We published Dark and Light, Atlas, which is a pirate game, Fear the Night, PixARK, Outlaws of the Old West, and also in late 2023, we published the remake of the original ARK using the Unreal 5 engine called ARK: Survival Ascended. The company is led by our Founder, Chairman of the Board, and CEO. He's also our Chief Strategy Officer, Mr. Hai Shi. Mr. Shi has more than 20 years of experience in the gaming industry. He first founded Pseudosnail in the year of 2000. Of course, myself, Heidy Chow, CFO of the company. 2024 was definitely a great year for us. We generated net revenue of $85 million and sold 4.7 million units.
As you can see to the right, most of our revenue from the platform provider is from the U.S. and delivered digitally, which spreads across between PC and consoles. What you're seeing here is the fabric of our business. As mentioned previously, we are one of the leading gaming companies in the sandbox survival genre with more than 100 million installs. Highly engaged users over the past 10 years, which Peter will provide you with more in-depth explanation. We own a transmedia IP that crosses gaming and TV. We publish our games across the majority of all platforms: Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Epic Games Store, iOS, Android, and also on Paramount+ for our animated series. We also have a strong executive team with a clear strategic and tactical plan for profitability expansion.
Last but not least, we're truly excited about the fact that we are paving a path to a digital assets future with stablecoins. Now, I would like to pass on to Peter to go over some of our analytics.
Wonderful. Thank you, Heidy, for the overview. Now, before we dive into our analytics, I want to take a step back and look at the gaming market as a whole to provide some context. NewZoo, the industry-leading analysis firm, expects the industry to grow close to $200 billion by 2027, reaching about 4 billion players. Putting that into context of today's population, that's half of the world's population that will be playing games. That said, our temple IP, ARK, has amassed 90.5 million gamers. Despite having a large gamer base, we have a strong conviction that we can grow into the 4 billion player base. We have a historical performance that supports that, and we strongly believe that we, as Snail, will be able to achieve that. I want to share the performance of our franchise over the years.
There are two perspectives I want to illustrate here for the success of the franchise. One is that we have grown close to $1 billion in gross revenue. Two, the large install base of 100+ million of base game and DLCs contributed to 4.1 billion playtime hours. Of course, we have reached the peak of 1.1 million daily active users in June 2022, which is a significant feat. As we talked about highly engaged users and how well our franchise has performed over the past 10 years, I really want to understand our user base a little bit more. I took a deep dive into what our user engagement looked like. On the left, what you're seeing there is that 42% of our gamer base are considered as highly engaged gamers. That's 42%. These gamers contributed to 380 hours on average per gamer. That's a pretty significant feat, right?
Let me put that into perspective for you. Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed Shadows a few months back. The playthrough of that game, from beginning to end, is about 90 hours. Our highly engaged gamers play four times that amount. What you see to the right is the daily active user and concurrent user. The important takeaway from that is, from day one, back in 2015 to today, our daily active user and concurrent users that we observe online have been very, very consistent. That really, truly speaks to the replayability of the game and how fun the game really is. I've talked about the revenue side of things, how our user engagement. I want to wrap all that up for you in this quarterly chart. What you're seeing here is the quarterly revenue from Q3 2023 to Q2 2025.
Whenever there's an ARK-related release, be it the remake in Q4 of 2023 or any of the DLCs that we have released, our quarterly revenue has improved quarter over quarter. More importantly, what I've discovered through analytics is that our DLC conversion sits at 54%. If you think of it in a different context, one in two ARK gamers will likely buy one of our DLCs. This 54% conversion is very important to us. It helps us inform our future DLC release strategies and monetization. Historically, we have released full-size DLCs that include maps, new skins, new features, new items. It's a really massive DLC, a downloadable content, right? Content that can be played up above the base game, on top of the base game.
How we think about the future is that we will continue to develop the full-size DLCs plus bite-sized DLCs that require less development time, lower cost, and higher profitability. With that, I'd like to pass it back to Heidy to go over our future growth strategies.
Thank you, Peter. So how do we grow? We define our strategy into three pillars. First is through what we're good at: gaming extension. Keep building on the existing IPs, new DLCs, and also licensing new IPs. Explore into different genres. Diversify our gaming portfolio. Second pillar is through our product expansion. Improve profitability with strategy cost control. Last but not least, we are truly excited for this one. We will be the first gaming company to issue stablecoins with a deep integration with Snail Inc.'s ecosystem. Now, let's take a look at how can we build on the existing IPs and diversify our gaming portfolio. We are excited to share that we have a robust release slate ahead, drawing from both our internal teams and also valued external partners. On the top are the major releases from our internal studios.
As you can see, we have one major DLC releasing in late 2025 and two new IPs releasing in 2026, which are internally developed. On the bottom are the games that we have acquired through licensing agreements, which our gaming partners license. Licensed games that can cost anywhere between $50,000 to $1.5 million. Once the game is launched, we will do a revenue sharing with the studios. We're anticipated to have about nine releases in 2025, led by the notable two are Echoes of Elysium and also Honeycomb: The World Beyond. As you saw on the previous slide, we have several exciting releases coming from our internal studios. To deliver the high-quality entertainment our users expect, we have been ramping up our development capacity. Our presence in the EU continues to grow, driven by a strong talent pool and favorable cost dynamics.
In addition, we are leveraging third-party development teams through strategic partnerships to further support our ambitious pipeline. All right, now let's move on to pillar number two, product expansion. We run the company with a lean, efficient setup, keeping things tight on the cost side. Since Q1 of 2024, we've been putting more focus on our own internal R&D, especially around game development. We are really leaning on the experience and leadership of our gaming team to build titles that can drive strong revenue growth. To stay profitable, we're smart about that. We outsource some of the development work so we don't overbuild our internal team. Plus, we keep a close eye on R&D and also marketing needs to make sure that they stay aligned with our game development plans. It's all about staying focused and efficient while we're growing as well.
Now, from a revenue standpoint, when we talk about product expansion, our biggest goal is to take the ARK franchise from just being a transmedia IP and turn it into a full-blown pop culture brand. We really believe ARK 2 is the key to make that happen. With ARK 2, we're blending the open-world survival game gameplay fans already love from ARK: Survival Evolved and ARK: Survival Ascended. This time, we're layering in a rich, story-driven narrative. That is going to help us to reach way beyond just survival game fans. On to stablecoins, I would like to take a moment to provide an overview of the stablecoin market. What is stablecoin? A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value by being pegged to a reserve asset, typically in the U.S. dollar.
Stablecoin was first introduced around 2019, and it took off significantly in 2022 because it became the preferred safe harbor in the turbulent crypto and micro environment. Today, there is a supply of approximately $170 billion. This figure is expected to reach $1.4 trillion by 2030. More recently, the U.S. government has passed the Genius Act. This act is viewed by many as a pathway to support and foster innovation in the stablecoin market. With regulatory clarifying and also a use case extension, we truly believe this is a moment for Snail Inc. to get into the space. We wanted to become the first gaming company to issue stablecoins. To that end, we have initiated a capital formation strategy tied directly to the stablecoin project. We've also retained crypto experts and also leveraged in-house talent to accelerate our entry into the space. What does all this mean to Snail Inc.?
We wanted to build an industry-first rewards ecosystem that ties gaming and crypto. It will look something like a game. It could be a gamer could interact with our games, and we could be in a rewarding system. Imagine that currently, we have over 90.5 million ARK franchise gamers that we could eventually build that into our stablecoin project. With that, I would like to take you back to our fabric success one more time. This concludes our presentation for today. Michael.
All right. Thank you, Heidy. Heidy, I want to go back to one of the charts that you actually had in your presentation where you were talking about your lean and efficient structure. I was wondering if you can share a little bit more details about the company's development cost, particularly in relation to your R&D initiatives. How do those efforts contribute to your innovation and growth? How does it affect the year-over-year profitability of the company?
Good question, Michael. As we continuously work to further diversify our gaming portfolio, from 2024 through 2025, we've signed more than 10 different publishing IPs, which we funded the studio upfront development costs. These games are still in their early stage and have not reached our internal capitalization policy. Because of that, we have to expense that cost on our financial statement. Once the game is released, other than the maintenance and also the technical support that the studio has to support, there won't be any significant cost incurred. There's no license fee because all the costs are already funded. Further, as we mentioned in the presentation, we also have internally developed the games, for example, for the stars that we mentioned, and also Nine Inc. Citra and Model, which is done by an internal team plus our external partners and contractors. We're actively working on these games.
Until the game reaches our technological feasibility, we will have to expense that and bear the cost on our current operation, which also means that when the game is launched, there's no other licensing costs that we will have to handle.
Gotcha. The company has been pretty innovative in looking for other growth venues. You recently launched in short-form video content as a part of your broader growth strategy. I was wondering if you can discuss the rationale behind getting into this video initiative and how that supports the company's objectives, particularly as you look at marketing, user engagement, and content monetization.
Thank you, Michael. Model entertainment consumption is increasingly overlapping between gaming, streaming, and also social media. By entering into the short video space, we wanted to broaden our presence with a digital entertainment value chain, transforming not just a gaming publisher, but also to a broader content platform that can capture more user attention and also engagement. Further, as the boundary between gaming and social entertainment continues to blur, having a presence in the short video business helps us to position ourselves into the next-generation entertainment brand, offering both interactive and passive experiences under one ecosystem. Last but not least, short video offers multiple monetization opportunities as well through advertising, digital goods, and also diversifying our company's revenue base beyond just gaming revenue.
It seems to me like stablecoin is a natural extension for the gaming industry. I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about your diversification efforts into stablecoin, if you can explain the strategic motivation for this initiative, and how it aligns with the company's long-term vision, the digital ecosystem, and the financial innovation strategy.
Of course. As the company's decision to enter into the stablecoin sector reflects a strategic step to broaden our digital capability and support the evolving needs of our ecosystem, we recently, in July of 2025, the government has passed the Genius Act. There is now a clear regulatory guidance governing the issuance and operation of the stablecoins, which allows companies like us to participate in this area with a greater compliance certainty and also risk management. As I mentioned earlier in the presentation, we actually engage a consultant that is assisting us. We're also having an internal compliance officer as well, making sure that, you know, we're in full compliance and following the regulation.
Given our experience managing digital transactions and virtual economies within games, stablecoin technology can serve as an infrastructure layer that supports more efficient and transparent digital interactions, whether that's for the payment, settlement, or other ecosystem-related functions. This intends not to change the company's core business as a game developer and a publisher, but to evaluate how financial and technological innovation can complement our existing ecosystem under the clear legal and operational framework.
Heidy, we have just a couple of questions out here. I was wondering if you can talk about the stablecoin issuance timeline. Is there something that is expected to take place in 2026?
We are currently working on building the infrastructure internally with our internal engineers and also the team. We're hoping to launch that as soon as possible. Of course, before we launch that, we have to make sure everything is in full compliance because it's not something that we could launch. We want to make sure that we're in full compliance with all the laws and regulations and passing all the state requirements as well. We're hoping in the very near future, we'll be able to launch that.
A few of these questions that are coming in from investors have already been addressed, but here's a couple. Could you talk about the Bellwright release on Xbox? When is that expected?
The team from our subsidiary in Poland is actually actively working on porting the game to Xbox. The team is still working on that. We're hoping in the next few months, and hopefully in the next few months, we'll be able to have that release on Xbox.
Could you talk about ARK, the animated series, and benefits from the show, improved exposure, new gamers, et cetera?
For the animated series, we launched the animated series on Paramount+. I believe it was last year that we launched that on Paramount+. We still have a series that we have not launched yet. We're hoping that, other than getting the gaming user or gamers, we also wanted to capture audience from households, from watching TV, that, for our fans, not just playing games, but also from other entertainment, watching TV, or that they could be knowing of our game.
I think you've already addressed this question, but I'm going to ask it and see if you want to add any additional color. What drove the decision to get into the stablecoin industry?
The majority of the reasons are because we know now with more clear guidance and regulation, we as a company, we've been in this virtual currency for many, many years because the majority of our mobile gaming are actually dealing with virtual currency in that purchase with coins, gold coins. Now with the stablecoin, we see that stablecoin could be a payment transmitter system. Also, being a game developer and also a publisher, we wanted to connect the two together and be able to utilize stablecoin as whether it is a payment transmitter system or as a rewards program to our gamers, or as a, once there are more guidance from the platform, able to utilize that in the gaming side as well.
That is all the time we have for questions. Heidy and Peter, I greatly appreciate your time today. I wanted to remind all the viewers today that I would really encourage you to take a look at our research on the company, and all that research is available to you on channelcheck.com. Thank you again, Heidy and Peter. Have a great day.
Thank you, Michael.
Thank you, Michael. Thanks, everyone.