First of all, hi, and welcome to MTG's Game Makers Day 2022. We've not done it in this format before, and we hope we have some great content and a great day for you. Before we start with that, I wanna say a big thank you to Hutch and Sean, who are hosting us today. This is their amazing office. We've done some slight modifications to make it more presenter-friendly for the day. Apart from that, this is where they live and make their games. A big thank you. My name is Anton. I'm MTG's VP Communication and Investor Relations. I will be your host and moderator today. I will also do my best to make sure that we more or less keep the time, at the same time as giving our speakers, you know, the time that they need. For those of you who know us well, and I think a lot of you do, obviously, we've had a busy year. We started the year with a very cool transaction where we not only sold and took the next step for our esports business, but also clarified MTG as a pure play gaming group. In June, moving quite quickly, clarified our vision and strategy of what we wanted to do as a gaming group. We announced the kind of common layer that we call the Flow Platform, which is our initiative to accelerate the value that we create together. Now only a few months later, here we are. We're here today to talk about the gaming companies and to let the people from our gaming companies talk about the things they've created and what they bring to the group, and also to show how all of that ties together through the Flow platform and through the strategy. The schedule we have to you today, we'll start off with a short introduction from our CEO, Maria, and our EVP of Gaming, Arnt. We will then move on to. I'll move out of the way of the. So you can see. We've then structured the day in a way that kind of brings together everything that we're trying to talk about accelerating our evolution and creating value. In very simple terms, there are three big blocks for the day. The first one has to do with ad monetization and cross-promotion. The second block has to do with both paid and earned marketing, and the third block has to do with future-proofing the business, so we're gonna talk about game development and also about our Web3 and NFT gaming initiatives. At the end of the day, we'll have a panel to tie it all together to try to show you how all of that comes together to create the incremental value that we're trying to achieve. Then we're gonna end the formal bit, and you will have the opportunity to talk directly to our game makers and actually meet them, which is what we wanted to achieve. There'll be plenty of opportunities to ask questions during the day. We will have a short Q&A section after each of the speakers. There will also be an opportunity towards the end of the day after the panel. We want to keep this interactive, so please don't be shy. We want everyone. There's few enough people that everyone can have the opportunity to engage. For our web, for the people dialing in or other viewing us on the web, there's also an opportunity to engage digitally, and I will help our viewers by voicing their questions in our Q&A. Without much further ado, I will hand over to Maria. Good. Welcome everyone to our Game Makers Day. So happy to finally see physical people where we do this. I actually missed that during the corona times. I know we do have a lot of guests with us online as well. I think as Anton said, it wasn't that long time ago, actually. It was a different setting, of course. We did have our Capital Markets Day already in June, which is just a couple of months ago. I think that day was really important for us because that gave us an opportunity to Anton's point that we wanted to talk to you about what does it mean for us as MTG turning into a gaming company. What kind of vision do we have? What do we wanna build? Why do we believe gaming is exciting? Also, of course, what's our ambition on it. What we promised you that day also is today you will hear us, more the management at that point in time, but we are not the heart of the company. The heart and the stars of the company is our game makers, our entrepreneurs, and they are the ones that's coming on stage today. Today, we really wanna take you behind the scenes of our gaming village to say why we, I mean, when we met all these companies the first time, we got excited. Hopefully, we are able to share that excitement with you today. Also, you will understand why we believe that we are gonna be able to grow faster than the market in the years to come. Before that, of course, Arnt and I will take some time still to go through where is our strategy. We hopefully have some newcomers to our equity story. What is our vision? Also what we wanna show you is what is the progress that we actually done just since June, and where are we looking now as we go forward. Our vision is quite simple, and we've said it quite a few times, and hopefully, you will also feel it today. I mean, we really wanna build the best home for gaming entrepreneurs. What we mean when we say that is to really selectively find some of the best game makers and entrepreneurs out there, bring them under the same umbrella, or as we say, village, and making sure that we together become stronger. We learn from each other's strengths, capabilities, know-how, and hopefully, we also have more fun working together. What that all means coming together is we're becoming a better company. We spent quite a lot of time actually then in the spring going into our Capital Markets Day to trying to challenge ourselves, how do we want to be as an owner? I think when it comes down to it, I mean, we want to make sure we drive the same value creation for gaming as we've done for esports, which means finding that fine balance with being an active owner, being the architect of making sure the gaming village come together, but also at the same time, allowing that creativity and that local mandated organization to become even better every day. That's why I'm so excited to have you all here today, and also for you on the stream, because hopefully you will see that. You will hear when you hear our CEOs speak about the companies, what is amazing about the companies, but also what are the capabilities that they are bringing to the platform, and hopefully also how do they learn from each other. That's the focus of the day. That's our vision. Again, it is still just early days. I think Anton said it, and he said we had a busy year. I would say actually we've had 2 busy years, to be honest. If you recap, I mean, I've been with MTG forever. It's like I'm soon becoming a legacy here. MTG has always been around entertainment, which means that's been my life. When I joined MTG almost 20 years ago, it was traditional free TV and paid TV. That was the hottest thing that you found in town. What happened is with technology and customer preferences, it evolves. If you look around you right now, and if we look around us right now, we don't find anything more relevant than gaming. I mean, the market is worth around $200 billion, and mobile gaming roughly half of it, so of course, just the starting point is amazing. There are 3 billion gamers out there, and both of these factors are set to grow. Of course, it's fair to say this year it's been an interesting year for gaming because it's the first time, I think forever also, that the gaming market isn't growing. There are both good and bad reasons for that, as always. If you look into the future and the trajectory, the way we see it, and also the way the market data that is out there is set to have a nice growth going forward, and all those growth drivers are out there. If you look at Sensor Tower and User, I think the rough average is around 5% CAGRs in the years to come. I think that's why we're excited to be here. If you then look at this timeline, and you're seeing actually what have we done, and of course, we've done 3 really value accretive M&A transactions, so you will hear them today, as I said. But equally important, we actually did a really transformative divestment. It's not that we're happy that we don't have ESL anymore. We really like the company. We enjoyed working with them for 7 years. I think also when you look at it, they are actually in a better place right now. If you look at MTG and our shareholders, we are in a better place right now. I think of all the things that we've done the last two years, I think the divestment was actually the most transformative in the sense that it actually made us a pure-play gaming company. It also made us a pure-play gaming company with a really strong balance sheet, which is also enabling us to continue to execute our strategy, because we do believe the gaming market is consolidating, and we want to be driving part of that. The other part it also enabled us, of course, was to give a good return for our shareholders. If you look at this year, we actually returned around 3.3 billion kroner back to our shareholders, which is also something we're really proud of, because ultimately, our job is to drive shareholder value. Looking at it then, where are we? As I said, we are on a journey. We're still in the beginning of it. There are so many more pieces we want to put into our umbrella. There is so much more we want to build up on the Flow platform. If you look at it where we were 12, 24 months ago, and if you look at it today, we have really built a much more diversified gaming group. We moved from single company studio to actually building a group, spread casual to mid-core, and we diversified when it comes to genres, when it comes to revenue streams, and when it comes to geographical mix. If you take, for example, our Q3 reports we published not too long ago, our reported revenues is around just north of SEK 4 billion. That is roughly now two-thirds in-app purchases and one-third in-app advertising. That is something that we're very focused in building up to because we do believe you become a stronger company with diversified revenue streams. On top of that, we also have good genre diversification, and we have a reach today of around 6.5 million daily active users and roughly a little north of 30 million monthly active users. These are also users that over time, of course, would like to extend both organically and inorganically because we're a firm believer that a relevant reach makes a difference. Where you can start to build a customer journey within your own reach, you can actually add incremental value. If you look at the geographical split, we still focus on the Western world, which means that we have roughly 50% of our users and revenues coming from Europe and 50% from North America. Today, you will hear a lot about how we drive organic growth, and we are true believers in organic growth. If you look at the portfolio, of course, we have acquired all these 5 companies, which means that M&A is an important accelerator of our growth. I think it's also important to highlight when we do M&A, what is it that is important for us? It is not just to buy company. We are wanting to build the best home for entrepreneurs with the best entrepreneurs. There are three guiding principles that we have when we do M&A. The first one is people and culture. I mean, that's the one thing you can never change. We are building a village. We want to make sure we find participants in that village that want to create a partnership with us, and with a culture. It's not the same culture, but you need to buy into each other's culture, you need to share some beliefs. Also you want to make sure that when you spend time with that management team, you also believe they can replicate the success, that they can also not only have and continue to build existing games, but over time, launch new games. The other part is, of course, evergreen IPs. I mean, the longevity of strong IPs is amazing. I mean, we learned it by the first acquisition we did with InnoGames with Forge of Empires, to see if you work with LiveOps, the strength of that IP is simply amazing. That is one of the corner pillars, and as you can also see on this chart, you also see that we believe in genre mastery. You want strong evergreen IPs also in the top in the genres that they're existing in. The third one is, of course, every company needs to have a good financial growth case. I mean, that's the heart of it. We want to grow as MTG, and of course, the companies we onboard, we want them to help accelerate our growth. On top of it, we would, of course, love them to bring synergies to us, how we can become better as a group, and also for us to be able to bring synergies to them so that we together can accelerate our growth. Another way to look at diversification and also are we happy with our positioning or not is, of course, to take then our strong IPs and say, where are they on the customer journey or sorry, the games journey, because a game has a lifetime. There's always an end. However, we also know with strong IPs, that end is very far out. We are looking at from everything, what do we have in the produce/introduce, what do you have in the growth phase, and then what do you have in establish and harvest, and how do you make sure that you find a balanced portfolio there where you of course have the vast majority of your games in the growth phase. I think looking at this chart again, you can see that our strong IPs, they are to the vast majority in the growth phase, which also means that's where the majority of our revenues comes, and which also means, I mean, you will hear Henrik today talk about how we work with LiveOps. These are all the games that you can continue to invest in with your LiveOps, which is really a dedicated skill. Also we use acquisition to continue to grow and harvest over years to come. Established games, equally important. The longevity is super strong. Also you should never forget about your harvest, your sort of legacy portfolio, because that's really where the high-margin games come in, because you scale down the teams, you scale down the marketing, but it gives you really nice bottom-line profitability, and that's also what you then reinvest in your produce phase. Today, you will also hear all the companies giving their commentary to how is the pipeline looking like, what should you expect for 2023 and 2024? As much as we are firm believers in evergreen IPs and we really like our growth portfolio, new games is a must to secure long-term sustainable growth. Sean will also have a special section in his part where he will also talk about what is actually behind the scenes of game making. It is actually an art in itself, and not just creative hit-driven business, and that is also that we walk you through with it. Let's bring it all together then. I mean, what are we trying to do? By creating this best home for entrepreneurs, we also want to build one of the leading free-to-play mobile operators in Europe, because our job is ultimately, again, quite simple. It is to drive shareholder value creation, and the way we do that is to build a company, drive both organic and inorganic growth, that has above market performance. That is what we're focused on. That's why we're really excited about our journey up until today. That's why we're excited about having you to hear our portfolio companies and CEOs presenting today. It comes down to really three things: continue to scale existing games and also introduce new games to the market, building up our Flow platform. We are a big believer in that synergetic approach to actually become smarter and better together, share capabilities and not reinvent the wheel. The last thing is, of course, on the inorganic side, also to utilize our balance sheet to actually become bigger in a relevant size, finding more of these stronger evergreen IPs that has an affinity to our existing games, and hopefully also onboard more capabilities that can come into our gaming village and help us grow faster. Hopefully you will enjoy the rest of the day today. You will hear many presentations after me now. Arnt will come and talk about the Flow platform, the importance of it, and how that will accelerate our growth. You'll also then hear to some of the key growth drivers I talked about, scaling existing games, launching new games. Henrik and Sean will go deeper into that. Preeti and Sid will then talk about also how do they add further capabilities onto the Flow platform. Hopefully at the end of the day when you hear everything, then you can also see what makes sense then on an M&A point of view, because for us it's about driving organic growth and also complement it with inorganic growth to really drive long-term shareholder value creation. With that, I hand over to Arnt, who will take the next part. Thank you, Maria. Can I hear my song, please? Hello, everyone. We've been working for weeks for the walk-up song, so that's why, just to wake you up, can you give me the song, please? Just to create something. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Yeah. Whoo. Thanks. We're really grateful that you took this adventure and made the trip to this little city, London, and join us today because I think it's super important to get close to the business beyond the slides and meet the people. In these little 10 minutes, I wanna take you on our journey, which has been quite exciting over the last 8 years already. From the first games investment, InnoGames, when we were the nobody meeting, Henrik and the team, first investment. We tried to diversify the group with the investment into Kongregate as a publisher and casual games developers. These were the first 2 steps. Now with Hutch joining group, Ninja Kiwi, and PlaySimple, we've become a nicely diversified group, and now we are building out our acceleration platform, which will help each company to boost their growth and grow faster than the market. Our vision, as you heard from Maria, it's really special, I believe, that's why we're all here, we wanna become the best home for game makers. A village which will attract the best talents in the world, where they are loved to share their knowledge, open up their technology, made it accessible for everyone, and collaborate. With these 35 companies, we have already found, I think, excellent talents, high-quality companies who moved into this village. Together, we're gonna build the village and benefit from this acceleration platform, the Flow Platform. The basis for the success, as we all know, is the culture. The culture is everything. Our job is to create the right environment and make sure each company can preserve their culture. I mean, that's why you're here. You should live and breathe and feel the Hutch spirit. Later, Sean will talk about how they develop games. When you walk around and explore with the Hutch office, you're gonna see they love racing. They're enthusiasts. They have pieces from Formula 1 cars over there, and they are the best experts when it comes to automotive communities. That's something you can only experience when you make the trip. The MTG signature culture is the glue. We wanna challenge each other. It should be a fun environment because we're a gaming company. Exclusively, we're not a bank. We wanna be playful. We wanna have fun. It's really important, we wanna really reach together next level up the playground. Let me introduce you to the centerpiece of this village, the Flow Platform. It comprises today 4 elements, but all 4 elements already exist in the portfolio companies. The technologies and tools have been developed over 5 to 8 years. To start on the left side with the BI analytics system. This is InnoGames' BI system, which they have developed, and now we elevated it, put it into the cloud and made it accessible to all group companies. Christian Pern is now our Flow Platform CMO, so he has also taken the existing tools services to optimize campaigns, to manage creatives and put it in the cloud and again, made it accessible working with all the group companies. Then we have on the right side, the two new building blocks, cross-promotion, ad monetization, where we also diversify our revenue streams. PlaySimple is a champion here and is starting to also bring this to Flow Platform and rolling this out and running tests. CT will later talk about how cross-promotion will become a key value driver in the future. Ad monetization is important because we're not only game makers, it's also important to master ad tech and to build our own ad stack. There will be more components be added over the next years. There's community management, there's LiveOps, and so much more we can open up to our games village. The core competencies to develop games, publish them, scale them, always sits with each company. On the small floor in Stockholm, there you find these 25 people busy with all listing requirements and offering some central services like strategy and finance. Also let me show you some insights into the growth and optimization potential of the Flow Platform to be very concrete how we can optimize the business. We process 17 billion data points per year, so data is the gold for the games business. It fuels the LiveOps engine and UA engine. Honestly, there is no other e-commerce business or digital business which knows more about the users and their interactions with product than the free-to-play mobile games business, and that's the reason why it's so attractive. Let me highlight two interesting numbers. We spend more than SEK 2 billion to acquire users, bring them into our audience network. Same time, we capitalize on them in ad revenues with SEK 1.5 billion. In total, we move SEK 3.6 billion around. These numbers will be boosted and optimized through the Flow Platform. How? Here, from each EUR or $ or SEK an advertiser spends, only 50% will arrive in our pocket, there's a leakage of 50%. Just imagine when we optimize 10% by building out our own ad stack and take control of this margin, this is a direct bottom line contribution. It's pretty similar when we acquire users. This is a tech play, therefore we develop the Flow Platform. Since we met last time, or virtually over video in May, we came a long way. We made huge progress on building out this Flow Platform. All companies ingest the data now in one BI system, which helps us to predict the ATV, optimize resource allocation. Christian has successfully built up the internal marketing agency, the tech piece of the platform, and is offering these tools and services like mapping CAT to optimize in one campaigns to all portfolio companies. We've already started rolling out a cross-promotion system driven by PlaySimple to the whole group and building our own ad stack. Now it's time to meet the real stars, the game makers, the entrepreneurs who have decided to join MTG and build this village together with us. You're going to hear later, as Maria said, from Henrik talking about how to drive LiveOps and grow the business. We have Sid, who came all the way with Pritty from India to present to you why PlaySimple is much more than a word developer, why they even also an ad tech company. We have Scott, who made the longest trip from Auckland, New Zealand, to show you how they have been able to build one of the really most iconic mobile game side pieces, Bloons, without spending a single marketing euro. All organic marketing. After the break, Sean, our host, will talk about product games development and prototyping and how process look like. Finally, Marcos will introduce you to the shiny blockchain world and why it is still exciting, although some guys screwed it big time with FTX, why it is not affecting the gaming world. Before I hand over, let me just summarize the key points which we want to prove to you today. You're going to see we really found the best entrepreneurs in this industry who are highly committed, and they can't imagine to work anywhere else than in gaming with so much passion. They have attractive, iconic games growth mode and a full pipeline of new games. The Flow platform makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts, and it helps us to outperform the market. With this, I'm happy to hand over to, with the next music, to our friend Sid from PlaySimple. Thank you. Thank you, Arnd, and thank you for the song. It's been a while since I heard that one. Yeah, it's one of my favorites. Today I've traveled along with my wife all the way from India to speak to all of you guys and to be in the company of my lovely entrepreneurs from the other group companies as well. The team has put together a short video that is going to play just now, which shows our games and the city from where we are. Can we have the video, please? That's the team there. They couldn't make it all to India. We invite you, probably in India sometime. Like you guys could have figured out, we are a word games company. I've got a small puzzle for you. Let's see if somebody can answer this. Mont dash is the highest mountain in the Alps. You can win a Porsche. Well, let me give it one, because I don't want to give a Porsche for this one. Mont blank. This is one of the puzzles in our games, and the players across the board, I think, have spent close to about $40,000 just answering this puzzle. There are thousands such puzzles in our games. That's the business what we are in. I think later after in the meetings, please feel free to download our games and if you're curious to answer some of these puzzles. The story of PlaySimple, we started the company in 2014, almost eight years ago, right around the time when MTG decided to buy InnoGames. The entire team is based out of Bangalore. We are about close to 300 people. On the right side here is my team. Each one of us have over 10 years of experience in this space. On the bottom, we've got the companies that we've worked at and the games that we've worked at, which, interestingly, none of them were ad-based. All of them were heavy on IAP. The first game that I worked on was Mafia Wars, which is an action RPG, and likewise a bunch of other games that are there. I've got Preeti, who's my co-founder. She's there, and the rest of the team couldn't make it here today, but would love to sort of meet you sometime later. This is the market that we are addressing, which is close to about $1.1 billion. Most of the people would think and imagine that, hey, word gaming, how large is it? It's a fairly large market, which is a small segment of the overall puzzle gaming genre, which is about close to $9 billion. These figures are only for the U.S. and Europe market. We compete against much larger players than ourselves, which is AppLovin, which has got PeopleFun, Take-Two, which has got Zynga, and Words With Friends, and of course, The New York Times Crossword and Scopely. On the right, I've got the demographics details of our players. Most of our people are 40-plus, and quite contrary to what people would imagine, that these games are actually played by kids. These are mostly female 40-plus folks who are playing these games. Most of our players are based in the U.S., and also a lot of people in the U.K. and Australia who play our games. There are a lot of other markets that we've not yet explored, which continue to excite us to go after in future. This slide shows the journey of our company. Well, the company started 2014 onwards, I think. Majority of the growth actually happened 2018 onwards. Since The bars show the revenue, and the blue line shows the DAU. Since 2018 till last quarter, we grew close to 45 times in revenue. That's essentially what, I think part of... Interesting milestones that happened here, this is where the pandemic started, and as you guys can see, our growth was really good until that point in time. We actually slowed down during that time because we wanted to take a pause versus continuing to scale up. This is where we partnered with MTG, our growth continued even after that. Which is, of course, something to say about the partnership that we have been able to operate likewise as we were operating before as well. There's a lot of things that has happened during this course of time, I'm gonna talk about them in the subsequent slides as well. Before that, these are the current games that we've we're working on our product maturity curve. On the left are the new titles that we're working on. I've spoken about the word genre that we want to sort of like become big and continue to lead. We also want to sort of expand ourselves in the casual genre, so the new titles will be in that space while we continue to scale our word games. Most of our revenue right now comes from 3 main titles, which is Crossword Jam, Daily Themed Crossword and Word Trip. Overall, we do 6 live games and 6 games in development. The bottom titles here are the games that were built all pre-2017. All of these current games that are here, all of them are games that we incubated in 2017 and we scaled subsequent years. The titles on the left from there are games that we incubated 2020 onwards, so yet to see the growth and scale from those games in the coming years. Last year, we contributed about 26% of the group's revenue. We currently have about 2.7 million daily active users. Most of them are present in the U.S. market. This is an interesting slide which shows the downloads of our games. They stack up nicely above each other. I think all of this is possible because of amazing cross-promotion between these games. I think likewise is the chart for revenue as well, and where the numbers don't cannibalize each other as we built it out. I think this was one of the things that we were thinking about when we started the company is how, and eventually the revenue and the downloads and the daily active users chart would look like, where, can we predictably build a large-scale business in the form of annuities from these games. I think the things that have helped us over the course of time is essentially investment in long term. I think one thing to keep in mind is we built this company out of India, which is not a major gaming hub. We took a plunge to actually invest in long-term assets, which is people, where we said that, "Okay, hey, we need to invest in grooming the talent here, as well as building infrastructure around analytics and data, which will allow us to sort of process data records very." I think one interesting fact, trivia fact is that we as a company, we process close to 7 billion data records a day to take decisions real-time. All of that is there, of course. I think the three key things that allow us to be successful is, one, that, hey, we decide to go after games and genre where we feel we have a realistic chance of being number one or number two. If a, if a game or genre that the team comes up and say that, "Hey, we wanna go after that," does not meet our qualifying criteria, we will not pursue that. The second thing is that, hey, we've been, like I've spoken about, we invested significantly in analytics and data infrastructure. Everything that we have, we operate on is, I mean, we are a full-stack team. Everything that we work on is completely built in-house. And that sort of gives us a lot of flexibility in the things that we can do. The third thing is that we replicate our successes in the games. That this is one of the things that we learned at Zynga, which they really mastered well, is if one of the features that is doing well in one game, figure out a way that how you can translate it and actually share it across the other games. That is how infrastructure is built. The most important thing that I'm proud of in this journey of last eight years is how, and I'm gonna speak about that, which is AdTech, as you guys would have guessed by now, is how we built that over the course of time. When we started the company, this is how it was looking like that. Essentially, most of our player... Of all the players that we were getting, we were able to monetize only a small fraction, a small percentage of the users. What do we do about the rest of the audience? Want to give you a perspective, I have compared ourselves with a bunch of public companies out there where data is available from their reports on what percentage of their audience is monetized through in-app purchases. On the right, I've got an interesting fact on how the session time over the years has continued to go up. We took this opportunity to say, "Okay, we need to figure out a way to monetize the remaining 90% plus audience." That ended up almost becoming like the wheelhouse for us for success. Fast-forward to last quarter, 75% of our revenue last quarter came through ads. Back in 2017 or 2016, we were only at 2%. Over the course of time, we have invested heavily in this space to do well, and which has been the bedrock for success for us. A small crash course on in-app advertising, because I don't know, I'm sure that a lot of people are very familiar with this, but I'm not sure about the overall audience. I'll do a quick one on this one. On the left side for the audience. On the left side for the audience, we've got a small chart, which is a simplified view of in-app advertising landscape, where we've got publishers on one side and advertisers on the other side. A lot of players in between which facilitate the users flow from one side to the other side. The advertisers want users to come and check out their websites or mobile apps. The publishers want to monetize from the inventory that they already have. The incentives for the players in between are to actually facilitate the goal for the partner that they are closer to. SSP is somebody who's closer to publisher. Their incentive is to help the publishers. DSP is somebody closer to advertisers, which is demand side platform. Their incentive is to get the best quality user for the advertiser. On the right side, I've got the different ad formats which the advertisers use and the publishers put in their inventory to facilitate this entire thing. We've got banner ads, interstitial ad, native ads, and video ads. There's one more ad format, which is offer wall, which has shrinked significantly over the course of time, but the other formats continue to remain large. Now, let's put some players in the category, in each of these segments, where on publishers, we've got major game developers. They are also present on the advertising side as well. These are not all the players. We had limited space, so we could only put few. I'm sure that you're familiar with a lot more players in this space. For the others, we've got the other players as well. I think, of course, over the last two years, a lot of consolidation has happened and will continue to happen. The space has, the folks that have merged in are AdColony, Chartboost, ironSource, and Unity as well. The Unity and ironSource was the last one that got acquired. The largest players in this space are, of course, Google, Facebook. There's a tie between Apple, which has also been expanding in this space. Amazon, of course, is a large player as well, and the other ones as well. Overall, the annual revenue from the mobile in-app game advertising is close to about $10 billion-$15 billion. There is no right estimate on that. We've tried our best to get the most accurate one on this. There are a lot of players in this space. Now, to operate in this, of course, one can integrate with any one partner here, but like An mentioned that, hey, you can end up losing a significant share of the revenue that you would have otherwise made. If you're somewhere here, their incentive are more aligned to the advertisers. Being a publisher, you need to maximize, however, maximize the use of your inventory. We have built our own proprietary systems which allow us to do that. There are two goals here. One is to, for every impression that is coming and landing on you, your inventory, you maximize the yield, that every... that the dollar that you can get from that impression is maximum. Second is you don't waste time determining which impression is that. The latency that is there from the time that your ad slot is available to the time when that impression is shown is least. We work with all the leading ad networks and ad exchanges, gather their bids for the different inventories that we have got, put them in different waterfalls, all in the cloud in real time, and then quickly when the game is available to show an ad, we take the right waterfall and make sure that most competitive bid actually gets to show the ad. All of this happens in split seconds. In a year, we serve over 40 billion ad impressions, which is equivalent to driving about 80 million ad installs. All of this happens in less than 10 seconds. That's the median. In majority of the times, the decision to show an ad is a matter of 200 milliseconds. Well, the outcome of that is this slide. We've got two lines here. One is the purple line, which is how the market has done on CPMs, and the blue, which is PlaySimple. We've got the CPM, the revenue per impression for different ad slots. As you can see, over the course of time, in comparison to the market, we have done better for most of the ad placements, which wasn't the case when we started. Over the course of time, constant investment in this space has helped us do better, which has also helped us to scale, like I showed in one of the earlier slides, our performance in the last 18 quarters. With this, we wanna take this to the rest of the group companies. Apart from being MTG's world gaming developer, we also want to spearhead our knowledge, with that we wanna spearhead the ad tech space with the knowledge that we have acquired to share that with the rest of the group companies and help them use as well. We have two goals here. One is, I think. I get to that in a minute. Currently, on the left side, this is where MTG's ad revenue stand and which is higher in comparison to most of our competitors. On the right side, we've got, again, similar to the chart that I showed at the beginning, we monetize only 45% of our inventory right now on ads. There's a lot of potential that is left, which can allow us to unlock a significant amount of revenue as well. I think, that's goal number one, how do we sort of like take this up over the course of time across the company. Second is Varun mentioned that, hey, advertisers are spending dollars on our inventory, and a lot of that is getting lost by the time it gets to us. To get as close to advertisers as possible so that we don't lose out on any dollar that is actually being spent on our inventory. With that, I'll leave you guys with one takeaway from my presentation, is we started at word games eight years ago, and that's the journey that we are on right now. We continue to remain a word gaming company. Our horizon two is casual games. We wanna scale in this large market that is there, which is much larger. Horizon three is becoming possibly an ad tech company over the course of time. With that, I would like to call Preeti to share our learnings on cross-promotion and how we'll take that across the group as well. Hi. I'm Preeti. I'm one of the co-founders of PlaySimple, and I'm here to talk to you guys about cross-promotion, what it's what it is, what it's done for us, and what it can potentially do for the MTG group. Unlike what the song says, I'm not here to take your money. Maybe some of it, not all of it. All right. A quick intro to what cross-promotion is all about. I'm sure you've heard of it. I'm sure you're familiar with cross-selling in normal marketing. In the gaming context, the basic idea is you have players coming in, they install a game, and most studios make a certain kind of game, right? We're a word gaming studio. Most of our games are word games. The idea is to sort of introduce a player who plays one game to the rest of the PlaySimple universe, all the other games that we have, they're very likely to be interested and makes a lot of sense for us. I'll get into details of how exactly it makes sense, but I mean, in the most intuitive sense, anyway, it's a good idea to expand that footprint, right? This is how it looks in practice. Let's say a player has downloaded one game, that's Word Trip, one of our biggest games. While a player is playing puzzles, they typically need coins to, you know, solve some of these things. This is what we call a watch to earn button. It's a rewarded video that you watch to earn coins in the game. What happens is when a player presses that button, they see a rewarded video ad. They earn a certain number of coins for that ad, right? Post that, in some instances where we think we want to convert a player to one of our other games, we show a what is called a cross-promo interstitial, right? A player may earn, like, 10 coins to watch a rewarded video. We incentivize them with, let's say, 10x that amount to download one of our own games. Then if a player is interested, they go through with this, and they download. They're redirected to the store to download one of our games. This is how it looks in practice. One of the questions that we often get when we talk about cross-promotion is, hey, why does it make more sense for you to sort of cross-promote to your own game versus, you know, selling that spot, selling that ad to an outsider who's willing to pay for it, right? The answer is it's not either/or. These are mostly mutually exclusive placements. The regular ads run on normal placements like watch to earn, like interstitials, which are not incentivized in the normal ad world, and then banner ads and such, right? We do run cross-promotion on those as well, but at the bottom of the stack. After we show... You know, if there is no other ad available to be seen, then we show a house ad, right? Those are those placements. The way we look at regular ad placements is we are optimizing for yield. We are optimizing to maximize on the dollars we make from showing ads, but we don't wanna lose our players to those ads, right? That's how. The surfacing and other things are optimized towards views and monetization, not for conversions. On the other hand, the cross promo ads are entirely incentivized and tuned for conversions. We look to maximize conversions. We show these selectively when we think the timing is right, when we think players would be most interested in such conversions. The placements we use are actually entirely different. These are new things, new placements that we have created in our games that don't exist in normal advertising context. This is an example, right? That's a typical interstitial ad. There is no incentive. It's just an ad that pops up maybe once you complete a puzzle. This is what an incentivized interstitial looks like. This doesn't exist in the rest of the advertising world. This is just an in-house placement. You don't really interrupt the players. I mean, it's a short. It's just a pop-up. When a player is looking for coins, it suddenly looks very interesting and we've had really good success with conversions with these placements. Coming back to why cross-promotion makes a lot of business sense, right? Like I said, you have. As a company, we do a lot of paid user acquisition, over 100,000 installs a day. We have a lot of players coming in, and a good at least half of them churn out on day one, right? The idea is to sort of when we pay for an install, how do we maximize their lifetime value within our system, right? What we want them to do first is of course engage with the first game, enjoy that, and then during their, over their life cycle, discover many other, many of our other offerings. There are different types of players in the game. We look at them. We look at their churn, prediction, we look at their behavior in the first game, based on that, we surface other games that they might be interested. For example, if a player is finding it difficult to play Daily Themed Crossword, and it looks like they're gonna churn because of that, then we start surfacing some of the more easier games that we have in our system, right? What that does is it allows players to engage deeper in our ecosystem. We have a lot of players who play more than one game. Then over their lifetime, they end up generating higher lifetime value. Rather than looking at something as the LTV in a game, we look at it as the PSLTV, and we try to maximize that, right? That in turn, for every $ that we spend on marketing, this additional value that we generate from a single player playing multiple games, that enables much higher marketing efficiency, which we again sort of are able to plow into our paid UA, and then the cycle continues. This is our journey. As Sid mentioned, I think from the very, from our very, like, seed investment deck, we had cross-promotion as one of the key pillars of our strategy, right? The question that we often used to hear from potential investors was, "Hey, this is a hits-driven business. What is the asset that you're building?" The answer for us was always, "It's the audience," right? It's the audience network that we're building. Games, different games over time, will serve to engage this audience. Over the long term, that's gonna be the key asset that we're building, right? We started the company in 2014. It was not until 2018 that we had multiple games at scale to really kick off cross-promotion. We started off in 2018 with our first cross-promo initiative. Over time, 2019 through 2022, we built out a really strong infrastructure that's very scalable. It's very simple. We've been able to deploy it across all of our games. Every new game that we look to launch comes in with cross-promo hooks. We're able to cross-promote users from our scaled games to these test games. Here are the results. Here are the cumulative results, right? We started off with some 300K installs for the year of 2018. We're gonna close 2022 with 8 million cross-promoted installs and that have delivered a cumulative value of $27 million over the last four years, and $10 million each in the last couple of years. All of this is, it goes straight to the bottom line, so it's hugely additive to our business. Is there any questions so far? Yes. I have 1 question about sort of in-game advertising in general. Whenever, like, something external is advertising, like an exchange or crypto or something, I kind of understand that. When other gaming publishers are advertising their games that they only monetize through advertising, it seems recursive. It doesn't seem sustainable. How does that work? Is it sustainable, or how does that work? Could you just summarize the question, if you might, for people on the street 'cause they don't can't hear? All right. The question, if I understand, is, we monetize... You understand external ads that we show that are outside of gaming, like crypto or whatever else, right? Or some shopping or something. How does it make sense to show ads to other gaming of other gaming companies, right? The way we really manage this is, we typically don't show ads of our competitors. We show ads of other genres which are complementary. One of the things when we've tested, and this is usually a big concern when we show any sort of ad, right? Is, what is it gonna do to my game? Is it gonna cannibalize? Am I just gonna lose all my players? We test all of these things heavily and ensure that our retention is not impacted by any ads that are shown. There's a lot of tuning that goes on under the hood to make sure it's all balanced out and it's additive. Right. All right, I will move on. Where we stand today, this is what cross-promotion does for us on an overall basis. Like I said, we do a lot of paid UA, over 110K installs daily. Over which, we have about 7,000 installs that are generated for free through cross-promotion. It helps us a lot in the testing, in the early testing of new games. We are able to spend a lot more time to fine-tune our new games, to get them to a state where the KPIs make sense to actually then spend paid UA dollars, right? Until that time, we support all of our new games with cross-promoted installs. Net-net, I mean, overall impact on business is about 25%-30% of our margin comes from revenue generated through cross-promotion. Right. Just a quick view of how, you know, how we operate. We have a central cross-promotion team that's dedicated to building out the infra, that is essentially as simple, you know, in a plug-and-play mode as possible. Like I said, I mean, we A/B test everything heavily. We certainly A/B test our internal cross-promotion as well. There's always, you know, donor games are always a little reluctant to show any ads. You know, we make sure that it's all making sense for both donor and receiver games. Heavy targeting, again, like I said, we don't wanna target players who are already heavily engaged in the donor game. We're mostly looking at guys who may wanna churn out or who are showing signs of disengaging. That's when we want to cross-promote them. There's also, it's a heavily collaborative exercise to get this going across. Even just within our studio, it takes a lot of collaboration. A few key success factors are one of the most important drivers is affinity between games. A player playing a word game is very likely to want to play another word game. That's a key driver. Having said that, from all the tests that we have run, both internally and externally, even cross-promoting across low affinity genres still makes sense because effectively the cost of the cross-promoted install is 0. Any value that's driven through these is additive. Simplicity and standardization of the infra is also very important, like I said, because to get these features deployed across, I mean, now we have about 10 games and counting across multiple platforms. If we have to do that efficiently and effectively, the infra needs to be super simple. That's been. Of course, I mean, data visibility is super important if we have to optimize. That's basically broadly what it takes to get this going. A couple of case studies to illustrate, right? The first case study is an internal case study. I wanna give you 2 examples, right? This one is at 1 end of the spectrum, where you can treat it as a best case scenario, if you will, right? These are 2 highly, 2 games with very, very high affinity, very, very similar except for a slight difference in gameplay. Very similar player demographic, right? The games I'm talking about here are Word Trip and Crossword Jam. Both at very similar scale, similar type of gameplay, similar demographics. We managed to send across more than 1 million installs from Word Trip to Word Jam over the last four years. The value that each of these installs, these cross-promoted installs generates is 20% higher than what we see from paid installs. This is what happens when you do high affinity cross-promotion. On the other end of the spectrum, we tried this, we do a lot of. Beyond word games, we ourselves are expanding into other genres. Those games will be lower affinity, right? A solitaire game would be lower affinity to a word game. We, we did see success with those as well. This is a great example, right? We, you know, after we joined the MTG Group, cross-promotion is something that we have always discussed as what can be a key pillar to our growth going forward. This was one of the first tests that we ran with our friends at Ninja Kiwi. We took a game, so we took Ninja Kiwi's biggest game, which is Bloons TD 6. We took our biggest game, Word Trip, both of which had a good U.S., large U.S. audience. That's where the similarities end, right? There is no genre overlap. There is no demographic overlap. Bloons TD 6 is almost entirely male, probably 25-ish. We have the word games, which is mostly female audiences, and older, right? On the face of it seemed like, hey, you know, this is not gonna really give us much. For the simple test that we did, it was a very high-level test, a very quick one to see how this is gonna play out, we saw some really surprising results. We saw that the players who cross-promoted from Bloons TD 6 to Word Trip actually did better than some of our own low-affinity games, right? It was, they engaged better, they converted better, they monetized better. It was actually net additive, and I think it's super promising for what we can do going forward. We also did the reverse. We cross-promoted from Word Trip to one of Ninja Kiwi's more casual games, Bloons Pop. Even there, we saw that our players responded a lot better to Bloons Pop than to some of our own games. Again, a very promising sign, and we're looking forward to sort of leveraging that more. That brings me to what cross-promotion could potentially do for the MTG group. Together, we have about 6.5 million in DAU, and we get 400,000 daily installs across all the studios. If we were able to even convert some of these at less than half the efficiency that we currently have at PlaySimple, we could generate about 10,000 additional free installs for the group. Within studios, there is a huge opportunity because within studios the affinity is already very high, so we have the best case scenario. We have, apart from PlaySimple, we have 4 best case scenarios. Across the studios also, between, let's say, Ninja Kiwi and InnoGames, there is a large overlap in terms of genre and audience. So potentially this could be, this could be a lot, a lot bigger, and we're really looking forward to spending the next few months and years, tracking that. That's all I have for you. Thank you. Leonie? Yeah, I'll take that. We'll now take a few minutes to take your questions, and thank you very much, both Priti and Sid. Let's get you both on stage so we can see you, if that's possible. Just in terms of just to ask questions, please do state your question into the mic, even if it takes a few seconds longer just to accommodate our streamed audiences. Let's start over there, Leonie. Hello. Yeah, thank you very much for the presentation. Just on cross-promotion, you mentioned you did some tests for free installs across the studios. Are you also doing, let's say, showing ads of the other studios? How does it work in terms of, for example, is Hutch giving you a rate on the ad that you can take or not? How does it work for that? Sorry. Why don't you take the question. Sorry. I don't think we are showing ads necessarily for each other's studios. I don't know if you know anything more about that. Are we showing ads of each other's studios? Yeah, I think so. I think we're not restricting the inventory to actually flowing into our exchange currently. Through the ads, there would be some portion that will be flowing in, but very small fraction that will be going in, which is, of course, something that we can optimize. I think as we roll out the strategy on cross-promotion, that will get fixed. We don't wanna sort of like. It's a very complex world because I think campaigns have a long history, and if we sort of like artificially pause something that will have a bearing on how those campaigns perform. Right now we are not doing anything. We're letting that inventory come in. Over the course of time, we of course, would not wanna lose out by actually giving that money to the players in between. I think we have to wait for the entire cross-promotion thing to work out. Within our company, we actually do not let the ads of Word Trip or Crossword or Word Jam to actually play on the other inventory across the board. As we roll out the strategy, we'll actually replicate this across the board as well. We have the capability to block it. We're not doing it right now. We do it within PlaySimple. Hi, thank you for your presentation. The world around us has become a bit darker this year. You know, throughout the years you've operated your business. Do you see any difference in this year from sort of a weaker macro environment or similar? Every year has been different in our journey. Like always, I think, back in 2014 to 2017, 2018, it was a different time when we were still very small and we were catching up to how the rest of the ad market and how the other developers are playing. I think back then we were seeing innovation happening a lot more often on the different ad formats where they were initially banners, interstitials, then playable ads, then video ads, and then videos and playables, and then video playables and static ads at the end. We have seen constant disruption happen. We've also seen consolidation last year. We have also seen Apple sort of like coming in and saying that, "Hey, the iOS ADT things are I mean, they're necessary. If I have to answer this question, I can say that, hey, it's a lot difficult to start a studio today versus what it was some time ago. Over the course of time, because of the infrastructure and the capabilities that we have built, I think that we are better equipped than we would've been a while ago. We always looked at the gaming industry and the studio that we're building required multiple components. One was people, one was infrastructure, one was users. We have come a far way in terms of getting some of those resources which allow us to scale. Of course, with partnership with MTG and the other studios, we definitely get better by sharing and learning from each other. If there's something working well for the other studio, it's an open, transparent space where we can discuss and say, "Okay, maybe we can take this and do the same way in our company as well. That's maybe just pass the mic forward. Thank you. Yeah. Tom from Citi. Thank you for the presentation. This might come later, Anton, so feel free to park it. The question is on the ad tech intermediaries. You've intimated that there is leakage, and I'm just interested in what elements would be most value added in terms of reduced plugging leakage in the short term, in terms of acquiring Yeah. different capabilities. I think it's, if I may answer that question. Firstly, repeating that question for the rest of the group here. The question is that, hey, what elements of the entire value chain would be most crucial to sort of plug in initially and then subsequently? That's the question, right? I think, it's two-pronged. One is our role is to sort of first is to take whatever technology that we built across the group. I think that's the most important goal for us that, hey, whatever PlaySimple has worked on so far that is doing well, we get it across. The second thing is that, hey, PlaySimple sort of like gets forward and takes up one of the things that are there to actually plug in that leakage. We're evaluating it, but I think the piece that we are the closest to is on the publishing side. I think we will probably take something up on that side, closer that side to, where we have the inventory and we can monetize that better, versus taking on the advertiser side. Thank you. We have a question from the web. On cross-promotion of PlaySimple's own games, you showed 7k out of 110k, around 6%. For the group, you showed 3k-10k of 400,000, so around 1%-2.5%, let's say. As your cross-promotion testing of Bloons TD 6 worked so well, shouldn't then the potential be much higher for the group in total than the 3k-10k and be more around, say, 20, is the question. Theoretically, yes. That's full potential. There are a lot of challenges. There are a lot of operating challenges that need to be taken care of. There's a lot of infrastructure that needs to fall in place. There are data security and privacy concerns that we need to sort of resolve. We have Christian who is building out the BI platform. And I think that'll You know, once that falls fully in place, it'll enable us to really sort of roll out cross-promo at its full potential. There's all of these different pieces that need to fall in place and this is a risk-adjusted number, if you will. Yeah, I think it's risk-adjusted. Also, I think all the inventory that is there on these games, I mean, we have an opportunity to monetize on ads as well as sort of like cross-promote. And until the time we have the true picture of the games, users, LTV, and what we are sacrificing there to actually cross-promoting, I think it's important. I think it's risk-adjusted to sort of like make sure that, hey, we do well on either of the fronts. Mm-hmm. Yeah, always I think taught in school. Under promise and overdeliver. Under promise and, like, leave the rest, and hopefully it'll be good. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Hi, it's Simon from ABG. Would you say that it's fair to assume that the potential for cross-promotion is bigger for other parts of the company to use it internally or between different genres? Secondly, what do you think will happen with CPMs over time? On the cross-promotion, like I mentioned, where there is high affinity, I mean, that's the best case scenario. That high affinity happens typically within studios, right? Like I said, there are some of our studios which have games that are, that, you know, you could potentially see players play both games across studios. Even there. I mean, the potential goes from like, hey, games in the exact same genre with the same demographic and then down to, like, games in completely different genres, different demographics. Those were the best case, worst case scenarios that I was talking about. Across the spectrum, it's all additive. You know, even, you know, between Ninja Kiwi and PlaySimple, that worked out well. At least it showed good signs of working out well. That's how we expect it to play out. I think the second- CPMs Yeah, I think the second question on the CPMs, if I can take that. I think on that one, I mean, we were spending a lot of time on that along with our partners because it remains an open question for everybody, whether it's Google, whether it's Facebook, in terms of figuring out what's going to happen. I think last 2 years were definitely, I think abnormal years that we saw, where we saw great numbers. I think if we look at the history of the CPMs or revenue per user over the course of time, I think it's still positive CAGR, and we expect that to continue to sort of move forward in that direction. We still see a lot of businesses that need to go digital. We still see a lot of shift that needs to happen towards performance marketing, and that would drive the CPMs up because gaming is one of the industries, or in mobile specifically, that you can get to the source of install. Which means that, hey, you will spend more on the places where you feel that, hey, you're getting the right value. All that needs to be sort of taken care is that you're having the best quality users, and if that is the case, then your CPMs will move up. Hey, this is Paul here. A quick question. In my view, your business model is not specific to word games, right? I mean, I think you're world-class in just optimizing, which I think would be able to apply to any casual timeless game. You mentioned before, right, that casual is actually where you want to go to, and we saw in the early stage, I think that you're working also on one bingo game. Wouldn't your model work perfectly well for solitaire, for dice, for bingo? Would it make sense to like prototype a lot to expand in these genres? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a really good question. One of the things that I would like to share here is that although we are a word game developer, most of the people see this genre as one big genre, there are multiple genres in it, within it. There's a crossword genre, we're the second-largest player. There's an anagram genre, where we are the second-largest player. There's a Scrabble genre, where we're the third-largest player in this category. We have understood, like, what works well in our systems that we can replicate in different genres. At the same time, we wanna make sure that we go after from one genre to other genre where there's high affinity, and there's not too much of resistance in terms of us crossing that bridge and ensuring a success. At the same time, where we have a realistic chance of becoming number one or number two. If the other players that are there, that have already established and they are very large, it's gonna take a lot more capital to become big there. I think While we remain excited about Solitaire and the other genres, at the same time, there are a lot of other opportunities that excite us, which we wanna go and pursue. All right. Thanks. Ish, I had a question. Sorry, I don't know your games well enough. On the cross-promotion side, are you displaying the cross-promotion ads in the same place you normally monetize your games, or is it in a different place? No, no. The cross-promo inventory is almost entirely different, right? The only time where cross-promotion ads show up on the regular stack is where we have no paid inventory, right? To show. But the cross-promotion ads typically show up in either on top of... They piggyback on rewarded video ads. In the example that I showed you, a player would see a rewarded video ad first, and then, you know, if they qualify for a cross-promo ad, then they would see it would follow up with a cross-promo interstitial. Right? It's entirely different inventory that we've carved out for cross-promo. Okay. 2 follow-on questions to that. First is: What is the intelligence that determines what ad to cross-promote? Is it random or is there, you know, analytics behind it that allow you to do that? The second question is: Do you then measure or calculate the effect of the cross-promotion on the LTV of the user? Yeah. The total LTV of the user. Yeah. The prioritization of a cross-promo ad is entirely dependent on, like, we are trying to maximize PlaySimple LTV in our case, right? We cross-promote to the highest potential game that is available and then go down that stack, right? That was. Yeah. That was one part. What was the second part? Yeah. I think the, I think, one is that, hey, do you go back and track the LTV of the user? Yes, yes. Yeah. For all cross-promotion, like I said, for pretty much everything we do at PlaySimple, we have an A/B test. We do look at, again, post cross-promotion, we do measure the LTV of the user, and it needs to be higher than what we predicted the lifetime value to be for the donor game. In most cases, the guys who actually cross-promote end up playing both games. We do track the overall PSLTV. They play both games without a loss in engagement? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Because the nature of the guys who play, right? They are, they are cross-promoting because they want the coins to play the donor game. You know, they're already sort of heavily invested in the donor game, and then they go play the recipient game. Sometimes they do switch off, like, so it depends, right? It depends. There's different categories of users. Sometimes you would have users who would have otherwise churned out of the donor game that we are cross-promoting. Even then, like net LTV would be higher than what we would have expected from the first game. Thank you very much to both of you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to make sure to keep everyone well-hydrated and caffeined up, so we're going to take a five-minute break and start again at 10, which will also allow us to mic up the next speakers. I see you, everyone, in five minutes, and look out for the loud music to bring you all back. Yes. Thank you. Way far away from home. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, Oh, oh. Oh, way far away from home. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, way far away from home. Jamming in my car like big moves, quiet plans. Wearing all my scars like they're part of my wings. Wondering where they are, it pulls on my heartstrings. Speeding up my drive like big movies on the screen. I've been way far away from home. I've been way far from them. I've been way far away from home. I've been way far too long. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, way far away from home. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, Oh, way far away from home. Way far away from home. With me here, you'll never be lonely. It's oh so clear, I've always been falling. Through a life that's upside down. Somehow, you turned me around. Stay another night. 'Cause all we have is time. Oh, I need your love. When you leave, I will miss your touch. Oh, you made me believe that I could be enough. You light me up. You raise my hopes and don't even know it. In a life that's upside down. Somehow you turn me around. Stay another night. 'Cause all we have is time. All I need your love. When you leave, I miss your touch. Oh, you made me believe that I could be enough. You light me up. We'll forget all the pain, we will get away from the sound of the sirens. In the week long, we'll be fighting, lighting a cigarette. Hands on the wheel, we'll go faster than we need to. Hold your breath, hold it for me. We'll put those fancy clothes on our coconut all-tan skin. I wanna reach the nirvana, five-star hotel in my pajamas. I'd like to climb the Mount Fujiyama. Circle around the island, driving a Yamaha. Gotta leave French, I guess we had a good time. It's satisfaction, it's satisfaction. I'm spending, I wanna fly. It's satisfaction, it's satisfaction. Oh, oh. It's satisfaction, it's satisfaction. Oh. It's satisfaction, it's satisfaction. We'll book a table in the classiest place we can find. Have all the flavors you've ever dreamt about. No need to drive with a helmet on. It's satisfaction, we just paint the town. We'll head back to our mothers and our friends. Just to make sure that everyone is safe. I wanna get even, break the ceiling that hung over your head. Gotta leave French, I guess we had a good time. It's satisfaction, it's satisfaction. I'm spending, I wanna fly. It's satisfaction, it's satisfaction. Oh, oh. It's satisfaction, it's satisfaction. Oh, oh. It's satisfaction, it's satisfaction. Oh, oh. Okay. All right. Let's welcome everybody back. We will continue the day. All right, gentlemen, let's go to content, please. You'll have to send one of those to me at some point. I thought you just said, "No, no, I want one." It's just where is my monkey? We talked about Tim. Oh, okay. Yeah, it was probably before my time then. All right, everybody, please take your seats and then we will continue to try to keep it on schedule. All right. Let's please take our seats and also because our friends on stream, so that they don't have to wait too long for us to begin. All right. For our next segment, I would like to introduce Hendrik, who is the CEO and one of the founders of InnoGames. Besides being one of the founders of one of the most successful games in strategy and city building, he also is a gamer himself. One of the games he plays is one I certainly wouldn't touch because it's extremely complex and has to do with building rocket simulations, which you all can ask him later. Hendrik, please come on stage, and I hand it over to you. Welcome. I'm Hendrik, co-founder and CEO of InnoGames, and I also like to show you a video of one of our games so you know what we are doing. Enjoy the video. After searching for generations, your tribe finally settles on a spot of green land, but your journey has just begun. A new culture rises. Traveling through history, you will meet friends to trade with, enemies to fight against, and different cultures to discover and learn from. It's up to you how far you will take them. Witness the rise of cultures. Download now for free. All right. Download it now or watch this presentation. InnoGames was founded in 2007, but we already started a couple of years earlier when us founders, Michael, Eike, and I, created our very first browser-based online game, Tribal Wars. This was the ambition, to build a game that we could play against and together with our friends. Tribal Wars became so successful that we then, after a couple of years, decided to drop out of university and create our own games company. This was the moment where InnoGames was started. We launched additional games. We're growing the company over the years, hired great talent that helped us to build further games. In 2016, we were the first company to join MTG, the first gaming company within MTG. We had lots of different opportunities, we decided for MTG because it gave us the opportunity to keep our entrepreneurial freedom, to continue our growth story, and also felt like this is the right place to be for us as a company. Since then, we are part of MTG and continue to grow. We also built a management team, not only consisting of us founders, but also brought in experienced people from the games industry. Felix, Christian, and Michael, also all of them worked many years already in games industry, more than 10 years. Christian, for example, Miniclip, 8 Ball Pool, lots of experience, which helped us to manage the company, grow the company, and of course, together with all our people at our Hamburg headquarters, we are building great games for our players. This is our mission. It's the same thing as back when we founded the company. We are here to make great games for our players. What we are delivering are high-quality virtual worlds where we can link millions of people around the world. That was the vision when we started InnoGames, and also back then, it's back today, it's also the thing we are working with all of our new game releases. Our games are available not only on mobile. Mobile is our primarily platform, but our games are also available on the browser. This is also very great from a player perspective because players can play our games anywhere they are. They can play in the morning on their smartphone and the evening on their web device, and every time they have access to their game account. It's also great for us as a company. We save part of the high payment fees from Apple and Google, and also we can use different channels to reach out to new players. Our players can start on one device and continue playing on other devices. Just recently, for our latest game, Rise of Cultures, a bit more than one week ago, we launched also the browser-based version. It's also now available not only on the mobile app stores, but also as a browser-based game. We built over the years a portfolio of games where it's mostly about building up something, building a city, interacting of course with other players. Over the years, we built up a portfolio of 10 games, 10 live games. We have games in the harvest space, many of them already with us since many, many years. Games like The West, for example, 15 years old, still 10,000s of players playing it every day. We'll also see later how LiveOps can help to have a game that runs for such a long time. Our biggest title is by far Forge of Empires, and it's also doing well since 10 years, in a very strong position and always great content, new content for our players. We are building new games, Rise of Cultures, Sunrise Village. We are growing and alsoGames in the earlier phases, Lost Survivors, Heroes of Sky, and Fortune, which are in production, and also a game, Defenders, a new game project, where we're combining city-building elements together with also some tower defense game elements. That's where we're also getting knowledge exchange and lots of relevant experience from the Ninja Kiwi guys. Thank you very much for this help. This made us possible to avoid probably some mistakes we would have made otherwise and really kickstart this, making the focus on the right topics, evaluating the right things we should work on, and combine tower-defense elements together with city-building elements. Of course, part of the games industry is also that there are games that are not making it. Sometimes these are, I would still say, great games. They are fun to play, but scaling a game today, of course, is a challenging business. This means we need to evaluate early on. Is this game really having a chance to become a worldwide success title? Sometimes we just make the call, no, this game is not the right thing to do, it's the right thing to move on and work on something different. This is also what happened with some of these games here. That's part of our business. It's normal in the games industry, it's especially also important to make the decision at the right time. With this together, we built a portfolio of 10 live games and 1.5 million active users. Last year, we had about more than 40% of revenue share was in the MTG Group. The growth at InnoGames was always very sustainable, reliable as our performance. You can clearly see the games industry is not a hit-driven business. If you do the right live operations, you can predict what's going on in the next month, in the next quarters, even in the next years to some extent. If you always create great content for your players, you can sustainably grow. We also have been growing after joining MTG, which of course was the plan, so that's good. We have been growing, especially also saw some peaks during the COVID times, players coming back to the browser-based games in a stronger way. Afterwards, things normalized more. I mean, everyone could be happy that life is more normal, but especially during the COVID times, our games had a higher activity and, therefore, we saw some peak. Now we are on a, yeah, good and healthy level growing the company. This is one of our strengths of InnoGames that we are really sustainable in our growth. We are not dependent on any hit titles. We're providing more to the whole group. You saw this earlier this morning, some of the UA tools, or the UA tools we're using for the Flow platform, they have been initially developed at InnoGames. The experience, the battle-proven experience we have at InnoGames helps to now build tools that can be used in the whole group, and are now also available in the cloud for other companies in the group. We have experience over the years with lots of different marketing channels. One example, you saw a TV spot at the beginning. We can use also TV as a marketing channel. We know how to attribute players from TV campaigns. We can measure the success. This is also very helpful, especially if the games are available on all platforms. This is also for us a very interesting channel, and we share this experience within the group. Of course, we build experience analytics, BI, and also LiveOps, what I'm talking today about. All this experience we can share within the group and also help other companies. At the same time, we are learning from other companies in the group to become better and, yeah, use the experience they made. I talked already, in our games, it's often about building up something, building up a city, village, and in general, you can combine it to this, yeah, tycoon crafting genre in general, which is a big genre. There are multiple subgenres. This is rather a flat genre. Within this genre, we are also competing with companies that are themselves much bigger than InnoGames and also much bigger than the whole MTG. We can clearly show that our games are really strong there. There's a certain sub-segment that's a city-building element, so where it's really actually about building up a city. That's where we are the number one companies on the mobile platform, so our games are, yeah, if you want to build a city on your mobile device, best thing is to come to InnoGames. We have really the best games there. We are proudly to be there the number one. Of course, there are also nearby genres which are, yeah, a bit broader and also give us opportunity to further growth. Our players, based on service, are already average age of 48 years. We have really also players above 60, which also play a relevant role. So it's also not that only young players playing our games. Our newer games have a bit younger audience typically. Our audience is, in most of our games, more male-driven, but this changes also depending on the game. As a country, of course, because of the size, U.S. is our most relevant country. But probably a bit to our historical reasons, we are still relevant also, or Germany is still a very relevant market for us, because it's probably our home market and helps us, where we started to grow. All right. We are looking at InnoGames', focus for the next years, or next year especially. We decided to put especially focus on three of our games. First of all, it's Forge of Empires. Of course, Forge of Empires is now more than 10 years old. Now we are clearly also in the phase to stabilize Forge of Empires on this strong level. Forge of Empires should be our fortress that we defend and run for multiple years to come. We have one new star in our portfolio, Rise of Cultures. This is our new rocket, improving the game significantly, scaling the game, based on this improvement, in the long term, make it as big as Forge of Empires. It has all the potential for this. Of course, we are improving the game still, it's always things you can make better and make it even more scalable. The next game is, which we launch afterwards, Sunrise Village. We also need to find there the further right measures to allow further scalability. We think, especially in the year 2024, we will be fully ready to also start with significant scaling based on the improvements we will make for this game. All this is based on a strong foundation we are having at InnoGames. I mean, great people, the portfolio of our games in different stages of their life cycle from also some of our older games, which are of course providing a healthy bottom line, the whole technology we build around this, which allows us the live operations, the user acquisition. It's a lot of things working together and making this possible, and this together will allow us to, yeah, have focus on 3 of our games, especially to let them shine. One topic I will talk today a bit more about is the topic about using BI and LiveOps to, on the one hand, drive monetization and really run games for very, very long time. We have very good examples here. We have 1 game, Tribal Wars, you know this already. It's next year becoming 20 years old. Tribal Wars is still a relevant game in our portfolio even after 20 years. Probably everything changed during this 20 years. From the early days, from the early scribbles to early browser-based game times, we changed nearly everything. The core and the ideas that still remain, and of course, it's available on all platforms, nowadays, still has 10 thousands, many, many 10 thousands of players playing this every day, so it's still really relevant part of our portfolio. This is because we always improve the game. We never stand still. We never stop developing it, always building something new for our players and changing it over the time. One thing we are probably even more impressive, Forge of Empires, our biggest title, 10 years, growing year by year since the launch every year, getting better. I mentioned also there was a COVID peak, obviously, which even further accelerated the growth. What you can really see after launching a game, the real journey can really just begin take off. It is clearly possible to grow a game for 10 years. It is clearly possible to run a game for 20 years, which of course is an amazing time. I mean, in Tribal Wars, there are people that met in the early days in the game. They have now children that are, yeah, old enough to work at InnoGames theoretically. That's really impressive. I mean, such a long time how you can run a game. Of course, Forge of Empires, that's also great that, we had this 10-year celebration, and of course always adding something new for our players. This is what LiveOps enables if you're doing it in the right way. LiveOps, of course, many, many aspects. We can't talk about everything today. Today, we'll talk a bit more about events. I will talk about CM activities, how we launch our product updates, and how we are using analytics in our for our LiveOps for our games. We have different examples. If you combine this, it's not that only one measure is enough. If you combine these measures, you can really make your game successful for a very, very long time. Of course, it starts with the team behind the game. We at InnoGames have sometimes content-heavy games. To be very clear, our players always expecting new content, new ages in our games, new levels, in Sunrise Village, for example. Therefore, we also need significant team sizes, and we organize them in different feature lanes, different teams working at the same time on different aspects to make sure that we can. Each team has a clear focus, clear KPI goals, which their features should enable. Then, within the smaller teams, you can have also strong collaboration. It's not possible that 30 people working on the same topic at the same time. That's why we organize in smaller feature teams. These feature teams then enable us to also release new updates to our players. At InnoGames, we are very consistent here. Every 2 weeks, we publish a new version to our players where there's something new for our players. This can be some feature lanes are still working on, some topics, others already ready, we publish it to our players. Because of this 2-week cycle, it's also very good to get the feedback from our players. It's not that the game changes entirely in this amount of time, but rather it's an iterative process. We get feedback from our players, also from the data, and we can use this to then make further decisions. Are there further adjustments needed, further feedback we should consider? With this approach, it's very good to run a game for such a long time. There are never big negative surprises or anything like this. It's also important that such a release process where you know that every 2 weeks something is new. Everyone in the company, community management, and also our pro gamers, they know that we have this release cycle. It's very predictable for everyone and also very efficient to run such a process that really runs like a clock. We also, of course, as an industry standard, we A/B test our new features, and especially if you release in a regular cycle, this also helps you to react on the results, try out new stuff, finish some tests earlier if results are very positive. A/B testing also clearly plays an important role. We have the tools behind it. We are having very strong tools to in-house develop tools to really give clear overview about all the KPIs that are influenced by new tests and therefore know are the things we are developing successful or not, and can then take the right decisions. In addition to this, it's also important that you as a game maker have a good understanding of what's going on in your games. We have multi-level dashboards, so first of all, very high-level overview about the situation in the game, but then we can further drill it down on different platforms, for example, different player groups, or sometimes, or in general also in our games later on individual features, better understand what is the in-game balancing, the in-game economy. This is also important. If you want to run a game for decades, you need to make sure that you're not screwing up your economy, that you're not giving out too much resources, for example, and it's like kind of creating an inflation in your game. That would be a big mistake. That's why you need to understand what's going on in your game, and having clear dashboards helps you a lot because then you know this and this and this is going on. We also collect, for example, word clouds of the player feedback, and if one word is mentioned quite often, well, sometimes it's positive feedback, sometimes it's negative feedback, but it's clearly a good reason to look at this and take actions on this because if multiple players mention something, for example, in the App Store reviews, we should listen and understand what their feedback is. This is therefore also very important to have this layer for everything you're doing. You need to know and understand what's the impact. You have the feedback from the players, but you need to combine it with the data you're seeing. I want to mention one thing which also is very important for us at InnoGames and also important part of live operation. This is regular events we are publishing in our games. What we are doing is, every month, depends on the timing, depends on the game, we will release changes to the gameplay mechanics, additional quests, typically with some time limits, where players then compete on a different game mode for a certain time. Often these events are themed by seasons, for example, a soccer event, St. Patrick's Day events, whatever tries to fit us also to the game world. These events play a very important role for us. We are often, more than 200 days of our time, there is already an event. There are some breaks in between, so players can relax and play the game without everything. Afterwards, they get clearly something new. On this, most of the players take part in these events. This is also important that we not only targeting the small audience, but most of these players enjoy the events. We create additional revenue. Of course, depends again on the game, how big this impact is. In some of the games, it's clearly 30% of the revenue coming from these event days, combined with some special sales we are having here. We have to really like the pipeline across the whole year. We're changing it from time to time, so always something new for our players. Events are also good because you can try out some stuff, and after three weeks it's probably gone. You can next time then iterate on this and make it even better than before. Wanna quickly zoom into one of example for an event. For example, we're looking at Halloween event we had just recently. There's typically in our event mechanics some time-based mechanics. Players should reach some goals within time. This of course creates a bit more action, pressure, competition between the players to be there on time. The players have the chance to win some specials, often together combined with a special event currency they can gain in the game, which is only available during the event time. After the events, they're often the chance to also win grand prizes, things that are really stay in your city. It's not that the event is fully gone, but after event you have something to remember, which is not only visual quality, but also providing some in-game stats. It's players want to have this special items because they boost your whole game progress also after the event. This of course also creates additional motivation to take part in these events, become successful. Of course, there's a bit of time pressure, which also makes sure that there's enough competition. It's not just playing around. It's really like you want to win there and then get some great grand prize. This is really important part of our whole event pipeline, which we implement in all our games. We have different mechanics. The more mechanics we have, the more we can try out and exchange to our players, the more successful we are. Of course, these events are for all players. We are also, as part of our LiveOps, looking at CRM activities, focusing on the right offers for the right players at the right time. Throughout the player journey, we think what is the best thing we can offer to the players to make the game more fun, to maybe also have the chance to upsell them to some other offers we are providing. We are combining different measures here. Often we're starting in the early phase of a player journey with some welcome series where we give additional explanation to the players, which also increases the retention in the early days. You have a bit more additional guidance. Have seen this is working good. We are often offering starter offers to our players, giving something out for less price than regular to show them that the value that we are offering throughout our premium prices. Sometimes players start paying and they don't pay anymore. We are often also offering then the right offers which make it attractive for them to try it out again, provide enough value for our players that they have fun again with some reactivation offers. We have also some players who sometimes churn, or we can also predict, that players starting to become more inactive and are likely to churn. This is also some reason where we then also can take activities, giving them some special goodies if they're coming back, to make it then more fun if you're coming back to your city that you are already making some progress and maybe not are blocked at the same point in time where you just recently stopped playing the game, but rather get some nice help here. We can give our players better offers, better attractive offers if they're already paying, which of course also helps here. We can give our players, if after a while they are not active, or active anymore, or we think they are not active anymore, and reactivation not sort the right process, we can also try to cross-sell them to other games. I think at InnoGames we are not as far as advanced as PlaySimple is doing, to be very transparent and honest with you. This is one area where we can also learn, giving out the players the right offers once they start playing in a new game, is of course also very good. We are learning there from the experience using tools from PlaySimple. This really helps us also to, yeah, use the chances in the group to become also better on this one. What we are doing nowadays, this is what presented in the last slides is done all manually. What we're doing nowadays is also that we are automatically segmenting our players in different groups. We find, for example, using case study of Elvenar here, players that are, yeah, different based on their spending behavior, based on their play behavior, putting them into different groups. With AI-based systems, we're trying to find the best offer for them, where they can, yeah, get also something from the game which is exactly the right based on a player group. This also means, the AI is also trying out different stuff, automatically testing stuff which we otherwise could not do manually in such a detailed way. It's helpful to have this automatic AI that tries out different things and helps to get the players good offers at the right time. What we have seen here, for example, is really like in a player group where we tried out these mechanisms, compared to our more manual approach, we increased the player lifetime value by EUR 6, which was really impressive for this player group. If done right, and that does not always work, but if done right, it can be really successful for us. We have a lot of data, and with this data we can try to find the best things for our players. If you combine all these measures, this really shows you can improve the lifetime value of a game if you're doing this right over multiple years. Not every quarter you see here, sometimes it also goes down a bit from time to time. Different reasons. Sometimes also the marketing mix changes a bit. We're looking at organic players on mobile U.S., but sometimes from a App Store feature you get in, lots of players which are maybe not too enthusiastic about your game. Of course, there's always a bit fluctuation, but what you can clearly see is you can increase it year by year over time. What we're also seeing here in our newer games, Rise of Culture, Sunrise Village, we are seeing the increase meant in the player lifetime value quarter by quarter. It's getting better. As long as we launch the right features to our players, they like it, they are good for the company, we, yeah, have the chance to continuously improve our lifetime value of our players. That's what live operations is about, making the game continuously better over years. If done right, you can run a game for 10 years or, as Tribal Wars shows, even for more than 20 years. To summarize this, it enables the success really over decades, if done right. Players always wanna have new content. They wanna have changes to the games. Even in the short term, they may be a bit skeptical. In long term, it's always good to have these changes. We think for live operations, it's also important, and what we have achieved and learned a lot of different mechanics, having a strong event pipeline. We tried out multiple different features, and see how the player reactions are. Some of them are not so good, but others players really like and then we repeat them also a bit more and further iterate them on them. Of course, with CM activities, it's really about providing the right offer to every player in the player journey at the right time to make sure that the game is fun, we are providing the right things so they also become paying players. Combining this is really what's all about and that's what we build a lot of experience at InnoGames over the last 20 years, you can nearly say, if you can include the hobby times. We can also share this experience in the group to help also other companies in the group learn from which event mechanics are the right ones, for example. All right. Thank you very much, and I'm happy to take some questions regarding InnoGames or live operations. Can we move you just to the center of the stage? Yeah. Thank you so much. No problem. All right. We have one question at the back. Hi, thank you for the presentation. I played Tribal Wars for like 5 to 10 years or something. Very good. Woo! Thank you. Yeah. In the beginning, it felt like a real grind. Mm-hmm. You really had to play and wait for everything to complete. At the end of it felt like almost pay-to-win. Can you explain what happened with the game over time, and is there a risk that you lose the long-term competitive players by having opportunities to purchase. Mm-hmm ... win by paying in the games? It shouldn't be fully pay-to-win. I mean, that's really interesting balance also with live operations. The whole world changes, means the Tribal Wars that was back in 2003 would not be the right game for the market as we have today. That means, we made changes over the years, but especially for a game like Tribal Wars, that's also the challenge to always find the right balance with your existing player base. That it's, the right decisions in the game should always be relevant for your game success. At the same time, of course, you wanna make sure that it runs as a business. That's where we are, yeah, finding the right balance, and working on to give the players, yeah, a game that's still competitive and at the same time a business case. We're seeing it's, from business side, it's very stable game. The strategy I think is the right thing for a game like Tribal Wars. Okay. Thank you. All right. We have an online question. In player categories, the person asking questions writes that, "I didn't see a zero revenue category. What% are zero revenue, and what is the monetization trend in long-term Forge players? I mean, most of the players don't spend any money in our games, and that's fine. By far the most players, I think we didn't disclose actually the detailed numbers. Yeah, it's significant amount of our players playing completely for free. We still, I mean, this is player segments, we can still try to make them right offers. Sometimes our offers are good enough that the players like them, and then they're also becoming players. That's part of our CRM activities, trying out to give them something where they really see enough value for their hard-earned money. In the end, of course, most players play for free. Some of them see ads, we started recently this year also based on group experience. There's a bit of money, we are earning this time, but some are really playing the game completely for free. That's fine. It's part of our business model. Not everyone has to pay money for our games. All right. All right. Thank you very much, Henrik. Thank you. All right. With that, we're going to move straight forward and welcome Scot, the co-CEO and partner in Ninja Kiwi to the stage. Scot, your remote is there. Don't believe me just watch. Come on. Don't believe me just watch. Smoother than a fresh jar of SKIPPY. Thank you everybody. Really appreciate having such a full audience and being able to take part in this. It's my pleasure to introduce Ninja Kiwi, give you some more information about the company itself, and then take a deeper dive into community and organic marketing, which is a real focus of ours. First, we'll start out with a video of some of our gameplay. I hope you saw that upper corner. That's a combination of Bloons and Zombie Assault gameplay. That was Quin69. He's one of the top Twitch streamers. He tried that level about 40 times before he won it, and that's why he got up and ran around the room the way that he did. He has a really sort of aggressive in your face audience, and so they were goading him the whole time, every single time that he was losing. He was truly excited when he finally passed that level. To give you a little background on Ninja Kiwi. It was founded in 2006 by brothers Chris and Stephen Harris. That was absolutely out of a passion for playing games. They both had day jobs, and they wanted to build games, and they wanted to build a strong and successful and sustainable company. They had an early hit in 2008 with the Bloons IP, both in 2 Flash games. Both casual physics puzzler and the original Bloons TD game moving into tower defense. They were still only about 6 people through that time. I joined in 2010. American by birth, a New Zealander by choice. I came to help scale the games and the company. Partnered with Chris and Stephen, and used my experience as an executive producer and studio leader at Electronic Arts and Activision. We got early traction with that, and then David and Barry joined the management team. They were co-founders of a company called Digital Goldfish that was doing the first mobile versions of the Bloons IP. The first Bloons mobile games were a license deal, because we didn't have the capability. We were a small Flash developer. When they came on board, that. We basically got two sets of co-founders, in one with Ninja Kiwi. We've all partnered together very strongly over the years. That set the company structure for the next 10 years. Two small, but entirely capable studios, of servicing games from concept, to launch, to LiveOps. Both of these studios can build games from start to finish. Importantly, they're both small teams from small countries who both love to punch above their weight. New Zealand and Scotland are really about showing their presence on the world stage. We're driven to do that. We're really passionate about it. We love the fact that we can compete on the world stage. In 2021, our story changed. For 10 years, we were working really, really well together, doing everything that we can, growing, having success. There was just such a perfect skill and culture fit when we met the folks from MTG. It wasn't really something that we're like, "Hey, we really wanna sell our company," it was like, "This is the next step that we need to take." It was not only about the skill and culture fit, but it was about the capabilities that could come. We're already great friends. Kongregate have been our friends for years. Both Bloons TD 5 and SAS: Zombie Assault 4 were two of the most popular games on Kongregate's Flash portal, so we'd known and worked with them, and we'd already been working with Kongregate on the ad side even before we were part of MTG. Clearly they had capabilities in the areas of user acquisition and business intelligence that we could work from. We're incredibly proud of the fact that our management team, basically the lowest tenure member of our management team, is 5 years. Most of the management team has 10 to 16 years with the business. I myself have been in games for 30 years. Quite a lot of experience there. Another thing that we're really proud of is the fact that across our 80-person team, our average tenure is 6.5 years. That is a really landmark figure across the industry. It allows us to have a muscle memory within the team. We know how we work together. We work together really well. We can play to our strengths, and it also means that we've been able to learn from both the successes and the failures of previous iterations of our games. Bloons is absolutely at the core of our portfolio. It is our main revenue driver. We're proud of that, but it's not just one or two games. It's a series of games, and importantly, it's an ecosystem that we built around those games, an ecosystem of different game experiences, most of them still broadly in the strategy category, but also including casual games, and some action games. The ecosystem in our case, we're a little bit of an anomaly, having a very popular paid game, still in the marketplace, very unusual. It was a choice that we had to make again between BTD 5 and BTD 6. We made the choice to continue to keep BTD 6 as a paid game. What that does as an ecosystem is it allows us to bring players in through the lower barrier to entry free games and then introduce them to the paid game. Similarly, having a paid game allows you to have an absolute guaranteed spender that then you can share back with your free-to-play games. That makes a very interesting and powerful dynamic. We've also built up the SAS, the Zombie Assault franchise, and we're happy to announce that we've got a new Zombie Assault game in early development. Our ambitions for that are sky-high, and I'll speak more to that in a little bit. We've also got an unannounced Bloons game, and that's gonna be in the new sub strategy subcategory. Then we have an ambitious new multiplayer IP game as well. Similar to Hendrik's story, we also take a look at LiveOps games that aren't performing well, that either take mindshare or just focus away from the rest of the game or aren't really accretive to the bottom line. We make the decision to kill early if we see. There's a couple of titles that never even made it to the stage where they had app icons, because they didn't pass internal creative standards. Strategy is our wheelhouse. We love playing there. Strategy and RPG are the things that excite us as players, and certainly as designers. What really excites us and where we've developed a competitive foothold in the market is in deep progression mechanics, and that's where the RPG elements in particular come in. Skill-based play, because that's really important in allowing players and the community to establish the difference between a good player and a great player, and that has a lot to do with engagement and investment over time. We've developed a technical strength in our games. Having core technology that helps you do better in the marketplace is an absolute strategic advantage, and we've really, since early Flash games and then continuing through mobile and desktop, have a real skill in dense simulations. We are able to get a lot of Bloons on screen and a lot of zombies on screen. That creates gameplay moments that are both emotional and exciting, but it also gives you game opportunities to be able to take care of all of those objects in the simulation? We've done this all organically, again, without any paid marketing. We're a strong player in the tower defense category, our ambition is to grow more than that. It's a relatively small subcategory, you know, we should be able to own it. We can do better than that. Again, that's where we can tap into the MTG village and the expertise with, you know, user acquisition and business intelligence. We intend to use that to drive our leadership in the tower defense category, our position in the overall strategy category, and particularly to pay attention to some of the markets where we're already showing strength, but where we know we can get more penetration. This is our revenue curve over the last 18 quarters. This also roughly aligns with the launch cycle of Bloons TD 6. This is our total company, reported revenue, showing strong growth. Clearly, there are some moments here. Q1s tend to be strong for us. That follows on not only the Christmas seasonal content, but also strong updates. We always do big updates in December and June. Those always transfer well into the into the first quarter. A little bit of COVID, post-COVID activity here, so not quite the same there, but that's definitely what's going on in those, in those areas. We also have strong summer quarters, you can see this real jump here. This is when we introduced the Boss events and the Paragons into BTD 6. It had a massive impact, along with the sales and activities that we were working on with content creators, really creating an energy around these new updates and the new content that was available. We've had a strong history of growth, and we know that we can drive that further. It's a combination. As you add things, we're up to our 33rd. We're, you know, in a couple of weeks gonna be launching our 34th major update to Bloons TD 6. We're literally adding more value to the game, and that's one of the reasons why we increased the price point on BTD 6. That was a pretty gutsy move to increase price. We didn't know we were necessarily moving into the economic conditions that we had. We could see, based on our players' responses, the quality of the game and the other offerings out there in the marketplace, that there was more value in the game. Over time, you can see from that revenue that it's also players simply have more to engage with and spend on over time. What are our ambitions? To continue absolutely crushing it. To build Bloons TD as a platform. We want to get beyond thinking about it as a game, those questions of, "When's BTD 7?" We're thinking at this point that BTD 6 is gonna be that game for a long time, that the ideas that we would have for BTD 7, will be, you know, will be better, more quickly served. The ability that we have technically to add new content into the game right now, we can do that both more efficiently, effectively, and faster to market within Bloons TD 6. There's a lot of ideas that we can include there. Then you see other great examples out there in the market of games that have done this really well, and we see that as a really positive model. Consistent content and distribution additions. We're already working more closely with our content creators, increasing the players' ability to not just participate, but to create within the game. That includes mod support, which is really important, especially on the Steam platform. Looking forward, considering a way to extend what we've started with the content creator revenue sharing but looking at player creator revenue sharing as well as a way to engage players. I do have to ask a question at this point as we talk about the reach of Bloons. How many people have non-MTG people, have played, you or your families or children have played a Bloons game? I see some hands. See some hands. Oh, my goodness. Oh, I'm gonna have to make some choices here. Just do the typical... I need to see the hands still. There goes the mic. All right. There's one. That's an easy one. Uh-oh. All right. See, somebody's gonna have to fight for some of these. Oh, oh, you had it. You had it. Oh, that was a softball. You gotta go deep. Oh. Hey, no, no. That one. No. Wah. Oh. Oh. Take out the A.V. Open those up. Open those up. All right. Open them up and show them around. Hold them up, please. Hold them up. Oh. This is one of the things that you can do when you get a brand that gets to a certain level. We talk about evergreen and mass market. This is a partnership that we are running with Makeship. We've been working with them for about a year now. This is, this is purely additive licensing revenue. They, they do limited time, crowdsourced, super high-quality plushies. Look at the quality of those things. They are absolutely amazing. Again, with very little cost to our team in terms of mind share or actual, you know, just spent time from our community management and production team, we're able to produce these. A few times a year, they energize the community, they get creators really excited, and they are, and then they're sitting on people's shelves. Their existence of the IP outside of the of the time that they're actually spending in the game. I'm also super pleased to announce verbally here that the ink is just dry, when we talk about additional distribution, that we have just inked a partnership agreement with Netflix. Bloons TD 6 will be- Whoo. Bloons TD 6 will be coming to Netflix subscribers in 2023. That's very exciting. There's more to do out there on this. Community is a huge focus for us. We'll talk more about this later. There's too much to go into 1 slide, that's why the next, like, 15 are about that. A new IP wheelhouse. This is really important. Maria said it. New games mean growth. They don't mean growth just because one of them has a chance to do, you know, be really successful or to help us with our internal cross-promotion. Absolutely, we wanna continue to extend Bloons. We are going to have this new game in the Bloons, in the Bloons IP. We wanna take Zombie Assault to the next level. We see we have every opportunity. We've got the technical know-how, the design know-how to really take that to the Bloons level. We wanna to get this new really ambitious multiplayer game out there as well. That has value not just in the sense of the revenue that those are driving, but they activate all of the other elements of the MTG village. The cross-promotion and ad monetization, every time we add one of those games, the cross-promotion and ad monetization that Siddharth and Priti were talking about, the ability to focus and refine the business intelligence and the player responses that Hendrik was talking about, the ability to learn from and improve the quality of those new games, which is something that Sean's gonna talk about, and then the ability to introduce players to new technologies and player interests that Markus is gonna talk about. Those are the things that every time that anybody in the MTG group brings a new game to the table, that adds value to the entire group in a much more additive way than before. We are pretty excited about what we can do here. How are we gonna do this? Well, we play to our strengths. We're really kind of simple when it comes to this. All these other people that have been presenting are really, really, really, really, really smart. All we do is just care an absolute ton about everything that we do. We look at this stuff with an incredible intentionality. I guess that's not all we do, but, you know, mainly, that's how it feels sometimes. We focus on the way that we build things as a team. We leverage these small teams of highly motivated people who have a whole bunch of muscle memory and experience in these games. We operate a really flat structure. It's easy to do when there's only 40 people in a given studio. We can do that, but we see that as a creative strength, and we play to that. It gives us some highly intentional, highly discursive, and highly iterative design process and build process. We're able to fail fast, improve, and continue that conversation. The games themselves. Focusing on the ecosystem that we've created, not just, you know, about that paid and free translation and the ability for genres to inform each other, but to really look at how we can learn from the systems that we've already put in place. Doubling down on what we do best. Again, that's deep progression. Deep progression models engage players for longer and get them into places where they feel like investing in the game. Then the skill-based play is what people who get into a game and are naturally great, they create aspiration for other players to be as strong as they are. If you can't do it naturally, then you spend more time, and you invest more in the game in order to get there. Then the third thing is really focusing on the target-rich environments and making sure that we're building best-in-class games that are truly competitive on platforms like Steam. Because we are on the Steam platform, we'll show some slides on this, we know how to be competitive there, and we set a really high mark for ourselves. Community. Everything that we're already doing, with our game community and our content creator community, and that's what I'd like to talk to you more about now. It is important to keep in mind, that Ninja Kiwi has had all of its growth, and from our perspective, success, through organic marketing. We really, you know, we can't say that we haven't spent a dime because we technically we did. Like back in 2012, we did some Facebook games, and we did some test marketing for that. In the last year, we've actually we've run a few tests, with MTG working with Kongregate again on our Battles 2 game. For the lion's share of that time, the growth that we've seen has been without spending any user acquisition dollars. How do we do that? By building, being responsive to, being again, highly conscious of and intentional about the way that we worked with our community as it was developing. The way we do that is by looking at it in four core categories. The first one is around the games themselves and ways that players can both participate but also create inside of those games. That creation piece is critical. Once we've got players invested and involved, we have to have a conversation with them. We create a discursive loop between our players and the development team. Once we've got that conversation going, we look at the way that we can harness and focus, that energy and direct it into community management. The last piece is tying in, the very hard to control but nevertheless incredibly powerful, aspect of content creation and what that means to the modern gaming world. I personally, I don't think there's too many other advocates out here. I haven't heard anybody else sort of say this in the press, but I think it's, and, you know, I think collectively in the company, but for me personally, this is a really big point. I think this is one of the most revolutionary things that's happened, in gaming, since the introduction of the mobile device. The way that content creators, they take an interactive medium, and they perform it in an interactive fashion on, especially when they're streaming on an interactive stage. That just creates a sort of meta-level of entertainment for a player that's already interested in that content that is unlike anything that we've seen in the history of advertisement. That's pretty powerful, and I think we should pay attention to it. How do we get players into the games and move them from participants to creators? This is a really important stage because it's a fundamental step in milestones. It breaks barriers between players and developers. And it's also fun. If you've made something, you're a lot more likely to show it off, want to show it off and share it. Chris and Stephen again had the brainstorm to take the tools that they'd made to build levels inside of the Bloons Flash game and expose those on in a website. Basically, they just took those same tools and put them on a website. Had some immediate traction. That was valuable both because suddenly, you know, the three people at that time didn't have to make all the levels themselves, but they also were surprised at what players could come up with. Had some incredible early stats on the traction there. One of the fundamental issues of it was that players had to play the game in one place and go to Bloons World and create the levels in another place. Still, it was an incredible foundation from which to build. We looked at this as we had the next game come into the portfolio about not only how could we improve those tools, but how could we get them into the game. Again, by improving the granularity, we brought more people into that design process, and that gave us more opportunities to be surprised by what players would come up with, continuing to break down that barrier between player and developer. We saw in the community conversations that were happening around this, that players were actually getting smarter about the levels that they were building, and they were actually making more astute comments about the levels that we would build internally. It basically educated the entire player system about what is the difference between an okay level and a great level. The technology was also moving forward, so we were able to get those tools into the Flash games themselves, and that was a really big step, but it was still a struggle on mobile. Technology for player creation on mobile is restricted by the platform. In the case of phones especially, you've got a smaller screen space, it's difficult to get the UI to display, it's difficult to interact with some of that UI. We're happy to say that that is a challenge that we met and basically exceeded our expectations on with Bloons TD 6. We were able to get our entire map and challenge creator system into the hands of players. Another thing about this was it cut out a creation loop because we weren't letting the players author any visible content or enter any text that wasn't gated. We were 100% sure that we were adding safe content into the ecosystem, which is, you know, important for any game, but especially one where you know that families are playing them. We created a place to display that content inside the game. The entire content browser was created as a way to share player creations inside the game. Can't really see some of those numbers up there clearly, but, you know, some of those are, you know, 76,000 likes for a random set of levels there, and that means, you know, hundreds of thousands of plays in order to get that. There's 220 pages of that content. It's incredibly inspiring to other players. It not only, you know, adds more content to the game and gives players things to do, but for anybody that's interested in building levels, it's a way to be surprised and inspired by what somebody else has created. One other thing, while you're concentrating on all the stuff that's happening inside your game, a lot like those plushies, is what's happening outside your game. How is your game living outside of the gameplay itself? We saw that this was just starting to happen. We'd get random posts in random places where players were combining their personal interests and passions and talents with our IP. It's like, we didn't ask them to do this. This was not a community pushed event. This is just stuff that players were doing for fun because they love the IP and they love these characters. That clearly feeds into the discussion channel. We needed a place to be able to show and interact with these items. We needed a conversation. How do you start a conversation? How do you have a conversation? You have to start a conversation. Somebody has to say something. The best place for us to say things is about our games. One of the core things that we do is, and we've developed this over time, this is an example of the last update that we released for Bloons TD 6, and it goes into incredible granular detail. We started at update notes with just a few general notes about what was going on in the game. Now, I'd say we've got best-in-class update notes. It explains every feature and what we've done in the game, but more importantly, why we've done it. It's really important that players understand whether it was a balance change, or a bug fix, or a response to community feedback, or just something that we internally had discussed and played, and we saw that it was actually, you know, something that was reducing player time in the game. We're willing to share some of that data back with players. Telling them why gets the community much more on side with what you're doing. Another thing that we've done more strongly in the last couple of years especially is get ahead of what's coming next. Letting players have some insight and to be able to start them talking and thinking about the kinds of features that would be coming. This is not to build a trap for yourselves, which would be, you know, tempting to do. You don't wanna promise features, you don't wanna promise timetables, but this is a way to just inform players of what's coming next, and that can often help bridge the time that you have between updates and events. Another thing that we do, I guess to say, we're pushing information out to the community, that's not a conversation. It starts a conversation, but you need to create push-pull mechanisms to have that two-sided conversation. Well, one of the things that we do is a weekly blog post. Easy, old school, but a way of collecting community feedback and mostly questions and then answering those every week. This is an example from earlier in November where we just happened to get, like, three or four questions about, well, you know, the developers' pets. We went to our Slack channel, which is Homeworking Buddies, and we grabbed all of the pictures that we could recently of the pets that were in there, and we shared that back to the community. What does that do? Does it help anything? Does it have anything to do with Bloons or Zombie Assault? No, it doesn't. What it does is it humanizes us as a developer. It shows a connection point. The fact that we have pets too, it makes us human, it gives us something to relate to. Because somebody else has a Persian cat, suddenly they like us more. That's okay. That's a great thing, okay. Figuring out ways to share our experiences and share, you know, our loves of gaming and other aspects of our lives is a good thing to do. It sets a personality for the company, and it also sets a tone of the discussions that we wanna have. It is important in our, in our questions that we also make it clear what we're not willing to talk about. We don't just answer every question. If there's questions that we can't answer, we just say, you know, we either come up with a funny way of doing it, or we just say, "No, that's, you know, that's off-bounds and we're not gonna answer that one." It's also important and really subtle that this is a way to develop your IP. This is a stance that we took with the blog a long time ago, particularly with regard the Zombie Assault world is pretty like, yeah, we created the Zombie Assault world, and that's what it is, and we can answer questions there. The Bloons world, we treat in a really more like a Star Trek observer perspective, where we don't act as the creators of the Monkey world, but more the discoverers of it. We're right in the same position as the players are. We align ourselves with the players and say, "We don't know exactly why they do this. It might be because of this. This is our theory about why the..." Why don't we answer those questions? Because it leaves them open. If we were to answer and close those questions and make some of these feedback canon, then the players would stop talking about it. Because we leave it open-ended, they continue to extend that conversation and come up with some really crazy and fun theories that then we get to play further with. Reddit and Discord are the places where our community lives. You have to have a home, and it's really good to land on technologies that people are already familiar with and using. We're proud that we just reached 250,000 subscribers on our Reddit. That puts us in the top 1% of all of all subreddits, which is a pretty awesome mark. One of the important things about what these technologies provide is a constancy, but also a filtering system. By channels on Discord and filters on and flair on Reddit, you can more easily get players to the to the content that they're interested in, the communities where they want to be a more active participant in discussions. The main thing that this does is just validate the time that they're spending. This is where players and super fans are spending hours and hours of time. You know, sometimes they're typing as they're playing, but a lot of times they're spending time outside the game. Again, this is IP engagement outside of the game itself. But the main thing that it does socially is it just says that you're not alone, like you're not the only person that likes this. You're not the only person that thinks that this art is fun. It gives you a community, and that is incredibly validating. What's one more way of connecting the developer and the community and to break down those barriers? Make your community your developers. We have hired four of our Apex players, over 7.5 years is the oldest tenure of one of these people. They are all legendary players known by name by the community. We found ways, you know. Again, this is not an easy thing to do. These are young people, many of whom had never left home and, you know, for, to get them to travel, you know, to move to New Zealand, from Australia to, you know, to, yeah, still in the U.S., two of them from Australia. It's a, you know, it's a huge thing. I mean, they are taking the next step in their life. We found ways to work with them in ways that they could be completely additive to the process, and it really was a win for everybody involved. It's a win for these people because they basically get the job that they were always, you know, that they've always wanted, but to some degree were already doing as being such dedicated members to the community. Now they get to work for a developer that they've always been connected with on games that they have loved and spent most of their lives playing. A huge win for them. For Ninja Kiwi, it's just so fantastic to have that expertise on your team, to have that knowledge being spread throughout the entire team as they're talking from the very first moment that a design idea comes to the base. It's just so much more valuable than getting reaction at any point down the road. Incredibly valuable. To the community itself, it validates that Ninja Kiwi's paying attention to the community, like that we really do care about what they say, that we value the people that are in the community. It's a way of basically validating everybody in the community by bringing these folks on board. Certainly when these people express an opinion about where Ninja Kiwi is or why we did a thing that it has immediate authenticity and meaning to that community because they're still, you know, just as connected and just as known throughout the communities. Now we've got a good, healthy discussion, and we've broken down some of those barriers between community and developer. How do we action it? Have to say when it comes to community management, customer support is job one. You have to. At the point that a customer has that a player has a problem or wants to give you feedback, you've got to be responsive to that. If you don't do that's your first job, that's your first job down. This is absolutely the best way to establish yourself past that litmus test of being a good developer. There is a pretty, you know, there's a pretty binary sense for that in the gaming community about whether you're a good developer or not. The responsiveness and the care that you show through not only the quality but the frequency and responsiveness of customer support is critical, and we have incredibly high standards for the turnaround on that. Our focus on player feedback has also helped us establish incredibly high ratings within our games of, you know, 4.8 on both the App Store and the Google Play Store. Pretty proud of the fact that we're the number 15 top-rated game on Steam of all time, based on player reviews. That is incredible to think about the games that are in the top 100 that are below us. We continue to duke it out with Counter-Strike. They actually got us today when I looked, I was like, "Oh," you know. We're flipping back and forth, which is pretty cool. I'm sorry. You know, again, this is us little guys in New Zealand, and, yeah, and that's Valve's one of Valve's best game on their platform. I'm fine to have that arm wrestle. This is not just bragging rights, though. We're incredibly proud of it, and it absolutely hypes the team up, but it's not just bragging rights. This is a point-of-purchase critical issue that these kinds of reviews and the responses that people see, and it's not just a canned, you know, contact customer support. People are seeing that at the point of download and purchase. It's an incredibly validating to see the developers' responsiveness and those scores, because they are absolutely helping to grease the wheels of that download and purchase. Of course, we've got all of the tools of a massive LiveOps system. In-game events, daily challenges, tournaments, boss battles, treasure hunts, odysseys, multiplayer events, and community contests, all of which we can bring to the table to help engage players. They provide variety, they anticipation. They give players things to look forward to. They provide challenges for players, and they create moments of conversation. Every time we do a daily challenge, there's a race effectively for the various community members to be the first one to post how to beat it. Every single day, people are rushing to play and write their tips and tricks for how to beat that daily challenge, and it's just mapped on every event that we that we do. Some of these are text, and some of these are videos. It just creates subjects for conversation. It's not just that they post that, but then there's a whole stream of comments and discussion beyond that. Contests are really, really interesting here and another way that we break down the barrier between player and developer. Contests are not just about engaging the people that want to enter the contest. They really do engage the entire community. We run a contest, we say, you know, "Design us a map," or, "Design us a profile background." We get a whole bunch of submissions. The submissions are all public. Then we curate them, and we push them back to the audience. We ask the community to vote on them. We've already curated them to make sure that they're going to go into our game, to make sure that we have the technical capability, that we think they're basically good designs, and that we'd be happy to build those. When we get those votes back, it's not just those creators who win. It's the entire community. Because when that map, which is in the game, went in Update 33, goes in the game, it's not just the player creator that gets a glow from that. It's everybody who endorsed it. Everybody who voted for it had a hand in getting that map in the game. It's another way to really extend that connection. Again, these maps are in or going in the game, and those profile backgrounds are all in the game, that's come through community management. Now that we've got player content, we've got a conversation, and we're directing that conversation, now it's time to link it back with content creators, and in sort of the massive spread and power, but also chaos that they represent. Ninja Kiwi is not new to content creation. We got into the thick of it 10 years ago. We started our own Ninja Kiwi channel 10 years ago, and started putting little bits of information. It wasn't really about updates. They were just little videos, really trying it out. Over time, built up to have quite a presence in the last couple of years. In particular, have become a central place for players to get official news about updates. This is largely on the shoulders of our head community manager, Sam, who has tirelessly put out dozens and dozens of update videos. Those have all increased in quality because of the frequency, the depth of detail that's shared in those, and the production values. We've simply gotten better at it. For that same amount of time or even a little bit longer, we've had connections with independent content creators. These are content creators that got into the system early and especially as games got traction as one of the main ways to grow your channel and your brand. We see some of the oldest ones here, you know, 2011, 2012. These are content creators that just independently found Bloons and started working with that as a way to build their channels and their brands. We pretty much kept a stick-to-your-knitting approach with this. We built the games, and they built their videos. We've made great strides in connecting with this with these content creators further to inform them and give them content for their channels. Twitch really came onto the market, you know, about four years ago. Obviously, Twitch has been around for a lot longer than that, but their focus on mobile, you know, didn't really see the leverage in the last, in the last year as a combination of focus on desktop and COVID with a lot of time on people's hands really accelerated the growth of Twitch and our growth along with it. This is Bloons TD 6 over the last four years. And those are peak viewership. Now that showed us that when top streamers came on, they could drive a lot of people into Bloons. We'd see very corollary spikes in our downloads on those same times. The quality of those players, not always that great. They wouldn't stick with the game necessarily. Usually, they'd just follow the streamer. A lot of cases, because of the retention of Bloons in particular, they would stick around, and they would become somebody who would play over time. The most important thing for us, and this is really great that Twitch shares statistics in the way that they do, was, and because YouTube just doesn't have good stats that are publicly available, is that we were able to see the impact of our content drops. Because we could see that our, that the streamers, the number of streamers, the number of hours of content that they're creating and then, and the viewership was going up right after our content drops, we could see how much that content was giving them something new to stream about and giving viewers something more to re-engage with. What's another way to align ourselves with content creators? Is align our business interests. These are all entrepreneurs. These are incredibly passionate people willing to basically spend their whole weeks dedicated to creating content. They are trying to build up their channels, they're trying to build up their businesses. Recently, we partnered with a group called Nexus.gg to create creator codes for us. They gave us, they have a platform that allows us to work pretty simply with content creators, create a code. When a player goes into our game, puts that code into an interface, any IAP that they make inside that game is gonna get credited back. A portion of that is gonna get credited back as a revenue share to the creator that's associated with that code. We started a test with this about 4 months ago. This is, this snapshot is only from about 2 months of revenue. We only worked with a dozen handpicked of these Bloons Tubers. The important thing to look at there is that blue section of the pie chart, and that revenue line that doesn't have any answered pre-spend because there was no spend before the content creator code. These players had either been playing the game and not spending, or they purchased the game and then started spending because of the creator code. This was a huge win. Yes, we're sharing some of that revenue back, but once we factor that in, we're seeing about a 20%-25% lift on the spending power of people using creator code. Really optimistic at this. Certainly, we need to see that, if that's sustainable. We need to see if that'll grow over time, and we need to see whether that's gonna develop with more creators in the program. We're very excited about that. Clearly, community is central to Ninja Kiwi's growth in the past, and we see it as central to the future. We know that we can increase that by better consistency with roadmap and content information going to both the community and to content creators. Continue to work events and contests, and as we open up new sections of the game, that's gonna open up new opportunities there. We've also added a creator to our staff. We've taken one of these new content creators. We're now contracting with them to help create content for our Ninja Kiwi channel. This dovetails beautifully with our player creativity tool suite that we're adding to the game. We're giving more and more players next year. We're looking at adding a full map editor, a map creator, using puzzle pieces to actually create maps inside of Bloons TD 6. We've got big plans for where to go from there, including that possibility of a player-creator revenue share. This really sums up what we've done. We see that you know, I just want to impress it. It's like this stuff doesn't just happen. It's like, oh, wow, all this stuff is happening out there, and no, we're not spending money to make it happen. We're spending time. We're spending, you know, conversations. We're connecting with people. There's just an incredible amount of intentionality from the design component to the technology that we're using, to the platforms that we're doing, to the kinds of people that we're training to interact with the public in this way. An incredible amount of intentionality that's going to create these pillars. We can activate these further within our existing games. We know that we can, we can activate them and accelerate them inside our new games. What's most exciting to us is to be able to share these learnings with the MTG Village and hopefully establish this community influence growth as a pillar not just for Ninja Kiwi but for all the MTG studios. Thank you very much. We've got 1 minute for questions. Let's see. Do we have any questions, or is everyone keen to go and grab some lunch? We have some questions. That's great. Scott, great presentation. Thank you. Thank you, sir. The obvious question, though, is as well as you've done, if you were to spend money on user acquisition, wouldn't your return on ad spend be, what, good, and then wouldn't it be worthwhile to do so anyway? Absolutely. I mean, that's part of why we're here. As we say, we're already in some early stages of testing that on free-to-play. We're also starting to test with Apple Search Ads some ad spending for BTD6. To us, it's sort of like it's not just about the free-to-play model. How about if we can make BTD6 as a paid game work with profitable marketing? That is a huge opportunity for us. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much for the presentation. It was great. I'm really interested in the sort of creator economy sort of elements of what you're doing, and I'm I mean, obviously for you guys it's a real opportunity that's being exploited in the here and now. Do you think that's something that can be done more broadly across the group, or does it just not work with some of the other genre and types of game within the MTG village? Appreciate the question. Can it be replicated? Is it dependent on game or technology or time? The broad answer is yes, absolutely. This is about connecting with your players in ways that are important, based on how those games and how those communities already function. Looking for ways to create that connection with the content itself. I do think that that bridging of trying to create, you know, Preeti and I had a quick conversation the last time we met about, well, maybe the players could create a few puzzles and that would be really... It's as simple as that. It's also really important, and we see this in most of the games, we see, you know, in all these presentations, the characters. The characters are really important to this, to sort of give players something to connect to. I think by having characters to relate to and player content, that's the source, that's the tinder to start that community conversation that ultimately can go from there. Whether content creators are going to create streams of every single game, obviously they're not gonna work in other ways. There are other ways that players are gonna be playing and talking about those things. I do think that there's clearly community group, you know, there are already conversations happening, guarantee it out there about what the puzzles are, and especially as those... if the puzzles can have event flows that are the same for everybody, that's really interesting, 'cause now players are looking at the same thing at the same time. With a little bit of movement in most places, I think absolutely those loops are repeatable. All right. It looks like we have no further questions. Thank you. Thank you so much, Doug. We're now going to do lunch, and we reconvene at 1:30. Lunch is upstairs, so we ask you to please just take the stairs, go up. We hope you enjoy it, and then we'll talk to you during and see you back here in an hour. That was it. We want more. We want more. We want more. No. You want more? Well just, you know, what do I get? You get an audience. It's true. It's true. I always wanted to dance in front of people. All right, everybody, welcome back. For people joining us on stream, welcome back. Thank you for waiting. We're a few minutes late, but we hope that's okay. I hope that you've gotten some food, I hope that you've gotten to stretch your legs, and I do hope that you've had, everyone, a chance to interact, to meet each other and meet the MTG team, the wider team across the group, which essentially is the point of this day. We will now bring on stage Sean, the Founder and CEO of Hutch. He's a cool dude. The one thing I must say that he was trying to do Movember, but he broke 'cause he didn't like it, so he has his mustache back, but we all love it. Sean, come on up and, talk to us about game development. Welcome everyone to our office. It's really nice to have you all here. I'm about to play a video about the studio, but also our games, and I hope the video really encapsulates for you guys how we operate or who we are as a vibe, and our world-class culture as well. Let the video roll, please. Brilliant. Yep, that. Okay. Founded the business 11 years ago. I did have a tash then as well. That's about a 2-year-old photo. Anton, I am donning a tash all the time. But I am doing this for Movember. Yeah. When we founded the business, a lot of us came from... How can I put this? Dysfunctional games businesses that were pretty tough to work at, but ultimately really passionate people, really creative people that loved to make games. A lot of management problems happen where people get involved in how the games are made. We came with this energy of, we can make a business that's different and better, really look after the employees and, you know, I've grown with these guys for the last 10 years. The business has three studios. One's in Dundee. We do our performance marketing there. One in Nova Scotia in Canada. We do a lot of sort of back-end technology there, but we're also starting to make games. The large majority of staff are based in London as well. I'm not gonna walk you through each staff member, but we're all here, so you can meet and greet these people. Yeah. The business itself, we have launched, I think we're up to our twelfth game. The main drivers of the business are 2 games. If you hadn't noticed from the video, we make racing games, and I'll talk a bit about that later. The main drivers of the business at the moment are Top Drives and Formula One Clash. Top Drives is a collectible car trading racing game. You don't actually race in it, but you collect cars and you trade with them. Formula One Clash is a light management racing game. Again, you don't race, but you do manage drivers as a manager inside the game as well. Those two have really, really grown the business. It probably looks like we don't do that much. We're just working on two games, but actually, and I'll talk about it a bit later, but we're doing a lot behind the scenes in terms of the games that we're making and making sure they're the best games they can be and the most successful. We're working on three games at the moment. It's a really, really exciting time for us in the coming year. As a business, we're currently ranked number two in the racing market. It's not good enough for us. We wanna get to number one. I think what's really interesting for this, when I started Hutch, I think games were predominantly made for men. I think what's also interesting about racing is people just assume racing is for purely men. And actually, if you look at our audience, it's diverse. Hutch as a business also represents that diversity. We're pretty close to these numbers as well. It shows how the market can grow even more and more. Our biases around racing and games is definitely changing and evolving. In terms of our. This is our growth figures for the last few quarters, or the last, oh, I forgot how many quarters. Like 19 quarters or something. Real growth happened in Q4 2019, and this is when we started to scale Formula 1, F1 Clash. What got us here was a bunch of games, also Top Drives really grew it. You can see how the revenues really stacked up. The last three quarters have been really good. Our best quarter, last quarter. Obviously talking about those 3 games that are coming out in the next 2 years, we should ultimately see lots of growth as well. In terms of the vision for the business, I'll talk a bit about how we look at racing later, the vision for the business is we really, really wanna change the way that racing games are perceived and played, we really feel like we can grow the market in that respect. The vision is to really, really shape how automotive entertainment is played, we aim to be number one in grossing, we do this by really creating an amazing culture and an amazing way to work. If people are looked after, then they can actually make the best games for the business. In terms of how we do it, we've got really strong concepts, and I'm gonna take you through how we get to those concepts later. In terms of racing, what really helps it is authentic licensing, and that really brings out the reality of what the products are and the content inside them. As Scott was talking about, community is a really key asset for us as well. Community enables retention but also marketing as well. These three components allows us to be... to create category invention games. A big value in the business is not just making the games we want to make, but making games that people actually want to play. With this mindset and this value, the team is very commercially minded 'cause we're creative, we've always got these ideas about things we wanna make, but actually it's always about who's the player, what are they playing, and how can we make better games for them. Sean. Yeah. You're not in frame. Left foot on X. Cool. Okay. Yeah. Really for us, cars and racing, like you probably think about traditional racing games where you've got a controller or you're pressing left and right on the screen. We don't see them that way. We see racing as an audience, a group of people that really are passionate about it. If you think about it, Fast & Furious is like a top 10 grossing film. It's about cars and drama or action drama. Formula One is the second most watched sport in the world. Top Gear has got billions of views on YouTube. Forza, Mario Kart, massively played games that made billions of dollars. We see it as an audience, not necessarily a way to play games. Second to that, we know our customer now better than most people 'cause we've got so much data, so much experience in all the games we've played, various different, like prototypes we've put players through. We've got so much institutional knowledge around what these players are playing. We're really influenced by the marketplace as well, so we often look at games that are doing really well in the marketplace. Maybe an RPG, maybe a base-building game, maybe a puzzle game, and we look at how can we make a racing game out of this. Does it work? Is it authentic? Does it appeal to those consumers? Ultimately, we do a lot of work, we throw away a lot of stuff, we do a lot of prototypes and tinkering and creativity, and that is how we create our content to make market-leading games. We just learn and repeat and repeat. This, I love this slide. This is ultimately showing you at the top end of the funnel, we've made tons of prototypes. I know there's I think there's 100+, but we can count 50. We've just got a lot of learning, a lot of creativity, and it's quite cheap to make, so it's quite easy for teams not to get too welded down in what they're actually building and just really get into the gameplay of it. There's this process called validation tests, which we essentially publish these games in secret in different app stores, and we just test the market to see if this game is working the way that we expected it to. We've actually published 12 games, and of those 12, 10 have been profitable, and 3 have been, you know, exceedingly profitable. For me, this is a really proud slide. How can we get this figure down to SEK 1 billion? I don't know. We're working on it. We've got lots of games coming down the line, so very exciting. Creating what I call a great work environment isn't just a sexy office, isn't just trials of doing a four-day work week. It's actually this process. This process is a really creative process, and it enables the teams to create the content that they really believe in because they're building for an audience. Now the process is evolving all the time, changing all the time. If I presented this next year, there would be details that would change 'cause we keep learning and we keep iterating. It's very creative at the start, and it's a lot more informed by numbers and data towards the end. I'm gonna take you through a real-world example of a game that's made over $100 million, that started off very much like this. The discovery phase, anyone in the studio can get involved. Anyone can create a one-page document about what the game can be. All we ask is you give some sort of visual kind of idea of what it is, also you build out some 4 to 5 pillars of what this game could be as well. This is Top Drives. Originally, it was called Collectable Card Trading Card Game or something like that. I forgot the name. This was the original pitch, and it's really funny to look back to because it really does meet this pitch and the team goes through probably thousands of these one-pagers. I've produced some. Many, you know, anyone on the team can produce them. It's all about researching the marketplace and seeing what one-pager you can come up with. It's very cheap and easy to make, and anyone can produce ideas like this. Next, we take that paper concept, and we actually build a fake product, like a marketing product. An app store, a fake app store, where you've got all the assets in there in terms of like five key assets for the game. The art style has kinda been chosen, the name keeps changing, the icon can keep changing, and then you sort of present to the consumer, "This is the game that we're trying to entice you with. Is this appealing? Do people click through it?" Apologies for coughing all the time, by the way. I'm at the end of my cold, so it's not contagious. You feel really guilty after COVID, right? The really cool thing about this is, again, it allows lots of experimentation, and it really gives us a sense if there is an actual audience here. We've all built games that have no audiences, and great games sometimes as well, but this enables us to de-risk things to make sure we're building a game for the biggest possible audience for the right reasons. Sometimes we wanna ask deeper questions about what's appealing to them inside the game. Quite often, we'll do surveys as well to figure out what's really ticking the boxes for consumers. We've found a game. It's got some appeal. There's something really interesting about it. We start to build prototypes. This, it's pretty ugly for you guys, but for us actually really represents what the gameplay can be and really gives a sense of the flow and how it works. This is sort of behind the scenes what Top Drives originally looked at. Testing that with consumers is really gonna work because it just could turn them off in terms of the bare ugliness of it. It really gives us some really good sense from the craftsmanship that goes on in the studio to figure out, is this the right flow? Does the game really make sense? What, what are the messages you're trying to understand? What's the objective of the game? As we approve this sort of stuff, which is again, part of this creative process, the game starts to morph into an actual game. This is where it gets really interesting. Beforehand, there's like very, very quick timeframe to go through this discovery basic market testing and prototypes. We go into a really intensive process where we can actually get a game to market within 12 weeks. There's an idea that's just come from paper, and in like 8 to 12 weeks, we've got it into the marketplace, and we're actually checking if consumers like the game. We're so focused on racing, we can reuse the assets we've had in our previous games. We can reuse all the learnings we've had from our previous games. We can check the data and compare it to other racing games. What we're doing is we're looking at really early retention figures and engagement figures, and to make sure they're above our benchmarks of previous games or learnings from other games. What was really interesting about Top Drives is the retention wasn't as good, but the community feedback was so strong, we knew we had something quite different and unique. There, there's measures that we're looking at all the time, and we're getting better at it as well. This is, this is. I think Will this video play for Chris Way? Yeah. Okay, this is Top Drives. This is on validation. When we first built Top Drives, management sort of sports games and other racing games just use circles for to represent the car. We really didn't wanna build. Top Drives has over 2,000 licensed cars. We didn't wanna build 2,000 3D versions of the car, so we thought the disc was a great idea. However, retention was a bit low, so it seems a bit obvious, but actually stick a real model of a car. Now, it doesn't have to represent all those 2,000 cars, but just cars and of course the retention jumped up. We've got an actual data point to check that this is actually leading to our thesis, that this will make the game retain better. This part of the validation process can go on for quite a while because we're actually trying to move our players through a process of sticking with our game and learning from it before we go to a full global launch. Sorry, it's playing again. This is insight into Formula One Clash. When we first launched Formula 1, and we were going for a big meeting, do we take the license? You know, it's a big risk for the business. Is it really going to move the dial? Actually, the very first launch of it, there was a serious bug, but we found it quite a while for us to find the bug. We fixed the bug, the retention goes up. We make a load of depth changes to the game to make it deeper and more of the full experience, and the retention comes down, and then we added a bunch of things like drivers, a load of full features. Interestingly, adding those features plus the brand moves, moved retention up by 10%. It validates our thesis that investing in a brand really helps the game and helps people stick to the game. Which is all about really, if you think about brands, it's a relationship you have with a, with a business or a company, and it really enables consumers to stick with the game. These are examples of a lot of games that we've gone through validation process. Some games have really tall bars. These tend to be the really casual games, and they're a lot more wide appealing. We've tended to stay away from casual games as we've gotten to more deeper sort of meta games. The last, the next three games have really, you know, strong indicators that they can prove to be big, big value adds to our business. The last bit of the process we learned from our launch of Puzzle Heist. Puzzle Heist went through this process, had amazing metrics, amazing retention, amazing monetization, but what we hadn't tested was scaled marketing. Our fellow friends at InnoGames have been doing scaled testing for Rise of Cultures, and we were like, "Wow, they're spending a lot on marketing before they've launched the game." Actually, when we launched Puzzle Heist, as we started to scale the marketing, we started to find the CPIs went up. As part of our process now, we really wanna push and throttle the market spending to see what CPIs we'll get to make sure we're not building a great business that has traditional metrics that we've seen, but also it can really, really globally launch and get mass scale. Overall, the process is all about creativity at the start. Really learn, discover, throw away things. Really, really enable the team to really experiment and try new things out. As we get to validation launch, we're really honing the game in terms of making it stronger and better. This is the bit where it gets less risky here because we've gone through a lot of creativity and now we're getting into a really surefire business case to build a really solid game. Wanna bring you back to this slide 'cause I think this is the reason you don't see, I guess, a lot of activity from us. Actually, the three games down here and the SEK 250 million we've generated from three games, we've got a success rate and we're really looking forward to the next three games coming out in the next two years and really boosting this value up. The two games. Unfortunately, I can't announce them, which is really frustrating. There's a new licensed motorsport game, learning, you know, leaning on the experience we've had with Formula 1. There's a new licensed game as well. There's also for Q4, there's a TV license that we've been looking at as well. Really exciting stuff and yeah, brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you very much, Sean. No worries. Let's see if we have some questions. The after-lunch questions are the tricky ones. No, it's good. I saw some pretty deep tough questions earlier, so. Okay. Well, there you go. All right. If we don't have any questions, I'm sure there'll be questions later. Yeah. We're just walking around the office, so there's lots of Hutchies wearing tops. Put your hands up. Oh, we got a question there. Hi. I was just wondering, now being a part of MTG, what kind of benefits have you seen in terms of your marketing initiatives? Yeah. I mean, we work very closely with Christian Pern. I'm starting to dream with a German accent. I spend so much time with him. An's quite happy with that. Yeah, I mean, there's. We thought we understood marketing when we joined MTG, and then we realized there's still so much to do. Like, Christian's done great work in their games. A lot around the business intelligence and actually how we report and we can act on the information. So yeah, we're working very closely and that, and that's a massive benefit. There's also an additional benefit just hanging out with other CEOs. When you're a venture-funded business, you tend to be in stealth mode. You don't share that much. We can very openly talk about our, you know, our problems and our opportunities and. Yeah, there's a massive benefit there. Thank you. A follow-up. I think you were quite dependent on Facebook, if I'm right. Yep. And could you- That has been identified by Christian. Yeah. Could you please elaborate a bit about how what happened around the Apple IDFA changes and how you cope with that? Yeah. Well, it's definitely not been easy for us because we're so focused on a certain audience. We tend not to be victims to things that happen that are out of our control, and, you know, the App Store's been evolving and changing over the last 10 years. Marketing has always been this thing that you whinge and moan about. Actually, we just look at it and we iterate it and get better at operating around it as well. I think a lot of these things have calmed down as well. We've also got, you know, a suite of sister companies to work with in terms of how they're operating with it as well. Thank you. No worries. All right. In that case, thank you very much, Sean. Cool. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Okey-doke. Our next and last individual speaker for the day is Markus, the CEO of Kongregate. Markus, let's join us on stage. Besides being passionate about NFT gaming, Markus also has an amazing sneaker collection. You can ask him about it. He's wearing box fresh Jordans right now, which is cool. Markus, the clicker is just behind you. Okay. Over to you. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Hi. My name is Markus. I'm the CEO of Kongregate. Before we dive deeper into Kongregate, let's take a quick look at our video. Great. Kongregate. Kongregate was founded in 2006 with the idea to create a platform where gamers and developers can meet. Basically a YouTube for gaming, if you want to put it like that. Over the years, we created more than 128,000 games with more than 40,000 developers on the site, quite a heavy beast. We added publishing services in 2010 and went into own game development, basically when the mobile era kicked in. With platform transitioning towards the end of the Flash game era, around 2020, we actually tested a bit tech opportunities around how can we continue that path with platform. One thing we tested was blockchain technology to see if this could be a fit for us. How would users react? How would the implementation on the platform look like from a proof of technology point of view? That all worked pretty well. We decided to go down that route and test it further. We even started by the end of 2021 to build an own team. Kind of, you know, we started with a handful of people that had the vision to start with this idea, to carry it over, made it up to 90 people in the blockchain segment. Today's Kongregate is basically divided into two areas of focus. We have the traditional games. We have the blockchain games. Within the traditional games, we are focusing on the collectible card game stack, which is the CCG. Animation Throwdown, cooperation with Fox, is our biggest title so far. It launched 2016 and has done over $100 million in lifetime revenue so far. We have established knowledge around the CCG tech back-end, basically from the Animation Throwdown era. We also developed other games like Spellstone, Tyrant Unleashed on the CCG tech back-end. We basically received a lot of knowhow from the execution on marketing and on publishing, which helped us to leverage these games into the next level. With regards to blockchain, our key focus and mission was to use the existing Web2 learnings that we had on the platform and extend it into Web3. How could the journey look like for a gamer to continue actually this journey? With blockchain technology, ownership was suddenly possible, right? We had an internet of 15 years that basically didn't allow ownership in the legal sense. Blockchain technology made it possible. Leveraging ownership into interoperability of projects, kind of taking your avatar from game to game, even outside the existing universe into completely different projects was suddenly possible and a thing. We developed this and tried to bring new games into the space, focusing on Web2 and extending it into Web3. Taking a look at the games, what we did in the traditional gaming side, I mentioned it earlier, Animation Throwdown, certainly an established brand that we build on. We are right now developing a new collectible card game with a big IP holder that will be revealed soon. The game is supposed to launch end of next year, early 2024. We have a couple of harvest titles that actually did great, usually around casual idle-themed titles. You know, we cannot really create a marketing case any longer, which means we are reducing the team, we are reducing marketing, we put the games in hibernation and harvest them at a high profit. On the blockchain side, we took the existing IP of Bit Heroes, a game that actually came up on the Kongregate.com site as a publisher product from a developer. We acquired the game in 2019. Around this IP, we had the vision to create the Bitverse, which is a metaverse of multiple games around this IP that would include the traditional role-play game, the RPG, but also a battle royale game and a runner so far. We are right now working on the development of a collectible card game as well for the Bitverse, which will launch in 2024. We took another existing IP from Spellstone, another collectible card game that will be extended into Web3 as well. Again, our key focus is to really stick with the Web2 mechanics, but extend them into Web3. Players will be able to decide, will I sign up for the new journey and kind of own avatars, non-fungible tokens, to have a probably more advanced journey and own these elements? Will I stay for now in the Web2 world because this is where I feel my comfort? Both is possible with us. It's rather a question of what can we do for the player to help him on that journey, and how can we leverage the learnings over and to take everything into Web3 to extend the kind of expectations and also the learning phase for the player. Looking at the revenues over the past 19 months, sorry, 19 quarters, we see that this is basically strongly driven by the transition from platform into the end of the Flash era. We lost about 60% of our volume. The way we recognized the revenue as a publisher of records was to show the full revenue in our books and the share towards the developer on the cost side. With a decline in revenue, we also had a decline in cost. As a matter of fact, we were actually able, from a company perspective, to increase the EBITDA and the EBITDA margin over time, year-over-year. This is basically because we jumped into own game development, which took a much higher margin share for us from the table, right? The mix is actually sometimes not really revealing the true performance of the company, depending on what you have from platform and how the developer mix is kind of overlaying the whole situation. Before I go deeper into blockchain gaming, Arndt mentioned it earlier, I want at least to address the elephant in the room again. What has happened around FTX and the thoughts around crypto and gaming in general? Looking into the data, has FTX breakdown influenced the whole in gaming? It was rather the speculative, let's call it DeFi or GameFi trading that was affected by it for a reason. I would say users that might not be very experienced with wallet creation and how the whole process around crypto gaming worked, they might be affected in a way to say, "Ooh, this wallet stuff is pretty new to me. I see a lot of bad news. I need some guidance here." Right? All these wallets, it's basically like going on the internet in the early nineties. It was literally not possible before Andreessen invented the Netscape Navigator. This is something similar we see with wallets. There's still a lot of stuff to do, still a lot of tech to be delivered, but it will come. It's not a question of the if, it's rather a question of the when and what can we do to make the user experience much better. This is where Kongregate basically steps in, we want to try to help users to become owners of their gaming journey. This is kind of our credo with the whole journey into Web3, taking Web2 elements and enhance them into a Web3 experience with a longer run and longer outlook of interoperability in the open Metaverse and becoming owners of avatars, of elements, getting rights, getting additional perks, because what else would come, right? If we just look at the market from a gamer's perspective, there are so many stuff out there, owning something, collecting something is still the most intriguing thing. When we started that journey in 2019, we actually managed, from all the learnings we had done in Web2, which is here on the left, to create since then more than 3.8 million wallets. We minted more than 3 million NFTs. We have done 4 NFT games that are out and playable out, Web2 meeting Web3. All these games are based on blockchain technology. We have done 2 NFT drops. We are not just talking about it, we are already living it. We've collected a lot of data. We have built a great team, I mentioned it earlier, from basically 5 to 92, and used our social media focus to collect more players around the Twitters, the Discords, to really engage and stimulate the community. Community work has become more important than ever. Scott mentioned it earlier with the Ninja Kiwi example. The organic outreach in these channels has become so important and is a great alternative to the traditional way of doing marketing. Buying guys like me on Facebook is now going into that direction. What is Kongregate's role in that whole play, and why does it need us? I kind of borrowed an old MTG slogan, "We are the igniter in the middle." At the end, we have three streams. We have developers, we have partners, and we have players. We want to bring them together in the middle. The developers, we have built great relationships. They trust us. They sign up for a journey that started in Web2, and that is extended into Web3. Partners, we have started a token fund with Immutable X. You have probably seen that in the press. We are also working on a cooperation with Sandbox, where you actually can take your Bit Heroes avatar that you saw in the video, and you will get a 3D voxelized image of it, and you can play it in Sandbox, and you can train your pet there in the Kongregate tower. Because you're an NFT holder, we also send you to the Snoop Dogg concert in December. This is a good example for interoperability and what this can actually do. We have also other partner projects with Illuvium or PlanetQuest, where your avatar becomes playable on the other side. Just imagine what this could do on a platform where developers can join on a similar technology, because there you have everything together. You can mix and match, you can use your avatar, play this game, that game. Great stuff. Players, I mentioned it with the wallet example. Some are already there, others are not. Wallets are a mess, right? This is fairly true. We will try the custodial way to actually integrate wallets immediately when you sign up with our platform, so you can have an easy onboarding, a seamless onboarding that will be important. We are chain agnostic, which means it doesn't really matter if you come with an Ethereum background, Solana background, whatsoever. We can manage that. We can interoperate everything, and our focus is to really be chain agnostic, to create a great experience for players in an open metaverse. That's the key focus here. To sum it up, what have we done this year? We have rebranded the platform. It launches actually end of this week with the first release under a new logo and branding. We will add the credits that you probably know as the platform currency with a token, a utility token that is tethered to an amount, to a dollar amount, to a fixed dollar amount, and that extends your journey into earning, being rewarded, and kind of making the whole system communicate with each other, right? It doesn't really matter from which chain you come, the token can help you to actually get to the next step. We will also start integrating further developers joining the Web3 side in early Q1. The focus is always to play, to learn, to earn, and to own. The developer side happening on the platform is one thing. We have launched four games, I mentioned it earlier, two drops, built a great team. We acquired the Gamaga studio in Chile by mid of this year. That helps us to build all these games. You know, the market is highly competitive. You can imagine blockchain, engineering, even finding game makers who have experience in this space, it's pretty hard to find. Nevertheless, we managed to get it to 92 people having a unique set of skills and experience to enrich this journey with us. Currently, nobody has that in this mix like Kongregate. This is pretty unique. We have the platform, the distribution. We have already the experience on the games, the wallet creation, and the NFT minting. Pretty much a unique setup to get it started from here. You don't have to be fully into Web3, right? Start the journey wherever you want. When you are ready, you come over. We are also here for the MTG family, which means. We have gathered the experience. Everyone in the group is invited and welcome to profit from our knowledge and to take the next step into that learning curve as well. The whole blockchain initiative is a kind of center of competence, let's put it that way, for next step for our other families here. To wrap it up, play and own combined with interoperability in an open metaverse. This is how we see the future of gaming. We will help users with the support and the education to get there. The key focus is, as I mentioned earlier, Web2 meets Web3. It's not either/or. It's the combination of it that brings us into the right direction. It's not a sprint, right? It's a marathon. We always have to keep that in mind. We are not in a rush. We are convinced that this is the right journey, providing additional value to everything that we have started back in the days. Thank you. Let's kick off with a question from the web. How does MTG and Kongregate plan to monetize Web3 and blockchain gaming? It's a combination of the traditional monetization that you know from Web3, kind of in-app purchases combined with ad revenues. Even for the games that we launch, you know this is already live. NFTs will be sold. You know, we sell NFTs on a daily base currently on Rarible, for example. There will be dedicated NFT drops, opportunities to even win an NFT. The combination of this monetizes the whole setup at the end. Very good. Thanks very much. Great presentation. Thank you. You talked a little bit at the end about how blockchain technology could really benefit other MTG family members. In your opinion, which of those family members have already started doing work with you on that front, and which of them have potential that's yet untapped across the different studios? From my perspective, not speaking for my colleagues here, but I think Ninja Kiwi and Hutch are probably the greatest fit, to be honest. Ninja Kiwi from the way they built the communities, and they would bring the terrific assets and add-ons that you could combine with Web 2 meets Web 3 elements, right? This is certainly something that could come. Not saying it does, it's just my personal view here. Hutch has, of course, with racing, a terrific opportunity and background. I mean, you have seen the news. Mattel has launched an own platform going into racing. Racing is happening already in the blockchain. Just take the REV token, right? One of Animoca's big investments. It's certainly a great fit for coming into Web 2 meets Web 3. We have a question all the way at the back, Leonie. Hold on. Just grab a mic so we can hear you. Hello. Doruk from Efendiklas. The question about the players. I expect that there are two type of players in the Web3 world. Which one will be just would like to play the game, other ones will like to earn money. How do you imagine that to satisfy both type of the users? Because expectations are will be different, retentions will be different, and the consumption rates will be different. How do you imagine to satisfy both type of users? Yeah. I think, it's a good question. The existing players kind of, you know, still sticking with Web2, they will have the regular expectations that they already have, right? If they want to participate in earning, they would actually need to sign up for the NFT route. Owning an NFT, the earning starts. You can use tokens to mint new items. There are a couple of combinations. The thing we are not doing is influencing the balancing. We will not create two kind of players, the NFT holders and the non-NFT holders. They will all have the kind of same experience within the game, while the NFT holders have additional opportunities, access to, let's say, some special events, special drops, voting rights, which game could come next. Imagine it like that, right? Kids being in a fun park, they all have the same fun, but some might have a fast-track ticket, others not, but they still have the same fun. This is the way I think about it. All right. One last question, unless we get any more in the meantime. You mentioned the complications around having wallets and actually wallet management and signing people up for wallets. How do you manage that complexity to help players have an easy pathway into NFT gaming? What we try to currently include, and this is currently already nearly implemented, is to have a wallet provider operating with us. Wallets will be integrated when you sign up into your Kongregate account. You can actually already have your wallet being combined to the account. You can use a Kongregate coin, the tokenized credits, for example, to make your NFT purchase, which you could then upload with a credit card in order to get it done from a monetary aspect, right? You don't even have to engage with cryptocurrency at all or buy ETH or anything like that to get the purchase done. You could technically do it in the traditional way, and the wallet is directly combined to your login, so you have an easy access. This is at least the first step. It's still, you know, this is not the solution of the whole problem, but we are working our way towards that and try to establish the most convenient situation. Very cool. All right. It doesn't look like we have any other questions. Okay. Thank you very much, Markus. Thank you very much. For our guests, we are actually running a bit early on time, which is good because it gives us time to do things without rushing. We're going to set up for a panel with all of our game makers, and Christian, our CMO, which will be moderated by Arndt. We're going to do it quickly. I'll have to give my mic away. We're gonna take a break, but I would like to ask everyone to just stick around, so don't go. It's gonna take maybe five minutes. Then we reconvene. If you need to use the bathroom, please go ahead, but don't wander off too far. I could reach and touch you. I'm afraid that I might love you. Be the one to start it. I'll try to forget it. You've got the most beautiful diamond eyes I've ever seen in my whole life. Hey, wait a second. I start, and then you walk up. Okay, good. Got it. Got it. There's an order in terms of just because so the sound channels work. I'll arrange it. You don't have to think about it. You have to be on the left. Yes, what's the order you mean? Marcus Henriksson just enter on the CMO. You tell them, man? I'll tell them. Yes. You want some water? Mm-hmm. Thanks. Just so that you're not surprised I'm doing it. It's mostly so that the sound guys know who's who when they talk. Okay. Do you ask him to come back or? No, you start behind me. Okay. Please have a seat. Just to steal a bit from our presenters, let's further humanize the game makers today. Yeah. It was a lot of information we've thrown to you. Since we used this gaming village picture, I'm just curious, I wanna see who actually grew up in a village here. Only you? The rest are city slickers? Village means personal. Also means, at least the village I grew up, somewhere next to the Dutch border, you help each other. You know, you build something together. That's why we wanna keep it cozy. The other personal thing I really liked since the reason why probably Sean joined our company is because during COVID times, I have 2 teenage girls, 12 and 14, and I bought a pony. As you see in Ninja Kiwi's presentation, a lot of cute pets. Who has a pet here? From you? Who has a pet? All the investors have no pets. Grew up in the city. There was one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. We want to discover more secrets, learn more about our entrepreneurs and grill them a bit and see what they come up with. Talk a bit their motivation, why they joined MTG, how they see the future, the key trends next year, how they cooperate, collaborate with each other. Let's hear some founder stories. A big welcome for the last round of discussions with our games entrepreneurs. Please come on stage. It's very crowded already in the village, huh? Yeah. Yeah. It's not the COVID safety measures, I would say. Great. I would kick it off with some questions, and you can join me then later with the questions you always wanted to ask. I'm always curious what drives people, what motivates them. I mean, all of them could have probably sold to anyone. Why MTG? What was really their personal motivation? Why did they join the gaming village in the first place, huh? Let's start with our friends from India. All right. You had another process. Why this Swedish company with the name MTG? Yeah, I think that's long story. I think that about the other process, which I will not get into detail. I think... I think we start... I'll have to go back slightly to answer that question. We started the company eight years ago. We were at a large corporate and sort of busy in their machinery trying to build games. We were pitching new games. We were all based out of India, and we were not getting a go ahead to build these games. We found some folks who believed in us. We believed in ourselves, for sure, and the rest of the co-founders also who were not here. We were out there to essentially prove that, hey, we can build a great business out of India. As we sort of built that over the course of time, we had raised capital, so we had to give that exit to our investors, like some of you folks here. As part of that, we started a process, and it was the middle of pandemic. People could not travel, and it was a really difficult time. Like they say, until the deal is done, it's not done. The first one didn't go forward for various reasons. The second one was as a process we were running, and I think it was the second wave of pandemic, and we had only one condition, that whoever we would move forward with, we have to meet them in person. I think at that point in time, Andre and Maria were sort of genuine enough that they flew all the way to Dubai to meet us and assured us that, hey, we will be able to operate the business with a lot of autonomy, like the way we have operated before. That literally sealed the deal for us. Everything that has happened or post that has been almost similar to whatever we were told. That's essentially what excites us, what continues to keep us as owners of our business and continue to keep us motivated. Thank you. That's the story. Cool. Sean, I mean, you had a pretty competitive process, as I remember. We were pretty much in the end when we joined the video call, and you were sitting here on your sofa, and I guess you had all the attention. Why MTG? Probably not only because of my pony, but why? No. The pony was a big deal for us. No, no. Like when you were speaking and I spoke about it before, like, we came from PlayStation and Microsoft, and we worked at big gaming companies, and we had all these pitches, and they were like... In one call, I think it was like 20 people. Senior vice president of toilets was there. I'm all about making decisions and moving quickly and then four people came up from MTG, and you talk about ponies, and I'm like, "I really like this guy." I'm not sure about his taste in horses, but I was like, actually, that's the mirror image of what I really wanna work with. Second to that, I've always actually, I've never told Hendrik this, but I've always actually followed you guys. I've always been really fascinated. I felt like you're a bit of a stealth company. I was, like, enamored, and the growth was just phenomenal. The big thing for us is we wanna grow our marketing, and I was like, "Well, they're doing pretty well," and they're good. You know, you and Maria were, like, great people to work for. That was the big thing for me. Like, I want Hutch to be 3 times as big as it is today, and I thought that, you know, example was a great one. I felt like with Kongregate, I was the first onto the boat, the MTG village. Thank you, Sean. No worries. I mean, Scott, we all could feel your energy today. Some will go home with some merchandise. We have been on a date for quite some time. First time we met at the GDC, it was actually for five years ago, and then you already knew Kongregate, and we've been building the partnership. Like anyone who has been on a date, it's not always... I mean, it was love at first sight. The question is, are both partners ready to get married? We had a first attempt, but us being a listed company, we had certain requirements. I always like the story where we said, "Yeah, we need to run a financial DD," and the guy's highly profitable. They said, "Here's our bank account. Just check the cash." "All is good." We said, "No, no." There was a good reason why we paused it. How do you feel- Yeah. Since we needed, like, four years dating, how do you feel now being partners? Well, it's the kind of thing. I mean, I think it was love at first sight, you know, with at least some of the people at the meeting. You know, present company included. It really was about focus and where MTG was at that, at that point and where Ninja Kiwi was at that point. We had never really wanted to enter a process. We just wanted to continue, you know, building our company and building our games, and it was about kind of the distraction of people talking to us that was first part of like, "Okay. Well, we'll just get a... We'll get a banker, and we'll see whether there's any value here." It, it really just gave us a whole bunch of indications about the kinds of things that we didn't want in most of the folks that we met with through that process. MTG, we connected through Kongregate separate from that was the first time we actually met some people that were like, "Oh, actually, this is what it feels like to be talking to real humans." We had the trust and confidence 'cause Markus, we've been working together for, you know, 10 years. Ninja Kiwi and Kongregate have been closely aligned since the early Flash days. That was, that was a huge endorsement of MTG. At that point, MTG was still connected to the broadcasting business, and there was, there wasn't the clarity in that first conversation. It was also a different kind of deal that was on the table, and it was like, "This is just too hard for us. We don't get it. We're just, you know, again, we're just. Things need to be simple and straightforward for us. That's what we believe in. We think that things can be obvious and clear, and business doesn't need to be confusing." Yeah, we waited a couple of years, and then those things clarified. The decisions that MTG had made and the way that you guys had again taken those strides forward and Maria taking the CEO role and moving in a new direction that clarified a whole bunch of things with us. Then it was really clear about what we could do with these two companies. Mm-hmm. Like, with the background, already from Kongregate and InnoGames, that we could be part of that, and it was exactly the places where we weren't strong. We weren't strong in marketing. We weren't strong in BI. We have a whole bunch of game-based BI, but in terms of processing that and setting up the conditionals that we needed. Again, it was a skill and culture fit. Then the deal that we put together a deal that really made sense. Mm-hmm. Gave us our ownership. One of the things that I'd always said to Chris was like, after working for a number of bosses, some of them fantastic and others less so, I told Chris I never wanted another boss. That's been really important for me, and I can absolutely say that it doesn't feel like I have another boss. It feels like I can still make decisions, express myself, be a little bit crazy, and that that's. Mm-hmm and that that's okay. Yeah ... it's been a very transformative change for us in all the right ways. Thank you. I mean, someone who also never had a boss in his life, probably only in kindergarten, is Henrik. I mean, it's the right thing to do. You start your own company. Henrik was the first we pitched. I mean, being a German, pitching the Swedish family model is kind of an irony, but I deeply believe in this Nordic culture and this, the respect, the consensus, and all the good things. Being so successful like InnoGames over all the years, always profitable, scaling the business. Today, it's quite interesting, Henrik bought into the family model, but I think it was always important for him to continue what they have been successfully doing. Today, he has two hats, and that's for us an ideal setup. I mean, Henrik is the founder and CEO of InnoGames. Sometimes he's the biggest shareholder in MTG. Mm-hmm ... which is quite interesting. That's the commitment we wanna see when we talk about owners and everything else, where I firmly believe everyone is looking long beyond the arms. It would be interesting since you're the first. Mm-hmm ... on this first part of journey, we had this crazy esports business with big vision, loss making. You were, like, our lighthouse on the gaming side, delivering like a machine and really growing the business. What has changed before you joined MTG and then after? First of all, I had a boss for maybe 1 year, when I was doing alternate service in Germany back then. Ah. Ah. This was a good time because this allowed us to have enough time to create our first game, Tribal Wars, So very, very helpful time. Great boss. Yeah, great boss. Bad employee. Yeah. I did my hours- Back then. I think I did my hours, nowadays they don't have it anymore in Germany. I think it was a good match for us together with MTG. We wanted to keep our autonomy, entrepreneurial freedom, and of course everyone assess us. For us, what was helpful to also work together with MTG, I knew Arndt from before. Markus, via Markus I had connections to Arndt, I knew that MTG is in Sweden, where you also feel a bit more comfortable than having a company on the other end of the world. That was also helpful for us, and that were reasons why we said, "Okay, this is a good fit." It actually worked out. We kept our level of autonomy. We kept also structures we had before with our VC investor, which was also very helpful. Of course, a bit more financial reporting, which has to be done a few days quicker. You don't have to have a full month to wait for the financial reports, whatever stuff. It was okay. We already set up all this, a lot of the structures and, I think the core, keeping our entrepreneurial freedom, this worked out and this was the most important thing for us and therefore, yeah, super happy that we took this decision, didn't go to some other partner, some other opportunity, but decided for MTG. Yeah. We're happy you're here. Thank you. Let's go into the village. Yeah. Probably give a bit of insight how you work together, how you exchange your knowledge, and what really helps you in your daily work and how you benefit from this gaming village. Yeah. I mean, Mr. Flow is Mr. Christian Pern. He's our walking Flow platform and brings all the knowledge he has built up and, and applied at InnoGames now to the Flow platform. Probably to start with you, Christian, is this like in a typical corporate where you have to pitch hard, even harder than to external clients to get a meeting and convince someone to accept your services and work with you? Or how does it feel when you have interactions with these gentlemen? Let me look up the answer you gave me. No, it's obviously not because we are very different on those topics. First of all, good ideas are always welcome throughout all the levels, I would say. Obviously also there's many people and many hands being involved in making that actually happening. No, it's not a corporate world. I had the chance after studying to work in a consultant company, and I've seen different industries, and I actually also took the decision for myself to say that I wanna work in a place where I wanna work. I would say that's the case at MTG. Staying in the analogy of the village, you can always knock on all of those doors. You can actually easily reach out to everyone. If you have a good idea, you wanna get some benchmarking, share expertise, get insights of the others, then that's easily done. I mean, you've seen a lot of faces here today as well. I think it's also worth noting that there's again, many people behind it, and they also share their ideas. The different departments reach out, and it's a really a good community. Staying in the picture, I would say, we might want to change that in the future. In this village, the doors are always open. Thank you. I mean, Markus, actually, you have started with the first collaboration on a bilateral basis with Ninja Kiwi. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, before Preeti and Sid joined the family and the village you have been working in ad monetization and also helped the Ninja Kiwi products to integrate more ads and so forth. How is the collaboration going, and what have you done so far? Yeah, like, Scott said, we started 10 years ago already when Flash was still a thing. Since then it has continued to kind of, you know, consult with each other to see where we can learn something from what Ninja Kiwi has done in the community. We have our marketing people ad mon traditionally UA that we actually route through Christian, directly of course, also into the other companies to really keep an ongoing exchange in consulting services and whatsoever to get the best out of it, right? To really see what we can do to optimize game to get an ad bonus here or an integration that could make sense and leverage all that in the group. Okay. When we speak of the technology you wanna share, guys, I mean, Henrik mentioned that he has developed over many years these two servers, which are now sitting in the cloud and are accessible to everyone. You have your ads tech and now on cross-promotion side, which is a very sophisticated commercial model. I think you only have this limited time, but you could even talk hours about the commercial model, which you have developed over the time. Where you see the biggest really synergies, both on the cost side and also on the revenue side? Probably if you wanna start. Yeah. I think so when we were sort of working in a previous company, I think cross-promotion was something that really helped. I think it was Zynga. One of the challenges that we were facing there was that the games that were trying to cross-promote or trying to get cross-promotion used to face a lot of hindrance and resistance from the other games because that would come all of a sudden and disrupt their roadmap. And we figured that that was one of the problems that we need to solve. I think from that and to make it really worthwhile for the donor games to actually look at it in a rather attractive way. We figured out that basically if there's a way to back attribute, or to sort of like pass back the LTV that the receiver game is getting and give it to the donor then, and use that to actually model out the LTV for the experiment, for the places where the cross-promotion is happening can make it really worthwhile. That really, sort of like sealed it for us in many places where we actually. The first place where we would face the resistance, where the donor game would come and say, "Hey, it doesn't make sense for us." That solved it on the cross-promotion side. Likewise, on the ad side, I think experimentation and A/B testing really helped. In the beginning, there was a lot of resistance because ads is not a traditional way to monetize games. There's a lot of, I mean, a lot of backlash, especially from the game design community in the cross-functional setup in a gaming studio where they say, "Okay, hey, this is not good. You're putting and sticking ads everywhere." To do it well, we have to leverage data and analytics, which our infrastructure really helped. Investing in that at the beginning allowed us to be able to sort of capture that and prove it. I think in one of the slides that Sean had, which had creativity and data usage over the course of time, I think it's essentially that, hey, that infrastructure that we had, allowed us to sort of leverage data. We believe in God, but for everything else. We look at data. For that data, we need infrastructure and I think all of that being in-house helped us to actually leverage that and test it out. Cool. What do you guys believe how the Flow platform will look like in 5 years? Really it's interesting what you said because I remember 6 or 7 years back when Maria and I dared to ask Hendrik, and they're like majority not monetized. Why don't we show ads? He nearly killed us saying, "No." "I wanna keep the game experience as it is." Now, Hendrik really appreciate that he integrates ads in the new games. That's another interesting, I think, synergy potential, if I call it a bit more academic. It is simply a new revenue stream still to the games industry. The biggest digital businesses platforms are built on ads, like the Googles and the Facebooks. In 5 years ahead, where do you see the Flow platform? Sean, you have an idea? I mean, I see it at a really high level. You can't manage what you don't measure and, like, all of us working together using the same data and talking about the same things. What's interesting about this group is I kind of see us as the Avengers. I know that sounds really, egotistical, but we're all quite different. Yeah. In that difference is what we can learn from each other, and the Flow platform can connect us all in terms of how we're doing, what discussions we're having. At the moment it's, you know, it's early days, so we, like, we're a bit disjointed at times. Like, but yeah, I think it builds us as a common platform to discuss performance and how we can increase it. I mean, platform is a big word, and having worked in many different digital businesses, I have to say the amount of creativity and data-drivenness and tech know-how is pretty unique in games. Yeah. Aside from the tech, we all know it's about the people, and hopefully you can feel that this is a group which has really fun yesterday. The rehearsal was fun, so we like to spend time together and travel to different places. When it comes to culture, and probably you can continue since we're here at your home. Sure. You did a pretty bold move with this four-day workweek. I know that Volkswagen tried something back then with, I think it was four-day production. How has this changed the culture? What was the feedback when you introduced this? Yeah. honestly, explain us how it works when you have only four days to work. I mean, it was pretty insane thing to try. Sorry. Thank you Maria and An for supporting me on it 'cause it's a wild experiment. The context of it is we're coming out of lockdown, got huge pressure to move to remote working. We don't believe in it. We've been hybrid working for 10 years, and we've seen great benefits of hybrid, like working from home, but also working together in the office. You know, if we went to remote, we'd heard people at Microsoft telling us, like, they're losing 20% with remote working. Like, okay, this is a measured gamble that we're doing. The first thing that you do in a 4-day working week is you feel extremely guilty. You, you're like, oh my God, I need to try and do what we call 180, 100. We want 100% of five days and 80% of the time, and you get 100% of the pay. You know, and I've been clearing my emails every week, which I've never done in a five-day working week because there's a level of intensity that feels like you're a startup again. It just, it is, it is pretty intense and hard. The guilt goes away because suddenly you're working really hard. Sometimes you're not seeing your friends much during the week 'cause you're just knackered from work. There's massive benefits, but you're kind of time boxing 5 days into 4, and then you're having a really good weekend and getting rested and coming back with full energy on the Monday. Yeah. I like the quote you said yesterday. Someone from the survey said, "You know, the 4-day we-workweek really helped my marriage." We tend probably to forget. Mm-hmm how important the social life is. Yeah. Again, we firmly believe if you put the people first, they will do great work and launch great games. Yeah. On the other end of the spectrum, when we met first InnoGames, it was pretty much all in this super cool, fancy and big office and pretty much in control processes and highly productive. Everyone in the office and suddenly COVID hit and you went fully remote. What has changed now in the post-COVID time at InnoGames? Yeah. I mean, we made very good experience with going fully remote in the COVID times. Could really keep our level of productivity and release great stuff for our players. It was also clear that some of this is based on the connections the people have made before COVID times. Fully remote is not the right thing to do. You need to meet in person across the company level. We have, we call them Hamburg Weeks because we meet in Hamburg. We have on a team-based level also teams meeting together also in the office. Yeah, have their creative exchange. I think there are areas where remote work is very good. This is, for example, when everything is clear, just producing something. For the creative processes, it's also very good if people come together. You don't have these creative processes on a day-to-day basis. It's more like a focus on some days now, and then the ideas need to be created and then executed for some people at home, some people in the office. Mm-hmm. I mean, Kongregate has been a remote setup even before COVID. You can't sit in your office in one of the most expensive cities of the world, San Francisco. How have you managed to create such a strong company culture from a remote setup? Yeah. As you said, we had that kind of situation already before the pandemic. People were moving away from San Francisco, so suddenly there was not really the need to have an office any longer. It was I would say we were struggling bringing people to San Francisco because it's so expensive there, right? Hiring became a real issue when we still had the office. With us being 100% remote right now, it's actually much easier to get hires. With the acquisition of Gamaga, we have certainly mixed a very focused Chilean team into the mix. We started to work with them as work-for-hire studios, so we already get to know a bit before engaging, which was of course important too. To Hendrik's point, we also bring together the teams that work together. That is certainly important to have off-sites together to still meet in person. Nevertheless, we started already when MTG stepped in being kind of distributed all over the place in the U.S. It was not really a big change for us. It was already kind of in the DNA. Cool. When we flew down to Auckland to visit Ninja Kiwi after they opened the border in May, we were quite surprised. I mean, a super lead team, from the distance we thought, "Why don't you hire more people? You have such a long pipeline." We found when you meet the team, then you understand the magic and the commitment to the games, and when they play handball together, which is not the handball you know. It's a school game. Totally different. This playful culture, this passion, the amount of passion and commitment to the product. What makes Ninja Kiwi culture so unique? Then in sitting there down in Auckland and the other studio in Scotland, and they've been working together for three years and never met before. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. sure, you merged and became a great partnership. how can you, yeah, retain talents in such a competitive environment? Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that. That's one of our favorite stories with David and Barry, because they had been doing the license work on Bloons for many years. We've made millions of dollars together and had never met in person. We were gonna meet in San Francisco GDC for the first time. They knew that the license term on Bloons was coming up, they thought they were gonna be getting fired at that point. We're like, "No. You know, we just finally wanna meet you guys, and we wanna talk about how we're gonna work together in the future." Anyway, that's just a funny aside. I guess it kind of represents the trust that we built up over time and over distance. This is a, you know, a continued theme here. You can get a sense for people, and you can work together. Then those things get really activated when you're meeting in person, and I think that we've seen this in the times that we've met in person in the last year and a half. Ninja Kiwi, Our culture is just so careful. Full of care. Chris and Stephen, myself, again, we've all had experiences in different businesses. We wanted to have some place where people felt at home, where people felt ownership, where people wanted to come to work every day, where there was really something that was special and intentional about everything that we did. That was just a constant message through both the Dundee studio and the Auckland studio. And we just showed that and proved that and modeled that in everything that we did, in the way that we grew staff, opened up doors, continued the flat management, really, you know, encouraged people to take ownership of things across the board. It fit in with our working model and our COVID experience. We were locked down in some pretty intensive New Zealand went really hardcore. We, you know, we absolutely had no chance to meet. We had to work everything remotely for quite extended periods of time. When we came out of that, we got together and we were like, "Okay, well, some of these things worked." That's... So we also adopted a hybrid model where we've got anchor days on Monday and Friday, optional days. That allowed people to play to the strengths, manage their commutes, manage their fuel costs, all the kinds of advantages that would come from that. Maintain that connection time. That connection time and us working together, talking together, playing the builds is so important. It's a similar shift to what Hutch did. Hutch. you know, I just look at you-. It's like from Hitch. No, that's what I'm thinking. I just want dance, and I'd never dance like that again. Hutch chose 1 way, but we got some input from team members. It was really important, we went a different way. The team wanted time to play the games and iterate on the games that wasn't fighting with their task time. It's rotated. a chunk of work to do, and you could always go until the end of the day or beyond. To be able to section off some time. Anyway, we've come up with this system called Fairly. We play the Dundee game. 4:00 P.M. Monday through Thursday, we're getting together and we're playing some of the iteration of what we worked on that day. Wow ... that week. On Friday afternoon, we take the afternoon off. Oh. We get our last builds in midday on Friday and then Friday afternoon is either dedicated skill development for the team, 'cause that's another thing that you never have time for during your week. When do you do your skill development? We section that off. Time to do a deep dive into game features, so we do more gameplay and then we have fun. We go and we do activities together, you know. Yeah. ... you know, we go to the beach. We do things. That's how you create the culture, but that's some of the things that we do and it feels like it feels like it's working and it feels like everybody resonates. It's honestly my personal learning. I mean, when I grew up in Germany, yeah, we have some German folks here, my mother taught me, always taught me, try to make it fun, and that's for me the cool thing with all these companies. When you travel then down to India, and I listened to this podcast from this coach talking about longevity. We all wanna live longer. He said there are four things, and I share the one thing you can do to live longer, and that is surround yourself with young, energized, optimistic people. When you go to the office of PlaySimple, the average age is 24, and they are so incredible, ambitious, and smart that I ask myself, how you manage such talent? All probably want to build some kind of PlaySimple and conquer the world and how do you develop these talents at average age 24? Yeah, you wanna take that one? your thing or I? Well, Yeah, we have a lot of folks joining us straight out of college, right? Obviously they come with, like, huge amount of energy. I think, yeah, average age is 24, there's probably like 60% of our guys are like just 2 years or under out of college. Yes, tough to manage and definitely can't do remote work. We actually got back to, you know, 100% back to the office late last year. It's honestly, it's a, it's a, it's a tough balance to strike, because we have fewer folks with deeper experience, and then we have a lot of young folks, a lot of energy, but it does get hard to handle. We have a long way to go to sort of build out the kind of culture that Scott here is talking about or Sean is talking about or Henrik. You know, because I think great with numbers, but there's still a long way to go. I think to add to that, we're also the youngest company in the portfolio. I think we're only eight years old. I think versus our peers who are, I mean, a lot maturer with, I think, the challenges that they would have probably faced on the way to getting to this stage and also bolder. I think the other challenges at least I see is that folks with kids, I think it's important that basically office is active so that they can come in, they get quiet time, as well as to be around with a lot of positive energy. We're sort of gotten back to work, where they have come back and said, "Oh, this is so good. I wish we would've done this sooner. Yeah. Thank you. Being back to travel, honestly, I have to admit, it's also good for my marriage so it's very positive to travel a bit and spend time abroad. I don't know. You have nice way of dating, Sid, I have to say. Let's look ahead. Let's look into the future, okay? Before we come to the key trends, there is this always the question we receive from the investors like, "Hey, beyond an earn-out, what's gonna happen when it elaps? Will Sean become whatever, DJ? model? Will Henrik start probably, I don't know, become a pro golfer?" What's gonna happen beyond the earn-out? Why are you in games? What drives you? How you look into the future? Probably let's start with Mr. Mr. Rutledge. ... Sean. Mr. DJ. Yeah. I mean, I'm in a great position to really do what I really enjoy in life, which is making games. We're still not number one. We've still got lots we can do. There are potentially other areas that we could investigate in. I could go and start another company, or I can live my dreams here. You know, I'm pretty happy doing what I do, and I don't have to worry about my fuel costs anymore. Sorry, that sounds really, really brash, but I am ultimately, like, fixated on making Hutch a better place to work and making better games and you guys are enabling me to do that. Yeah. Thanks. We know Henrik's plan, otherwise you wouldn't have become the biggest shareholder in MTG. You can't get away. You're locked in, you know. No, your long-term commitment I think is clear. I mean, Scott, I know you would your biggest dream is writing a book, as I recall. Yeah. There's still so much time. What are your plans like the next? Well, again, I mean, we're all at different life stages or whatever. I think Arndt and I are sharing the, sort of the old, the oldest people in the company. Shh, shh. tag. No, sorry. The sexiest? No. We can't say that. The baldest? Baldest. Okay. We'll go with baldest. I mean, yeah, you do. You look at the time spent, 30 years in games, I'm really only starting, I feel like, to capitalize on the multiple market shifts that we've seen and the kinds of, you know, I've seen all sorts of platform generation shifts. That makes me feel like I've got a whole bunch of information to share. That makes me feel good. My master's degree is in education. I really like to teach as well as to learn, constantly studying. Every day that I work, for, you know, both with my own eyes open, but also with really smart, passionate, connected people, I'm learning. I'm learning better ways to do things. I'm learning how a generation of younger leaders is interpreting data, and seeing things and relationships differently than I do. That makes me question, you know, some of the assumptions that I've made over time. Things in front of us. We make games. We're doing a good thing in the world. We're putting entertainment out there, helping people cope with bad stuff that's going on in their lives. Like, I'm not saying it's a noble mission, but it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool game because they were able to make a little bit of money. a little bit of money by being a player creator, and that got them on, like, "Wow, I could make money doing this. Maybe I should look into game development." Maybe that's gonna help energize and be that story of informing and enabling the next generation of developers. And maybe some of them will wanna work for Ninja Kiwi and the MTG family because that's where they got started. That's a pretty good story. And in terms of writing stories, you know, let's write that one too. And then I've got a whole bunch of book ideas that I still need to, you know, so. But part of that is- No, no, I always have to do this. Is taking, is having both. Why can't we have the wealth that has come from the businesses that we've built and have some of those nice things, and continue to devote our lives and time and energy, to a business that we really care about? I think, look, okay, great, you got some money in your earnouts. Enjoy that, but continue to do things that you love. Thank you. I mean. Beautiful we all wanna do something relevant. I mean, you go to school, I don't know who presented at the elementary school, what they're doing and being investor. I don't know. Florian is also hard to tell a six, seven-year-old. I was always jealous when the guys with a real job, like doctor, architect, they were the heroes, yeah. I think, what can I say? Now I can point to Bloons, and we all as investors share whatever. We wanna be part of the products and leave a legacy. Bloons, I think, is a great example. Forge is a great example. All your games become the biggest in racing. Last two questions before we open up. Regarding the future, I mean, it can become the biggest thing in history, blockchain, yeah? It can go south or somewhere else. The hype in blockchain gaming, we've seen Axie Infinity. We read all the stories about people making millions with the Axies, but extracting value from a game economy. I think Henrik has a clear view on this. Any economy will implode if you just extract. How important is the game quality, the game experience, what you stand for in blockchain gaming, and how do you see the trend evolving over next years? Yeah. You brought up actually, I think that is a good example for actually the short-term speculation that went into craziness, right? I think this is something the future in gaming will definitely not have. I think in, let's say 5-10 years from now, everybody here in this room will own multiple NFTs. If you love it or not, right? It will be concert tickets, whatsoever. It will be totally normal for us to interact with it. I think the question is not if you like NFTs or not. It's, I think, the technology, the underlying blockchain technology is very compelling and certainly driving the change into a certain direction. It might not go as deep as we hope or see it today. I certainly believe it will do, but, I think you cannot stop the development. It has already opened the door and, speculate, oh, this is where we start. It was the same with the internet. It was the same with free-to-play. It started with blockchain, and it will go in a similar direction. I'm not really anxious about the future, let's put it that way. It's a bit like with Homer Simpson. Do you remember this quote when he said, "Internet, is this thing still around?" This is a bit like blockchain. Probably to close with, the key trends since you had the forefront and we have the recession on the horizon. How will this affect marketing, user acquisition, everything? Do you think this will hit us? Might come up in the QA, but good you ask. It's a bit like a crystal ball, and I think there is no clear answer. There's not this right or wrong. There's different scenarios to draw. I personally think that what we heard earlier, it's a form of entertainment. I would think that this form of entertainment is still around and, of course, quite interesting. When it comes to the marketing side of things, I guess, it's to be seen on how different industry are affected, right? We are not only competing in terms of marketing with other gaming industries. In terms of marketing, we are basically competing with all industries that want to have people's eyeballs. I personally can at least imagine that there's some industries that see somewhat more of a downtrend and might stop advertising, which could be in our favors. I guess then it's to be seen how that is actually equaling out. As always, we are keen to kind of take the opportunities we see. We are fast in analyzing the data and getting our hands on it. I think that's the way how we can actually win. Thank you. If there's any questions left, now it's time to ask them before we can have some beers. Sorry. Yeah. Thanks, thanks for that. It's a great panel. The, the thing that really comes across is the chemistry. You know, you all clearly get on, and there's even though very different organization, there's obviously a shared backbone. I'm interested in you know, how... Maybe this question for Maria actually, the how, you know, how you add in additional houses to your village, so to speak, and how do you make sure that the, you know, there's a cultural fit. What happens if it's just a really great business but you don't get on? Yeah. I mean, we're in a quite, let's say, comfortable position with our balance sheet, and I think we did everything right with esports. Although I miss the crazy guys with their events and everything, but on the other hand, now we have a pretty crystal clear equity story, and we sit here with some cash. There's no rush. I think it's a good position we're in. We have the strong balance sheet, and we're still doing the same thing. We're actively screening the market, meeting great companies because there's so many great entrepreneurs out there, companies, and there are some we're really interested in and believe they should join the village. It's question of timing when we can sell such a deal also to capital market and explain why this is a stellar deal. B, we wanna keep the folk company somewhere else. Yes, we would be active, but in the end, like in any dating process, it's a timing. Matter of timing. I think the piece Arnd mentioned was one of the only for us was is I think we really missed these peers during the start of pandemic. It was quite lonely and being part of the village and actually this group and this I think peer group could have been really helpful that, hey, with uncertain times that we're living in, just to call up any one of these guys, which I can now to ask, "How are you guys doing? How are you tackling this?" can be really helpful. One of the other things to say just about the about game developers is that most people are pretty humble and they're pretty focused on their businesses and their teams. There's a lot of common just I mean, that's why the Game Developers Conference is such a weird thing in such a big industry that there's not more competition. We're sharing data and stories and all this kind of stuff all the time with direct competitors. you know, somehow it's okay as opposed to Hollywood and other places where it's like, "You gotta protect everything and don't let anything out. I know. Data, like we're not, you know, because data is one thing, we're pretty protective of data, I think the risk of having somebody that would be a total tissue rejection is pretty low. I think anybody that's sort of vetted by the team is it's gonna have some of those same values. I think by being who we are, we're gonna find the right people. Cool. It was a long day. Hopefully insightful. Play our games. Become Like join the Monkey World. Play Forge. Do some racing. Play crosswords. Help us to earn money and enjoy our games. With this, I hand over to Maria, who will close the day. Thanks for your. Oh, well, please. Yeah. I'm not sure that I actually have to top this after the panel discussion, but I still wanna say some final few remarks. First and foremost, when I started today and in our open presentation, me and Arnd, we told you that today we really wanna bring you behind the scenes and meet our stars and our game makers, entrepreneurs, and I truly hope that you felt today what every time I meet them, I get so much energy. I think I usually say the most important meeting is the first meeting in any M&A discussion where you meet them, you look them in the eye, to also get them on stage, present to you what is unique about the companies, what is the skills that they're bringing to the group, but also most importantly, what are the people behind it because it is all about the people, which I also said in the beginning. That is people and culture is the one most important thing that we are big believers in. Big thank you for coming today. Big thank you for the team that has been here today presenting. Big thank you for everyone dialing in also on the stream. Hopefully you then take away the fact that we are truly building a gaming village with great game makers, a winning team. We have super strong evergreen IPs, and also we work very actively with them with LiveOps, which hopefully you got Henrik's presentation as his takeaway. We also have an interesting pipeline of new games. I think, of course, I mean, you got questions on that as well in the end, to complement this organic growth where we are a firm believer that with our strong evergreen IPs, we're gonna continue to grow fast in the market. We also want to be acquisitive, and we want to continue to add more of these great game makers and entrepreneurs into our village with strong evergreen IPs, and that's what's gonna be able to make us even more successful in the future. Thank you everyone for dialing in. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting our journey, and I hope to see the vast majority of you having dinner and drinks later. Thank you, Maria. Before you don't see any more of me, or at least not on stage, so now I would like to welcome everyone. We'll get to this in a second. Would like to welcome everyone to what we kind of think of as meet the village. It means that the entrepreneurs that you've seen today on stage, they'll all be on the third floor and here. You can actually go and talk to them directly and ask them any questions that were too sophisticated or too smart to share with everyone else because we're all you know, we all wanna, we all wanna win in the end. We're going to do this, obviously grabbing a beer on the way. It's a casual format. We're gonna take a break, and we hope that as many of you as possible can join us tonight. Tonight, we are excited to welcome you just for a very, very casual but cool evening reception with amazing views. We're doing it at Shoreditch House, which is a very, very short walk from here. The address is 13 Bethnal Green Road. I mean, Hutch says we are now here, so it's a very, very easy walk, where we'll continue this casually. Chat to the entrepreneurs. Let's have a nice time. Everybody, we have, you know, just depending on what you wanna do. Do some emails, have a catch-up, have a rest, and then we hope to see you tonight. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you for participating and asking questions, and we hope to see you both tonight but also soon again on our journey as we go forward. Thank you.