East Side Games Group Inc. (EAGR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. I'm Jason Bailey, Founder and CEO of East Side Games Group. Today, we're going to go over our Q3 2024 results. I want you -- to remind you that this is a -- forward-looking statements, and the disclosure is available here. I'm sure every single one of you have read it, agree to it and understand it, but today, we'd like to get into some of the exciting things that would -- happened in Q3; and talk about the future of East Side Games Group; and some of the things that have happened over the last quarter, over the last year. I'll be joined by various people from the company to explain and go deeply into those things. Firstly, we'll introduce our CFO, Jason Chan, who will give us all the financial highlights; as well as Jim Wagner, our Chief Product Officer; Lisa Shek, our Chief Operating Officer; and a few other people from within our organization.

Hello, everyone. I'm Jason Chan, Chief Financial Officer of East Side Games. We built on the momentum of Q2 with the launch of Power Rangers Mighty Force back in August. And I'm happy to report that we're going to post our first growth quarter of the year, ending on a top line revenue of $21.4 million, which is a 3% growth year-over-year and a 4% growth quarter-over-quarter. We've also ended the quarter with $2.56 million in adjusted EBITDA, which is a 12% margin and our eighth consecutive quarter posting net profit of $2.5 million and over. The metrics of the core portfolio of the business continue to be healthy and strong going into Q3. We have an average daily active user count of 236,000 players; a stickiness rate of 24%; and an ARPDAU, an average revenue per daily active user, of $0.99. The goal here is to continue to focus on profitability within the existing portfolio and to make sound investments in our user acquisition with aggressive payback windows to ensure that the growth we do get is both profitable and sustainable. We continue efforts to accumulate cash and ended Q3 with a balance of $8.3 million in the till. This is the highest balance we've had since Q2 of 2022 and represents an 11% increase versus Q2's cash balance. We also have 0 debt on top of that. We see this as a significant amount of dry powder that we can use to invest in our future games as well as ourselves as a company. We're going to start deploying this capital in the coming quarters as we launch new games down the pipeline in 2025 and to also bolster our share buyback program. And on that note, I'm going to pass it back to Jason.

Over the last 2 years, East Side Games Group has invested heavily in repurchasing our own shares through our NCIB. We think we are severely undervalued, that the market doesn't understand what we are and what we're doing and what an incredible opportunity this is. And granted it is our responsibility to educate the market and get that message out to people, but that being said, there is a tremendous opportunity for those who do understand the strength of what we're doing and the opportunity that we have here. And at the current quote in the market, we think it's ridiculously undervalued and that the best thing we can do with our cash is buy ourselves back. By buying our shares back at this price, it's been a sacrifice to our cash balance, but we think that is a safe bet, as we know the strength of ourselves. By taking available shares out of the market, it reduces our float and, hopefully, over time, will increase the value of this company and increase its market cap, but most importantly, it allows us to have even more strength and autonomy over what we do and to capitalize for ourselves the strength of the company and arbitrage that against the stock price which is not where it should be. In 2024, using our NCIB, we've been able to buy over 2 million of our shares back. We bought them at an average price of $0.66. The cost of that is to our cash balance. So over -- since we started our NCIB 2 years ago, we've spent just over $2 million repurchasing shares, so with our current cash to date plus our NCIB costs, our cash balance would be well over $10 million. Our goal is cash production to increase our dry powder to have that treasury as high as possible so that, as new opportunities come along, we're able to jump on them. So having approximately $10 million available to us to market and grow and take advantage of the launch of that game is very, very important to us, so we continue to grow that cash balance. At the same time, we're always going to buy back our shares at the best possible price.

I'm Jim Wagner, Chief Product Officer. Power Rangers Mighty Force launched midway through Q3 and immediately had a positive impact on our business. Within days, we were able to scale up to almost 30,000 daily active users, with some of the best ROAS numbers in recent history. Unlike many mobile game launches, in the first month, we maintained a positive ratio of top line revenue to user acquisition spend, which resulted in increases to both our top line revenue and our profit margin in this quarter. The passion of the Power Rangers fan base is in full effect. And Power Rangers Mighty Force is now our highest-ARPDAU game in our portfolio. We are actively working on bringing over more engagement and more monetization features from the rest of our portfolio to bring out those numbers even further. Season passes in our games continue to be a very strong source of revenue for the studio. In Q3, we made the decision to increase the cadence of season passes from once monthly to twice monthly. As a result, we increased season pass revenue across Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money, Bud Farm Idle Tycoon and Cheech & Chong Bud Farm by almost 40%, exceeding our expectations. Q3 had a number of highlights in terms of revenue generation. We had our third highest single-day revenue in 2024 within Q3. And a number of games had their highest revenue days of the year, including Bud Farm Idle Tycoon, Cheech & Chong Kush Kingdom, Doctor Who: Lost in Time, Star Trek Lower Decks: The Badgey Directive and Milk Farm idle tycoon. All had their strongest single-day revenue in 2024 in Q3. Looking ahead to Q4, we're excited to roll out cooperative and competitive play into Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money and RuPaul's Drag Race Superstar through a brand-new guild feature that allows dozens of players to band together to compete and cooperate to win exclusive, new prices. We believe that this feature is a perfect fit for the passionate fan bases of these 2 games and will be a pillar of East Side Games and all future games in our portfolio for years to come.

Hi. I am Elin Jonsson, and I am the Chief Business Officer at East Side Games Group. I work really close with our IP and brand partners. And we create various of initiatives together to boost organic installs and increase engagement. The most significant initiative in Q3 was the Intergalactic Friendship Day crossover event. We worked together with Paramount and BBC and created our first crossover event ever between our 2 titles Star Trek Lower Decks and Doctor Who: Lost in Time. Together with our IP partners, we managed to create a significant hype around this event. We announced at Comic-Con in San Diego. And we got access to both Paramount's and BBC's all-digital marketing channels, so website takeover, newsletters, social media, YouTube, with one strong messaging around downloading both games and play both events. This resulted in a high increase in organic traffic both from a quantity perspective but also from a quality perspective, so high day 1 retention. This also marked as one of our top-performing ARPDAU events in both games. We are now super excited to try to replicate the success from Intergalactic Friendship Day with 3 other titles in a new crossover event in Q4.

Hi. I'm Wally Nguyen, the Chief Revenue Officer for East Side Games. I'm here to talk about the Epic Games Store. The Epic Games Store for iPhone, iPad and Android is an exciting, new mobile marketplace. Currently, the Epic Games Store is available on iPhone and iPad only in the European Union, while users of Android and PC and Mac can access it worldwide. Epic plans on expanding availability on iPhone and iPad to the U.K., Japan in 2025, with more regions that follow as new laws promoting app store competition are enacted. From a financial and economic perspective, this is why we're excited: The Epic Games Store presents an exciting, new [ avenue for ] developers, as they are offering a 12% revenue cut for payments processed through Epic and 0% for third-party payments. This is far more attractive to us, as compared to the 30% cut taken by those like Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Epic mobile represents an important initiative that holds significant potential for us. With this generous revenue-sharing model and programs like Epic First Run and Epic Rewards, we see it as a vital step towards increasing our revenue in 2025. These initiatives provide visibility and [ promotional ] support. So at East Side Games, we're proud to announce that we'll be offering Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money on the Epic mobile store later in Q4, with more titles to follow. This partnership not only allows us to reach a broader audience but also positions us to capitalize on new distribution opportunities.

Hi. I'm Lisa Shek, Chief Operating Officer. I focus on making our operations run smoothly and work closely with our co-development partner studios around the world. From Vietnam and Argentina to Australia and the U.S., we're proud of our partner ecosystem. Many of our partners have built multiple games with us. And this year, we've partnered with Funkitron out of Boston to codevelop our third match-three title. And today, we are thrilled to announce RuPaul's Drag Race Match Queen. This marks our second collaboration with World of Wonder following the success of RuPaul's Drag Race Superstar. Superstar launched in October 2021 and has become our top-grossing game in the studio, with over 4 million lifetime installs and 200,000 daily active users at its peak. Match Queen is currently being tested in soft launch and already showing promising signs of strong player retention. Over the last few years, we have tested and perfected our match-three core mechanics and learned what the RuPaul fan base really wants. And this game is going to be the best of all worlds: glamorous fashion; iconic, new queens; some friendly competition; and captivating puzzles along the way. We're so excited to launch this title in early 2025.

Hi. I'm Galan Akin, East Side Games Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer. And I've been having as much fun making RuPaul's Drag Race Match Queen as the fans will have playing it. We're so excited to combine our success in live ops fashion gameplay with our new learnings in match to create a brand-new hybrid game that is going to be extremely easy to pick up and very hard to put down. World of Wonder is an excellent hands-on partner and has worked closely with us on every game detail to help us deliver the best, most authentic fan service to this passionate, underserved market. Our development partner, Funkitron, has helped us create the highest-quality match experience on the market. And we're taking our success with RuPaul's Drag Race Superstar to the next level with a streamlined, accessible game experience that combines the most loved elements of Superstar with the industry-leading retention and remarkable monetization of our new match games. Launching with over 1,000 highly polished levels and thousands of fashion items, the game will feature 2 high-profile queens from the show every month and offer limitless possibilities for self-expression through our "toot or boot" player voting feature.

Thank you for joining us for the Q3 2024 East Side Games Group Earning Call. We hope we were able to give you a good sense of our strategic planning, our initiatives going forward as well as some great achievements that we had over Q3. We remain dedicated to delivering value for our shareholders, employees and partners going forward. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us; and we'll be happy to answer them.