Modern Times Group MTG AB (MTGB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

First of all, so 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 want to say a big thank you to Hutch and Sean, who has for hosting us today. This is their amazing office. We've done some slight modifications to make it more presenter friendly for the day. But apart from that, this is where they live and make their gains. So a big thank you. So 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 the time that they need. So 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. We then 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. And 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 low flow -- through the flow platform and through the strategy. So the schedule we have to you today will start off with a short introduction from our CEO, Maria and our EVP of Gaming, Arnd. We will then move on to -- 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, about accelerating our evolution and creating value. So in very simple terms, there are 3 big blocks for the day. The first 1 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 going to talk about game development and also about our Web 3 and NFT gaming initiatives. At the end of the day, we'll have a panel to tie it all together to kind of to try to show you how all of that comes together to create the incremental value that we're trying to achieve. And then we're going to end the formal bit, and we'll also -- 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 will 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. So 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. And 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. So without much further ado, I will hand over to Maria.

Good, and 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. And 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. We met it was a different setting, of course, but we did have our Capital Markets Day already in June, which is just a couple of months ago. And I think that day was really important for us because I 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 information do we have? What do we want to build? Why do we believe games is exciting? And also, of course, what's our ambition on it? But what we promised you that day also is, today, you 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. So today, we really want to 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. And hopefully, we are able to share that excitement with you today. And also, you will understand why we believe that we are going to be able to grow faster than the market in the years to come. But before that, of course, Arnd and I will take some time still to go through where is our strategy? We hopefully have some newcomers to our equity story. So what is our vision? And also what we want to show you is what is the progress that we've 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, and we really want to build the best home for gaming entrepreneurs. And what we mean when we say that is to really selectively find some of the best game makers and entrepreneurs out there, bringing them under the same umbrella or as we say village and making sure that we together become stronger, we learn from each other's strength, capabilities, know-how. And hopefully, we also have more fun working together. And what that all means coming together is we're becoming a better company. We spent quite a lot of time actually than in the spring going into our Capital Markets Day to try to challenge ourselves how do we want to be as an owner. And 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 done for eSports, which means finding that fine balance with being an active owner being the architect of making sure the gaming pillars come together but also at the same time, allowing that creativity and that local mandated organization to become even better every day. And that's why I'm so excited to have you all here today and also for you on the streams 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. So that's the focus of the day. That's our vision. And again, it is still just early days. I think Anton said it, and we said we had a busy year. I would say actually, we've had 2 busy years, to be honest. And if you recap -- I mean, I've been with MTG forever, it's like I'm assuming becoming legacy here, but MTG has always been around entertainment. With me that's been my life. But when I joined MTG almost 20 years ago, it was traditional free TV and pay TV. That was the hottest thing that you found in town. What happened is with technology and customer preferences, it evolves. And 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 day 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 a first time, I think, forever also that the gaming market isn't growing. There are both good and bad reasons for that as always. But if you look into the future and the trajection, the where 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 [indiscernible], I think the rough average is around 5% CAGRs in the years to come. And I think that's why we're excited to be here. And if you then look at this time line, are you 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. And 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. But I think also, when you look at it, they are actually in a better place right now. And if you look at MTG and our shareholders, we are in a better place right now. So I think of all the things that we've done the last 2 years, I think the divestment was actually the most transformative in the sense that it actually made us a pure-play gaming company. And 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 SEK 3.3 billion back to our shareholders, which is also something we're really proud of because ultimately, our job is to drive shareholder value. So looking at it then where are we? As I said, we are in 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. But 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-corp. And we diversified when it comes to changes, 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 2/3 in our purchases and 1/3 in advertising. And that is something that we're very focused, have been building up to because we do believe you become a stronger company with diversified revenue streams. And on top of that, we also have a good strong diversification and we have a reach today of around 6.5 million daily active users and roughly a little bit north of 30 million monthly active users. And these are also uses over time, of course, we'd like to extend both organically and inorganically because we are 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. And then if you look at the geographical split, we're still focused on 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. But 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. And I think it's also important to highlight when we do M&A, what is it that is important for us because it is not just to buy company we are wanting to build the best time for entrepreneurs with the best entrepreneurs. So there are 3 guiding principles that we have when we do M&A. The first 1 is people and culture. I mean that's the 1 thing you can never change. We are building a village. We want to make sure we find participants in that village and 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. And 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 on Forge of Empires to see if you work with live ops. The strength of that IP is simply amazing. So that is 1 of the corner pillar. And as you can also see on this chart, you also see that we believe in genre mastery. So you want strong evergreen IPs, also in the top in the genres that they're existing in. And the third 1 is, of course, every company needs to have a good financial growth, I mean that's the heart rate. We want to grow MTG. And of course, the companies we onboard, we want them to help accelerate our growth. Then 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 the strong IPs and say, where are those on the customer journey? So the game's journey because a game has a lifetime. There is always an end. However, we also know with strong IPs that end is very far out. So we are looking at from everything, what do we have in the produce introduced? What do you have in the growth phase? And then what you have in established and harvest? And how do you make sure that you find a balance of portfolio of that? Where you, of course, have the vast majority of your games in the growth phase. And 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 revenue comes and which also means, I mean, you were there, Hendrik today talk about how we work with live ops. These are also games that you can continue to invest in with your live ops, which is really a dedicated skill and also we use acquisitions to continue to grow and harvest over years to come. Established games equally important, the longevity is super strong. And 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 a really nice bottom line profitability. And that's also what you then reinvest in your produce space. And today, you will also hear all the companies giving their commentary to how is the pipeline looking like? What should you expect for '23 and '24? Because 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 also has 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. So let's bring it all together then. I mean, what are we trying to do? Well, by creating the best home for entrepreneurs, we also want to build 1 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 as of above-market performance. So 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, and it comes down to really 3 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. And then 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 the 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. So hopefully, you will enjoy the rest of the day today. You will hear many presentations after me now. Arnd will come and talk about the flow platform, the importance of it and how that will accelerate our growth. You'll also then here to some of the key growth drivers I talked about, scaling existing games, launching new games. Hendrik 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. And then hopefully, at the end of the day, when you hear everything, then you can also see what makes sense and 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. So with that, I hand over to Arnd, 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? Thank you. Hello, everyone. 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. And in these 10 minutes, I want to 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 Hendrik and the team first investment, then we try to diversify the group with the investment into Kongregate as a publisher and casual game developers. These were the first 2 steps. And now with Hutch joining the group and 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 the growth and grow faster than the market. So our vision, as you heard from Maria, and it's really special, I believe, and that's why we're all here, we want to become the best home for game makers. A village, which will attract the best talents in the world where they are loved to share the knowledge, open up the technology made it accessible for everyone and collaborate. And with these 5 companies, we have already found, I think, excellent talents, high-quality companies who moved into this village. And together, we're going to build the village and benefit from this acceleration platform, the flow platform. But 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 that culture. I mean that's why you're here. you should live and breathe and feel the hatch spirit. Later, Sean will talk about how they develop games. But when you walk around and explore with the Hutch office, you're going to see they love racing. They enthusiast. They have pieces from Formula One cars over there. And they are the best experts when it comes to automotive communities. And that's something you can only experience when you make the trip. So the MTG signature culture is the glue. We want to challenge each other. It should be a fun environment because we're a gaming company. Exclusively, we're not a bank. We want to be playful. We want to have fun. And it's really important we want to really reach together next level, level up the playground. So 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 BI analytics system. This is InnoGames BI system, which they have developed, and now we elevated it, put in 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 tool services to optimize campaigns to manage creatives and put in the cloud and again, made it accessible working with all the group companies. And then we have, on the right side, the 2 new building blocks cost promotion amortization, where we also diversify our revenue streams. PlaySimple is a champion here and starting to also bring this through flow platform and rolling this out and running test. Sid will later talk about how cost promotion will become a key value driver in the future. And amortization is important because we're not only game makers, it's also important to master at tech and to build our own ad stack. And there will be more components be added over the next years there's community management. There's live ops and so much more, we can open up to our games village. And the care competencies to develop games, publish them, scale them, always sits with each company. And 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. But 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 live ops engine and UA engine and 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. And let me highlight 2 interesting numbers. We spent more than SEK 2 billion to acquire users, bring them into our audience network. At the same time, we capitalize on them and add revenues with SEK 1.5 billion. So in total, we spent roughly -- we removed like SEK 3.6 billion around. So these numbers will be boost and optimized for the Flow platform. How? Here, from each euro or dollar, or our SEK and advertiser spans, only 50% will arrive in our pocket. So there's a leakage of 50%. So 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. And it's pretty similar when we acquire users. So this is a tech play. And therefore, we develop the flow platform. And since we met last time or virtually over video in May, we came a long way. So we made huge progress on building out this Flow platform. All companies ingest the data now in 1 BI system, which helps us to predict the ATV, optimize resource allocation. Christian has successfully built up digital marketing agency, the tech piece of the platform and is offering these tools and services like [indiscernible] to optimize and run campaigns to all portfolio companies. And we've already started rolling out the cost promotion system driven by PlaySimple to the whole group and building our own ad stack. But 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 Hendrik talking about how to drive live ops and grow the business. Then we have Sid who came all the way with Preeti from India to present to you why PlaySimple is much more than a world developer, why they're even also at tech company. We have Scott, who made the longest trip from Auckland, New Zealand to show you how they have been able to build 1 of the really most iconic mobile game site piece with blunts without spending a single marketing euro, all organic marketing. And after the break, Sean, our host will talk about product games development, and prototyping and how process look like. And finally, Macros will introduce you to the Chinese blockchain world. And why it's still exciting, although some guys got a big time with FDX, why it is not affecting the gaming world. So before I hand over, let me just summarize the key points which you want to proof to you today. So 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. So with this, I'm happy to hand over to, with the next music to our friends Sid from PlaySimple.

Thank you. Thank you, AR&D, and thank you for the song. It's been a while since I have that one. It's 1 of my favorites. Today, and I can't mention 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. I've put together -- but 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? [Presentation]

That's the team there. They couldn't make it all to India. So we invite you probably in India some time. But like you guys could have figured out, we are a world 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 ads?

You can win a Porsche here.

Well, let me give it 1 because I don't give a porsche for this one. But Mont Blanc. And this is 1 of the puzzles in our games and the players across the board, I think, has spent close to about $40,000 just answering this puzzle. And there are thousands of puzzles in our games. That's the business what we are in. And I think later, after -- in the meetings, please feel free to download our games. And if you are curious to answer some of these puzzles. The story of PlaySimple, we started the company in 2014 almost 8 years ago, right around the time when MTG decided to buy InnoGames. And all that is based on Bangalore. We have about close to 300 people. On the right side here is my team. Each 1 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 have worked at, which, interestingly, none of them were ad based. All of them were heavy on IP. The first theme that I worked on was Mafia Wars, an action RPG. And likewise, a bunch of other games out there. I've got Preeti, who's my co-founder, she's there and the rest of the team who make it here today, but would love to sort of meet you some time later. This is the market that we're addressing, which is close to about $1.1 billion. And most of the people who think and imagine the 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 ours, ourselves, which is AppLovin, which has got people fund, Take-Two, which is got Zynga, and Words with Friends. And of course, the New York Times Crossword and [indiscernible]. On the right, I've got the demographics details of our players. Most of our people are 40-plus. And contrary to -- 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 the markets that we've not exclude, 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 -- but majority of the growth actually happened in 2018 onwards. Since '20, the bars show the revenue and the blue line shows the since 2018 till last quarter, we grew close to 45x in revenue. And that's essentially what -- I think -- and I think -- so interesting milestones that happen 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 want to take a pause versus continuing to scale off. This is where we partnered with MTG and our growth continued even after that, which is, of course, something to say about the partnership that we have been able to operate likewise that you were operating in [indiscernible]. There's a lot of things that has happened during this course of time, and I'm going to talk about them in the subsequent slides as well. But before that, this is -- these are the current games that we are working on, on our product maturity curve. On the left are the new titles that we're working on. I've spoken about the [ word John ] and that we want to sort of like become big and continue to lead. But 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 teams. Most of our revenue right now comes from 3 main titles, which is Crossword Jam, Daily team Crossword and Word Trip. Overall, we do 6 live games and 6 games in development. The bottom titles here are the games that we built all pre-2017. All of these current games that are here, all of them are games that have been incubated in 2017 when we scale subsequent years. The titles on the right, on the left from there are games that we incubate in 2020 onwards. So yet to see this growth and scale from those cans 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. It is an interesting slide, which shows the downloads of our games. And they stack up nicely above each other. And 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 1 of the things that we were thinking about when we started the company is how and eventually, the revenue and the downloads in the daily active user 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 1 thing to keep in mind is we build this company out of India, which is not a major gaming hub. So 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 and on analytics and data, which will allow us to sort of process data records, very -- I think 1 interesting fact is that we -- as a company, we process close to 7 billion data records a day to take decisions real time. So all of that is there, of course. But then I think the 3 key things that allow us to be successful is 1 that, hey, we decide to go after games and genres where we feel we have a realistic chance of being #1 or #2. If that -- if a game or a genre that the team comes up and say that, hey, if you want to go after that does not meet a qualifying criteria, we will not pursue that. The second thing is that, hey, we've -- like I've spoken about, we invested significantly in analytics and data infrastructure. Everything that 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 -- now that -- this is 1 of the things that we learned at Zynga, which they really mastered well is if you -- if 1 of the features that is doing well in 1 came, figure out a way that how you can translate it and actually share it across the other games. That is how infrastructure is built. So the most important thing that I'm proud of in this journey of the last 8 years is how -- and will speak about that, which is at tech as you guys would have guessed by now, is how we build 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? Well to give you a perspective, I have compared ourselves with the ones of public companies out there, where data is available from their reports on what percentage of their audience in monetized, through in our purchases. And on the right, I've got an interesting fact on how the session time over the years has continued to go up. So we took this opportunity to say, okay, hey, we need to figure out a way to monetize the remaining 90% plus audience. And 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 in the [ bedroom ] 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. So I'll do a quick 1 on this one. On the left side, 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 have got publishers on 1 side and advertisers on the other side. And a lot of players in between, which facilitate the users grow from 1 side to the other side. The advertisers want users to come and check out their website or mobile apps, the publishers want to monetize from the inventory that they already have. And the incentives for the players in between are to actually facilitate the goal for the partner that they are closer to. So SSP is somebody who's closer to publisher, their incentive is to help the publishers, DSPs somebody closer to advertisers, which is a 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 intact. We've got banner ads, interstitial ad, native ads and video ad. There's 1 more ad format 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, we could only put a few, and I'm sure that you're familiar with a lot more players in this space. And for the others, we've got the other players as well. I think, of course, over the last 2 years, a lot of consolidation has happened and will continue to happen. This space has -- I think of this, I can say that the unit -- of the folks that have merged in our ad colony, Chad post, ironSource and Unity as well, as the Unity and ironSource was the last 1 that got acquired. The largest period in this space are, of course, Google, Facebook. And I think Google, Facebook, now 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 $15 billion -- $10 billion to $15 billion. There's no right estimate on that. We've tried our best to get the most accurate 1 on this. There are a lot of players in this space. Now so to operate in this of course, one can integrate with any 1 partner here. But like Arnd mentioned that you can end up losing a significant share of the revenue that you would have otherwise made. If you're somewhere here, their incentives are more aligned to the advertisers, but being a publisher, you need to maximize, however, maximize the use of your inventory. So we have built our own proprietary systems, which allow us to do that. The goals are -- there are 2 goals here. One is to for every impression that is coming and landing on you -- your inventory, you maximize the yield that every -- the dollar that you can get from that impression is maximum. Second is you don't waste time, did the mining, which impression is that. So the latency that is there from the time that your -- that slot is available to the time and that impression is shown is leased. So we work with all the leading ad networks and the 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 million ad impressions and which is equally 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 2 lines here. One is the purple line, which is how the market has done on CPMs and the blue, which is PlaySimple. And we've got the CPM -- the revenue per impression for different ad slots. As you can see, over the course of time, as -- I mean, in comparison to the market, we have done better for most of the ad placements, which wasn't the case when we started. So 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 1 of the earlier slides, our performance in the last 18 quarters. Now with this, we want to take this to the rest of the group companies, apart from being MTG's word gaming Developer. We also want to spare ahead our knowledge, we want to spare ahead 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 2 goals here. One is, I think -- but I'll get to that in a minute. But 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. So I have -- I think -- so that's goal number one, how do we sort of like take this up over the course of time across the company. Second is what Arnd 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 1 takeaway from my presentation. As we started at Word Games 8 years ago, and that's the journey that we are on right now. We continue to remain a word gaming company. We -- our Horizon 2 is casual games. We own a scale in this large market that is there is much larger. And Horizon 3 is becoming possibly an active company over the course of time. With that, I would like to call Preeti to share our learnings on cross-promotion and how we would take that across the group as well.

I'm Preeti, 1 of the cofounders of PlaySimple. And I'm here to talk to you guys about cross-promotion. What it is? What it's done for us? And what it can potentially do for the MTG Group. And unlike what the song says, I'm not sure to take your money, may be some of it not all of it. So quick intro to what cross-promotion is all about. I'm sure you have heard of it, I'm sure you 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? So we're a word gaming studio. Most of our games are word games. So the idea is to sort of introduce a player who plays 1 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 in details of how exactly it makes sense. But I mean the most intuitive sense, anyway, it's a good idea to expand that footprint, right. This is how it looks in practice. So let's say, a player has downloaded 1 game. That's Word Trip, 1 of our biggest games. And while a players playing puzzles, they typically need coins to solve some of these things. This is what we call a watch to unbutton. It's a rewarded video that you watch to earn coins in the game. So what happens is when a player presses that button, they see your rewarded video ad, they own a certain number of points for that ad, right? Post that, in some instances, where we think we want to convert a player to 1 of our other games, we show what is called across promo interstitial, right? And so a player may own like 10 coins to watch rewarded videos. We incentivize them with, let's say, 10x that amount to download 1 of our own games. So then if a player is interested, they go through with this, and they download. They're the redirected to the store to download 1 of our games. So this is how it looks in practice. Now 1 of the questions that we often get when we talk about cross-promotion is, hey, what -- why is -- I mean why does it make more sense for you to sort of cross-promote to your own game versus selling that spot, selling that ad to an outsider who is willing to pay for it, right? So the answer is, it's not either or. These are mostly mutually exclusive placements. So the regular ads run on normal placements like watch tower like interstitials which are not incentivized in the novel ad world and then banner ads and such, right? So we do run cross-promotion on those as well. But at the bottom of the stack, so after we show -- if there is no other ad available to be seen, then we show a house ad, right? So those are those placements. And the way we look at regular ad placements is we are we're optimizing for yield. We are optimizing for the -- to maximize on the dollars we make from showing ads, but we don't want to lose our players to those ads, right? So that's how -- so 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. And 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. So this is an example, right? That's a typical interstitial add. There is no incentive. It's just an ad that pops up maybe once you complete a puzzle. This is what an incentivized interstation looks like, this doesn't exist in the rest of the advertising world. This is just an in-house placement. So you don't really interrupt the players. I mean it's a short -- it's just to pop up. But when a players looking for coin, it suddenly looks very interesting. And we've had really good success with conversions with these placements. So coming back to why cross-promotion makes a lot of business sense, right? So like I said, you have -- so as a company, we do a lot of paid user acquisition. Over 100,000 installs a day. So we have a lot of players coming in and could -- and at least half of them turn out on day 1, right? So the idea is to sort of when we pay for an install, how do we maximize their lifetime value within our system, right? So 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, this cover many other -- many of our other offerings. So there are different types of players in the game. We look at that on prediction, we look at their behavior in the first game. And based on that, we surface other games that they might be interested. For example, if a player is finding it difficult to play a daily team crossword and it looks like they're going to turn because of that, then we start offering some of the more easier games that we have in our system, right? So what that does is it allows players to engage deeper in our ecosystem. We have a lot of players who play more than 1 game. And then over their lifetime, they end up generating higher lifetime values. So rather than looking at something as the LTV in a game, we look at it as the PS LTV, and we try to maximize that, right? So that, in turn, for every dollar that we spend on marketing, there's 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 an journey. So as Sid mentioned, I think from a very like seed investment deck, we had cross-promotion as 1 of the key pillars of our strategy, right? Because 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? And the answer for us was always, it's the audience, right? It's the audience network that we're building. And games, different games over time will serve to engage this audience. But over the long term, that's going to be the key asset that we're building, right? So we started the company in 2014. It was not until 2018 that we had multiple games at scale to really kick off cross-promotion. So we started off in 2018 with our first cross-promo initiatives. And over time, 2019 through '22, 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 send -- we're able to cross-promote users from our scale games to these test games. So here are the results, here are the cumulative results, right? We started off with some 300,000 installs for the year of 2018. We're going to close 2022 with 8 million across-promoted installs. And that have delivered a cumulative value of $27 million over the last 4 years and $10 million each in the last couple of years. And all of this is it goes straight to the bottom line. So it's usually additive to our business. Is there any questions so far? Yes.

I have 1 question sort of in-game advertising in general. So when -- whenever is like something external, is advertising like an exchange or crypto or something I kind of understand that, but 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?

Preeti, just summarize the question [indiscernible] on the street. I can't hear.

All right. Okay. So the question, if I understand, is -- we monetize -- so you understand external ads that we show that are outside of gaming, like crypto or whatever else, right, or some shopping or something. But how does it make sense to show ads to other gaming -- of other gaming companies, right? So the way we really manage this is we don't -- we typically don't show ads of our competitors. We show ads of other genres, which are not -- which are complementary. So -- and 1 of the things when we've tested -- and this is usually a big concern when we show any sort of add, right? Or what is it going to do to my game? Is it going to cannibalize? Am I just going to lose all my players? So we test all of these things heavily and ensure that our retention is not impacted by any ads that are shown. So there's a lot of tuning that goes on under the hood to make sure it's all balanced out and it's additive. All right. I will move on.

So where we stand today, this is what cross promotion does for us on an overall basis. So like I said, we do a lot of paid UA, over 10,000 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? So until that time, we support all of our new games with cross-promoted installs. And net-net, I mean, overall impact on business is about 25% to 30% of our margin comes from revenue generated through cross-promotion. Just a quick view of how we operate. So we have a central cross-promotion team that's dedicated to building out the infra that is essentially as simple in a plug-and-play mode as possible. And like I said, I mean, we test everything heavily, and we certainly, we test our internal cross-promotion as well because it's always donor games are always a little reluctant to show any ads. So we make sure that it's all making sense for both donor and receiver games. Heavy targeting, again, like I said, we don't want to target players who are already heavily engaged in the donor game. We're mostly looking at guys who may want to turn out or who are showing signs of this engaging, that's when we want to cross-promote them. And there's also -- it's a heavily, heavily collaborative exercise to get this going across, even just within our studio, it takes a lot of collaboration. A few key success factors. One of the most important drivers is affinity between games. So a player playing a word game is very likely to want to play another word game. So that's our key driver. Having said that, it's -- from all the tests that we have run both internally and externally, even cross-promoting across low authority genres still makes sense because effectively, the cost of the cross-promoted install is 0. So 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 the -- get these features deployed across now we have about 10 games and counting across multiple platforms. If you have to do that efficiently and effectively, the infra needs to be super simple. So that's been -- and of course, I mean, data visibility is super important if we have to optimize. So that's basically broadly what it takes to get this going. And a couple of case studies to illustrate, right? So the first case study is an into case study. It's -- so I'm going to give you 2 examples, right? This 1 is at one 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 demographics, right? So 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 stand across more than 1 million installs from Word Trip toward Jam over the last 4 years. And the value that each of these installed, these cross-model installs generates is 20% higher than what we see from paid installs. So 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 -- as -- so beyond word games. We ourselves are expanding into other genres, and those games would be lower affinity, right? A solitaire game would be lower affinity to a word game. So we did see success with those as well. But this is a great example, right? So we -- 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. So this was 1 of the first tests that we ran with our friends at Ninja Kiwi, so we took a game. So, we took Ninja Kiwi's biggest game, which is Bloons TD6. We took our biggest game Word Trip, both of which had a good U.S. -- a large U.S. audience. But that's where the similarities end, right? There is no genre overlap. There is no demographic overlap. Bloons TD6 is almost entirely male, probably 25-ish, and then we have the word games, which is mostly female audiences and older, right? So on the face of a seem like, hey, this is not going to really give us much. But for the simple test that we did, it was a very high-level test, a very quick 1 to see how this is going to play out. And we saw some really surprising results. We saw that the players who cross-promoted from Bloons TD6 to Word Trip actually did better than some of our own low affinity games, right? So it was -- they engaged better, they convert it by -- they monetize better. So it was actually net additive. And I think it's super promising for what we can do going forward. We also did -- we also did the reverse. We cross-promoted from Word Trip to 1 of Ninja Kiwi's more casual games, Bloons Pop, and we also -- even there, we saw that our players responded a lot better to Bloons Pop than to some of our own games. So again, a very promising sign, and we're looking forward to sort of leveraging that more. And that brings me to what cross-promotion could potentially do for the MTG Group. So 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 a place, we could generate about like 10,000 additional free installs for the group. And within studios, there is a huge opportunity because within Studios, the affinity is already very high. So we have the best case and we have -- apart from PlaySimple, we have 4 best case scenarios. And across the studios also between, let's say, Ninja Kiwi and InnoGames, there is a large overlap in terms of genre and audience. So partially, this could be 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.

I will take that, But we will take. So we'll now take a few minutes to take your questions, and thank you very much, both Preeti and Sid, let's get you both on stage, so we can see you, if that's possible. And 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 with the [indiscernible].

Thank you for your presentation. Just on cross-promotion. So you mentioned you did some tests so far, free installs across the studios. But are you also doing, let's say, showing ads of the other studios? And how does it work in terms of for example, Is Hutch giving you rate on the ad that you can take or not? How does it help for that?

Why don't you take the question?

Sorry. So I don't think we are showing ads necessarily for each of those studios. I don't know if you know anything more about that? Are we showing ads of each of those studios?

Yes, I think so. I think we are not restricting the inventory to actually flowing into our exchange currently. I think through the ads, I think -- but there will be some portion that will be flowing in, but a very small fraction that will be going in, which is, of course, something that we can optimize. But I think as we roll out the strategy and cross-promotion that we get fixed, we don't want to sort of like stop -- I think a lot of -- it's a very complex world because I think campaigns have a long history, and we feel sort of like artificially pause something that will have a bearing on how those campaigns perform. So right now, we are not doing anything. We're letting that inventory come in. Over the course of time, we, of course, would not want to lose out by actually giving that money to the players in between, but 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. So as we roll out the strategy, we'll actually replicate this across the board as well. So we have the capability to block it. We're not doing it right now. We do it within PlaySimple.

Thank you for your presentation. The world around us has become a bit darker this year. 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. And like always, I think back in 2014 to 2017, '18, 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 and label ads and video ads and the videos and playables and then video playables and static ad at the end. So we have seen constant disruption happened. We've also seen consolidation last year. We have also seen Apple sort of late coming in and saying that, hey, the iOS, ATT things are -- I mean, they're necessary. So if I have to answer this question, I can say that, hey, it's not difficult to start a studio today versus what it was some time ago for the course of time, because of the infrastructure and the capabilities that we have built, I think there will be better equipped than we would have been a while ago. We always looked at the gaming industry and the studio that we built required multiple components. One was people, 1 was infrastructure, 1 was users. So we have come a far way in terms of getting some of those resources, which allow us to scale. And 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 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.

Tom from Citi. Thank you for the presentation. This might come later Anton, so feel free to park it. But the question is on the ad tech intermediaries, you've intimated that there is leakage. 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 capabilities?

I think -- so I think it's -- if I may answer that question. So first repeating that question for the rest of the group here. And the question is, 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? So 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 is 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 out 1 of the things that there to actually plug in that leakage , we are evaluating it. But I think the piece that we are the closest to is on the publishing side. So I think we will probably take something up on that side -- close at that side to where we have the inventory and we can monetize that better versus taking on the advertiser side.

Thank you. So we have a question from the web. So on cross-promotion of PlaySimple's own games, you showed 7,000 out of 110,000, so around 6%. But for the group, you showed 3,000 to 10,000 of 400,000, so around 1% to 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 3,000 to 10,000 and be more around like so, let's say, 20 is the question.

Theoretically, yes. That's full potential. But 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's data security and privacy concerns that we need to sort of resolve. We have Christian who's building out the BI platform. And I think that will -- once that falls fully in place, it will enable us to really sort of rollout cross promo at its full potential. So there's all of these different pieces that need to fall in place, and this is a risk-adjusted number, if you will.

Yes, 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 uses LTV and what we are sacrificing there to actually cross-promoting, I think it's important. I think so risk-adjusted to sort of like make sure that we do well on either all the fronts. And yes, always, I think, taught in school. And the problems and leave the rest and hopefully, it will be good.

Thank you very much. So -- yes, 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 part the company to use it internally or between different genres? And secondly, what do you think will happen with CPMs over time?

So on the cross-promotion, like I mentioned, where there is high affinity, there is definitely -- I mean that's the best case scenario. And the high affinity happens typically within studios, right? But there is -- like I said, there are some of our studios, which have games that are -- that you could potentially see players play both games across studios. So even there -- so it goes -- I mean, the potential goes from like, hey, gives them the exact same genre with the same demographic and then down to like games and completely different genres, different demographics. Those were the best case, worst case scenarios that I was talking about. But across the spectrum, it's all additive. So even between Ninja Kiwi and PlaySimple, that worked out well, at least it showed good signs of working out well. So that's how we expect it to play out.

Yes, I think the second question on the CPMs, if I can take that. I think on that one, I mean, so 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 because I think last 2 years were definitely, I think abnormal years that we saw where we saw great numbers. But I think if you look at the history of the CPM or our 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 installed which means that, hey, you will spend more on the places where you feel that, you're getting the right value. So 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.

It's Paul here. A quick question. In my view, you're not -- your business model is not specific to word games, right? I mean your -- I think your word class in just optimizing, which I think would be able to apply to any casual, timeless game. And you mentioned before, right, the casual is actually where you want to go to. And you saw in the early stage, I think, that you're working also on one bingo game, but wouldn't your model work perfectly well for Solitaire, for dice, for bingo. So what makes sense to like prototype a lot to expand in these genres?

Yes. So I think it's a really good question. So one of the things that I would like to share here is that although we are a word game developer and most of the people see this genre as one big genre, but there are multiple genes within it. And there's a crossword genre, we are the second largest player. There's anagram genre, where we are the second largest player. There's a scrabble genre, where we're the third largest player in this category. So we have understood like what works well in our systems that we can replicate in different, different genres. At the same time, we want to 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 #1 or #2. If the other players that are there that have already established and they are very large is going to take a lot more capital to become big there. So I think we're -- while we remain excited about solitaire and the other genres, at the same time, there are a lot other opportunities that excite us, which we want to go and pursue.

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. So 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. So the cross-promotion ads typically show up in -- either on top of -- so tapping you back on rewarded video ads. So the example that I showed you. A player would see an rewarded video ad first. And then if they qualify for a cross-promo ad, then they would see -- it would follow up with a cross-promo interstitial, right? So it's completely -- it's entirely different inventory that we've carved out for cross-promo.

Two follow-on questions to that. First is, what is the intelligence that determines what ads to cross-promote? Is it random? Or is there analytics behind it that allow you to do that? And the second question is, do you then measure or calculate the effect of the cross-promotion on the LTV of the user, the total LTV of the user?

Yes. So the prioritization of a cross-promo ad is entirely dependent on like we are trying to maximize PlaySimple LTV in our case, right? So we cross-promote to the highest potential game that is available and then go down that stack, right? That was one part. What was the second part?

Yes, I think in the second, I think, so one is that, hey, do you go back and track the LTV of the user?

Yes, yes. And yes, so -- for all cross-promotion, like I said, for every -- pretty much everything we do at PlaySimple, we heavily A/B test. So we do look at, again, post-class 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. And in most cases, the guys who actually cross-promote end up playing both games. So we do track the overall LTV.

They play both games without the loss in [indiscernible]?

Yes. Yes. because of the nature of the guys who play, right? They're cross-promoting because they want the coins to play the donor game. Therefore, they're already sort of heavily invested in the donor game, and then they will play the recipient game. Sometimes they do switch off, like so it depends, right? It depends on what -- there's different categories of users. So sometimes we 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 expected -- we would have expected from the first game.

Thank you very much to both of you. Thank you.

Thank you.

So we're going to make sure to keep everyone well hydrated and caffeined up. So we're going to take a 5-minute break and start again at 10, which will also allow us to make up the next speakers. So I'll see everyone in 5 minutes and look out for the loud music to bring you all back. Thank you. [Break]

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. So 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 gains 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. So Hendrik, please come on stage and I'll hand over to you.

So welcome. I'm Hendrik, Co-Founder and CEO of InnoGames. And I also like to show you a video of one of our games to know what we are doing. So enjoy the video. [Presentation]

All right. Download it now or watch this presentation. So InnoGames was founded in 2007, but we already started a couple of years earlier, when as founders, Michael, Eike and I created our very first browser-based online game, Tribal Wars. And 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. And this was the moment where InnoGames was started. We launched additional games. We're growing the company over the years, hired great talent to helped us to build further games. And in 2016, we were the first company to join MTG, the first gaming company within MTG. We have lots of different opportunities, but 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. And that's -- since then, we are part of MTG and continue to grow. We also build 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. Because 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. And what we are delivering a high-quality virtual world is where we can link millions of people around the world. That was the vision when we started InnoGames. And also back then, back to today, it's also the thing we are working with all of our new game releases. And our games are available not only on mobile. Mobile is our primarily platform. But all games are also available on the browser. And this is also very great from a player perspective because players can play our games anywhere they are. So they can play in the morning on the smartphone and evening on their web device. And every time they have access to the game account. And it's also great for us as a company. So we are safe 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. And just recently, for our latest game Rise of Cultures, a bit more than 1 week ago, we launched also the browser-based version. So it's also now available not only on 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. And over the years, we built up a portfolio of 10 games, 10 live games. And 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 ten thousands of players playing it every day. And we also see later how life ops 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 also games in the earlier phases, Lost Survivors, [indiscernible] production. And also a game defenders, a new game project, where we're combining city-building elements together with also some power defense game elements. And that's why we're also getting knowledge exchange and lots of relevant experience from the Ninja Kiwi guys. So thank you very much for this help. This made us possible to, yes, avoid probably some mistakes we would have made otherwise and really kickstarts with 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. And 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. And sometimes we just make the call, no, this game is not the right thing to do. And then it's the right thing to move on and work on something different. And this is what also what happened with some of these games here. So that's part of our business. It's normal in the games industry, but 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. And last year, we had about more than 40% of revenue share within the MTG Group. The growth at InnoGames was always very sustainable, reliable as our performance. So 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 months, 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. And 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. Then 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. And now we are in a, yes, good in-house level growing the company. And this is one of our strengths of InnoGames that we are really sustainable in our growth. We are not dependent on any hit titles. And we are providing more to the whole group. So 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. So the experience, the better 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. So 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. And this is also very helpful, especially if the games are available on all platforms. So this is also, for us, a very interesting channel, and we share this experience within the group. And of course, we will experience analytics, BI and also live ops is 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 yes, use the experience they made. If you look -- 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, yes, tycoon crafting genre, which is a big genre, there are multiple sub-genres. But it's rather a flat genre. And within this genre, we are also competing with companies that are themselves much bigger than InnoGames and also much bigger than the whole MTG. So we can clearly show that our games are really strong there. There's a certain subsegment, that's a city building element. So it's really actually about building up the city. That's where we are one of the #1 -- we are the #1 companies on the mobile platform. So our games are -- yes, 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 proud to be there the #1. But of course, they are also nearby genres, which are, yes, a bit broader and also give us opportunity to further growth. Our players based on service 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 those changes also depending on the game. And it's 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 -- 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. And we are looking at InnoGames, focus for the next year or next year, especially, we decided to put especially focus on 3 of our games. So first of all, it's Forge of Empires. And of course, Forge of Empires is no more than 10 years old. Now we are clearly also in the phase to stabilize Forge of Empires on this strong level. So Forge of Empires should be our fortress that we defend and run for multiple years to come. We have one new start in our portfolio, Rise of Cultures. This is our new rocket, improving the game significantly, scaling the game then based on this improvement and 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. So it's always things you can make better and make it even more scalable. And the next game then is which we launched afterwards is Sunrise Village. We also need to find there are the further right measures to allow for the scalability. We think, especially in the year 2024, we will be fully ready then to also start there with significant scaling based on the improvements we will improve -- we will make for this game. And all this is based on a strong foundation we're having at InnoGames. I mean, great people, the portfolio of our games in different stages of the life cycle from also some of our older games, which are, of course, providing a healthy bottom line. The whole technology we built around this, which allows us, the live operations, the user acquisition. So there's a lot of things working together and making this possible, and this together will allow us to have focus on 3 of our games, especially to make them -- let them shine. And one topic I will talk today a bit more about is the topic about using BI and live ops to, on the one hand, drive monetization and really running games for a very, very long time. And we have very good examples here. We have one game, Tribal Wars, you know this already. It's next year becoming 20 years old. And Tribal Wars is still a relevant game in our portfolio even after 20 years, probably everything changed during these 20 years. So from the early days from early scribbles to early browser-based game times, we changed nearly everything. But the core and the ideas that still remain. And of course, it's available on all platforms nowadays, still have tens of thousands, many, many, tens of thousands of players playing this every day. So it's still really a relevant part of our portfolio. And 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. But 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 that there was a COVID peak, obviously, which even further accelerated the growth. But what you can really see, after launching a game, the real journey can really just begin to take off. So it is clearly possible to grow a game for 10 years. It is clearly possible to run the game for 20 years, which, of course, is an amazing time. I mean and Tribal Wars, there have people that met in the early days in the game. They have now children that are, yes, old enough to work at InnoGames theoretically. So that's really impressive. I mean such a long time how you can run a game. And of course, Forge of Empires, that's also great that we had a 10-year celebration and of course, always adding something new for our players. And this is what live ops enables if you're doing it in the right way. And live ops, of course, many, many aspects. We can't talk about everything today. Today, I will talk a bit more about event. I will talk about some activities, how we launch our product updates and how we are using analytics in our -- for our live ops -- for our games. We have different examples. And 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. And of course, it starts with the team behind the game. And we, at InnoGames, have sometimes content-heavy games. So to be very clear, our players always expecting new content, new edges in our games, new levels in Sunrise Village, for example. And 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. And then within the smaller teams, you can have also a 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. And this feature teams then enable us to also release new updates to our players. And then new games, we are very consistent here. Every 2 weeks, we publish a new version to our players, where there's something new for our players. So this can be -- some feature lanes are still working on some topics. Others already ready, and then we publish it to our players. And because of this 2-week cycle, it's also very good to get the feedback from our players. It's not 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. So 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 a pro gamers they know that we have this release cycle. So it's very predictable for everyone and also very efficient to run such a process that really runs like a clock. And we also, of course, as a industry standard, we A/B test all 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, finished some tests earlier if results are very positive. So A/B testing also clearly plays an important role. We have the tools behind it. We are having very strong tools, in-house developed tools to really give clear overview about all the KPIs that are influenced by new tests, and they have no other things we are developing successful or not and can then take the right decisions. But 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. And we have multilevel dashboards. So first of all, a 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, in-game economy. And 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. So that's why you need to understand what's going on in your game and having clear dashboard helps you a lot because then you know 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 action on this because if multiple players mentioned something, for example, in the reviews, we should listen and understand what their feedback is. And 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. And I want to mention one thing, which also is very important for us at InnoGames. And also important part of life operation. This is regular events we are publishing in our games. So what we are doing is every month, depends on the timing, depends on the game. We will release changes to the game plan 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 seen by seasons, for example, a soccer event, St. Patrick's Day events, whatever tries to fit it also to the game world. And these events play a very important role for us. So we are often more than 200 days of our time that is already in event. There are some breaks in between, so players can relax and play the game without everything. But afterwards, they get clearly something new. Most of the players take part in this event. It 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. And in some of the games, it's clearly 30% of the revenue coming from this event base combined with some special sales we are having here. And 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. And events are also good because you can try out some stuff after 3 weeks is probably gone. But you can next time then iterate on this and make it even better than before. When it -- quickly zoom into one example for an event. So 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. Then the players have the chance to win some specials, often together, combined with the special event currency they can gain in the game which is only available during the event time. And after the events, they're offered the chance to also win grand prices, things that are really -- stay in your city. So it's not that the event is fully young, but after event, you have something to remember, which is not only visual quality but also providing some in-game stuffs. So it's players want to have these special items because they boost your whole game progress also after the event. And this, of course, also creates additional motivation to take part in these events, yes, become successful. And 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. And this is a really important part of our, yes, 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. And then, of course, this is -- this event are for all players. But then we are also, as part of our live ops looking at CRM activities, focusing on the right offers for the right players at the right time. So 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. And we are combining different measures here. So often, we're starting in the early phase of a player journey with some welcome series where we get additional explanation to the players, which also increases the retention in early days, you have a bit more additional guidance. I have seen this is working out good. We are often offering start offers to our players. So giving something out for less price than regular, to show them the value that we are offering throughout our premium prices. And then sometimes players start paying and then they don't pay any more than we are often also offering them 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 the players starting to become more inactive and are likely to churn. And this is also some reason where we 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 a 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. And we can give our players if after a while they are not active anymore or we think they are not active anymore and reactivation, not sold 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. So we can -- 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. So this really helps us also to use a chance in the group to become also better on this one. And what we're doing nowadays, this is what's presented in the last slide 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, yes, different, based on their spending behavior, based on their play behavior, putting them into different groups. And with AI-based systems, we're trying to find the best offer for them where they can, yes, get also something from the game, which is exactly the right based on a player group. And 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. So 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. And what we have seen here, for example, is we like a player group where we tried all those mechanisms compared to our more manual approach. We increased the player lifetime value by EUR 6, which was really impressive for this player group. So if done right, That does not always work, but if done right, it can be really successful for us. So we have a lot of data and with this data we can try to find the best things for our players. And 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. So of course, there's always a fluctuation, but you can clearly see is you can increase it year-by-year over time. And what we're also seeing here in our newer games, Rise of Cultures, Sunrise Village, we are seeing the increasement 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 have the chance to continuously improve our lifetime value of our players. And that's what's live operations is about, making the game continuously better over years. And if done right, you can run a game for 10 years or as Tribal Wars shows, even for more than 20 years. So to summarize this, it enables the success really over decades, if done right. And players always want to have new content. They want to 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 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 other players really like and then we repeat them also a bit more and further iterate them on them. And of course, with same 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 thing, so they also become paying players. And combining this is really what it's all about. And that's what we built a lot of experience at InnoGames over the last 20 years. You can really say if you include the hobby times, but -- and we can also share this experience in the group to help also other companies in the group learn from which main mechanics are the right ones, for example. All right. So 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?

Yes.

Thank you so much.

All right. We have one question at the back.

Thank you for the presentation. I played Tribal Wars for like 5 to 10 years something and...

Very good.

Thank you. And in the beginning, it felt like a real grind. You really had to play and wait for, yes, for everything to complete. But at the end of it, 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 for the long-term competitive players by having opportunities to purchase and win by paying InnoGames?

It shouldn't be fully paid to win. I mean, that's really interesting balance also with live operations. The whole world changes. It means the Tribal Wars that it was back in 2003 would not be the right game for the market as we have today. So that means we made changes over the years, but especially for games like Tribal Wars, that's also the challenge to always find the right balance with our existing player base. That it's activity in the game, the right decisions in the game should always be relevant for your game success. But at the same time, of course, you want to make sure that it runs as a business. So -- and that's where we are finding the right balance and working on to give the players, yes, a game, that's still competitive and at the same time, a business case. And we're seeing it from business side, it's a very stable game. So this strategy, I think, is the right thing for a game like Tribal Wars.

All right. So we have an online question. So in player categories, so the person who asked the questions writes that I didn't see a 0 revenue category. What percentage are 0 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. But yes, it's a significant amount of playing completely for free. We still -- I mean, this is player segments, we can still try to make them right offers. And sometimes, our offers are good enough that the players like them. And then they're also becoming players. So that's part of our CRM activities trying out to give them something where they really see enough value for their hard-earned money. But at the end, of course, most players play for free. Some of them see ads. We started recently this year, also based on group experience. So there's a bit of money. We are earning the same. But from our really playing the game completely for free, but it's fine as part of our business model. Not everyone has to pay money for our games.

All right. And with that, we're going to move straightforward and welcome, Scott, the Co-CEO and partner in Ninja Kiwi to the stage. Scott, your remote is there.

Smoother than a fresh jar of skippy. So thank you, everybody. Really appreciate having such a full audience and being able to take part of this. It's my pleasure to introduce Ninja Kiwi. I'll 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 game play. [Presentation]

So I hope you saw that upper corner. So that's a combination of balloons and zombie assault game play. That was Quin69. He's one of the top Twitch streamers and he tried that level about 40 times before he won it, and that's why he got up and went 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. So 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. And 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 and 2 flash games, both casual physics puzzler and the original Bloons TD game moving into tower defense. And we're still only about 6 people through that time. I joined in 2010, American by birth, New Zealander by choice. And I came to help scale the games in the company partnered with Chris and Stephen and user experience as an executive producer and studio leader in Electronic Arts and Activision. We've 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. So 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 -- so we basically got 2 sets of cofounders in one with Ninja Kiwi. And 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 live ops. So 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. And we love the fact that we can compete on the world stage. In 2021, our story changed. So for 10 years, we're working really, really well together, doing everything that we can grow in and having success. But there was just such a perfect scale and culture fit when we met the folks from MTG. It wasn't really something that we're like, hey, we really want to sell our company in this. But it was like this is the next step that we need to take. And it was not only about the scale and culture fit, but it was about the capabilities that could come -- we're already great friends. Kongregate has been our friends for years, both Bloons TD 5 and Tesla [ Missile Fort ] were 2 of the most popular games on Kongregate Flash portal. So we've known and worked for them. And we've already been working with Kongregate on the ad side, even before we were part of MTG. So 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 are 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. So quite a lot of experience there. Another thing that we're really proud of is the fact that across our 80-person team or average 10 year 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 1 or 2 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, and 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 is 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. So that makes an interest very interesting and powerful dynamic. We've also built up this as 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 going to be in the new sub-strategy subcategory. And then we have an ambitious new multiplayer IP game as well. Similar to Hendrick's story, we also take a look at Live Ops games that aren't performing well that either take mind share or just focus away from the rest of the game aren't really accretive to the bottom line and we make the decision to kill early if we see. So 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 their 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 about engagement -- has a lot to do with engagement and investment over time. And then we've developed a technical strength in our games. So 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 scale in dense simulations. We were 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 -- how are you going 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 but our ambition is to grow more than that. It's a relatively small subcategory, but -- so we should be able to own it. We can do better than that. And again, that's where we can tap into the MTG Village and the expertise with 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 Bloom's TD 6. This is our total company reported revenue, showing strong growth. Clearly, there are some moments here. Q1s tends 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. So those always transfer well 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 areas. We also have strong summer quarters. So you can see this real jump here. This is when we introduced the BOSS events and the Paragon into BTD 6 and they 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 is available. So we've had a strong history of growth, and we know that we can drive that further. It really is -- it's a combination. As you add things, we're up to our 33rd, we're in a couple of weeks, going to 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. So that was a pretty getsy move to increase price. We didn't know we were necessarily moving into the economic conditions that we had. But 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. But 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 are thinking at this point that BTD 6 is going to be that game for a long time that the ideas that we would have for BTD 7, we will be better, more quickly served and 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. And 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. So 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. And then 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. So 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. I see some hands, Oh my goodness. I'm going to have to make some choices here or just do the typical. So 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. So this is a partnership that we are running with Makeship. We've been working with them for about a year now. So this is purely additive licensing revenue. They do limited time, crowd-sourced, super high-quality plushies, look at the quality of those things. They are absolutely amazing. And again, so with very little cost to our team in terms of mind share or our actual just spent time from our community management and production team we're able to produce these. And 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. So they're existence of the IP outside 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. And so Bloons TD 6 will be coming to Netflix subscribers in 2023. So 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 one slide. So that's why the next like 15 or about that. And then a new IP wheelhouse. This is really important. Maria said it. New games mean growth. And they don't mean growth just because one of them has a chance to do -- be really successful or to help us with our internal cross promotion. So absolutely, we want to continue to extend Bloons. We are going to have this new game in the Bloons IP. But we want to 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. And we want 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. So the cross-promotion and ad monetization, every time we add one of those games, the cross-promotion and ad monetization that start then and pretty we're 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 is going to talk about and then the ability to introduce players to new technologies and player interests, that Marcus is going to 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. So we are pretty excited about what we can do here. How are we going to 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 smart. And all we do is just care 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 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, so we can do that, but we see that as a creative strength and we play to that. That 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. So focusing on the ecosystem that we've created, not just 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. And then the skill-based play is what people who are -- who get into a game and are naturally great, that create aspiration for other players to be as strong as they are. And if you can't do it naturally, then you spend more time and you invest more in the game in order to get there. And 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. So 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. And then 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. So 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 -- 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 run -- we've run a few tests with MTG working with Kongregate again on our Battles II game. But 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 for core categories. The first one is around the games themselves and the 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. And the last piece is tying in, 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 -- 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. So that just creates a sort of meta level of entertainment for a player that's already interested in the content that is unlike anything that we've seen in the history of advertisement. So that's pretty powerful, and I think we should pay attention to it. So how do we get players into the games and move them from participants to creators? Now this is a really important stage because it's a fundamental step in milestones that breaks barriers between players and developers. And it's also if you've made something, you're a lot more likely to show it off, want to show it off and share it. Christian even, again, had the brainstorm to take the tools that they've made to build levels inside of the Bloons flash game and expose those in a website. So basically, it just took the same tools and put them on a website. Had some immediate traction that was valuable both because suddenly, the 3 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. But 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. But still, it was an incredible foundation from which to build. So we looked at this as we had the next games come into the portfolio about not only how can we improve those tools, but how could we get them into the game. So 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. And 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. So it basically educated the entire player system about what is the difference between an okay level and a great level. And 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 but we're happy to say that, that is a challenge that we met and it 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 offer any visible content or enter any text that wasn't gated. So we were 100% sure that we were adding safe content into the ecosystem, which is important for any game, but especially one where you know that families are playing them. And then we created a place to display that content inside the game. So the entire content browser was created as a way to share player creations inside the game. You can't really see some of those numbers up there, clearly. But some of those are 76,000 likes for a random set of levels there, and that means hundreds of thousands of players in order to get that. And there's just a 220 pages of that content. So it's incredibly inspiring to other players and not only add 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 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? And we saw that this was just starting to happen. We get random posts and random places where players were combining their personal interests and passions and talents with our IP, we didn't ask them to do this. This is 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. So 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. And how do you start a conversation? Well, how do you have a conversation, you have to start a conversation. Somebody has to say something. So the best place for us to say things is about our games. So 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 update notes. We were just a few general notes about what was going on in the game. And now I'd say we've got best-in-class update notes. It explains every feature of 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 something that was reducing player time in the game and 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, it should be tempting to do. You don't want to promise features, you don't want to 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, but I guess to say, so 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 2-sided conversation. One of the things that we do is 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 3 or 4 questions about the developers' pets. So 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 that have anything to do with Bloons or Zombie Assault? No, it doesn't. But 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. So 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 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 want to have. It is important 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 we either come up with a funny way of doing it, or we just saying, no, that's off-balance and we're not going to answer that one. It's also important, I mean 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 to the Zombie Assault world is pretty like, yes, 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 of the discoverers of it. So we're right in the same position as the players are. We put -- 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 -- 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 cannon, then the players would stop talking about it. But because we leave it open ended, they continue to extend that conversation 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've just reached 250,000 subscribers on our Reddit. That puts us in the top 1% of all sub-Reddits, which is a pretty awesome mark. And 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 flare on Reddit, you can more easily get players 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. Sometimes they're typing as they're playing but a lot of times, they're spending time outside the game. So 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. So what's one more way of connecting the developer and the community and to break down those barriers? Make your community your developers. So we have hired 4 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, and we found ways. And again, this is not an easy thing to do. These are young people, many of whom had never left home to get them to travel, to move to New Zealand from Australia to -- yes, still in the U.S., 2 of them from Australia. It's a huge thing. I mean, they are taking the next step in their life. But we found ways to work with them in ways that they can be completely additive to the process. 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 -- that they've always wanted but to some degree, we're already doing as being such dedicated members of the community. But 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. So 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 is just so much more valuable than getting reaction at any point down the road, so incredibly valuable. And then 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. And then certainly, when these people express an opinion about where Ninja Kiwi is or why we did a thing that it has immediate authenticity, meaning to that community because they're still just as connected and just as known throughout the communities. So 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. I 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, 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. And 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, 4.8 on both the App Store and the Google Play Store. I'm pretty proud of the fact that we're the #15 top-rated game on Steam of all time based on player reviews. So 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, but we're flipping back and forth which is pretty cool. I'm sorry. Again, this has little guys in New Zealand. And yes, and that's Valve's -- one of Valve's best game on their platform. So I'm trying to have that arm wrestle. This is not just bragging right. So 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, these kinds of reviews and the responses that people see, then that's not just a canned contact customer support. People are seeing that at the point of download and purchase. So it's an incredibly validating to see the developer's responsiveness in those scores because they are absolutely helping decrease the wheels of that download and purchase. And then, of course, we've got all of the tools of a massive live op 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. The anticipation they give players things to look forward to. They provide challenges for players and they create moments of conversation. So every time we do a daily challenge, there's multiple -- there's a race effectively to -- for various community members to be the first one to post how to beat it. So 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 do. Some of these are text and some of these are videos. It just creates subjects for conversations. So 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 in 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. So we run a contest. We say, design us a map or design us a profile background. And we get a whole bunch of submissions. Those submissions are all public, and then we curate them, and we push them back to the audience. And then we ask the community to vote on them. So we've already curated and we 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 a 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. So it's another way to really extend that connection. So 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. So 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 sort of the massive spread and power, but also chaos that they represent. Ninja Kiwi is not new content creation. We got into the thick of it 10 years ago. So we started our own Ninja Kiwi channel 10 years ago and started putting little bits of information. It wasn't really about updates. There 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, and 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. So these are content creators that got into the system early, especially as games got traction as one of the main ways to grow your channel and your brand. So we see some of the oldest ones here, 2011, 2012. So 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 stickier knitting approach with this. We built the games, and they built their videos. But we've made great strides in connecting with these content creators further to inform them and give them content for their channels. Then Twitch really came onto the market. About 4 years ago, obviously, Twitch has been around for a lot longer than that, but they're focused on mobile, didn't really see the leverage 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. So this is Bloons TD 6 over the last 4 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. So we'd see very corollary spikes in our downloads at the same time. The quality of those players not always that great. They wouldn't stick with the game necessarily. Usually, they just follow the streamer. But 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 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. So because we could see that the streamers -- the number of streamers, the number of hours of content that they're creating 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 reengage with. So what's another way to align ourselves with content creators as 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. So recently, we've partnered with a group called Nexus AG 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 IP that they make inside that game is going to get credited back. A portion of that is going to 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 snapshot is only from about 2 months of revenue. But -- the -- and we only worked with a dozen handpick 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 answer pre-spend because there was no spend before the content creator code. These players had been playing the game and not spending or they purchased the game and then started spending because of the creator code. So this was a huge win. So yes, we're sharing some of that revenue back. But once we factor that in, we're seeing about a 20% to 25% lift on the spending power of people using creator code. So really optimistic certainly we need to see if that's sustainable. We need to see if that will grow over time, and we need to see whether that's going to develop with more creators in the program, but we're very excited about that. So clearly, community is central to Ninja Kiwi's growth in the past, and we see it essential to the future. We know that we can increase that by better consistency with road map 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 going to open up new opportunities there. And we've also added a creator to our staff. We've taken one of these new content creators, and 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. And we've got big plans for where to go from there, including that possibility of a player creator revenue share. So this really sums up what we've done. We see that -- I just want to impress it. It's like this stuff doesn't just -- it doesn't just happen. It's like, oh, well, all this stuff is happening out there. No, we're not spending money to make it happen. We're spending time. We're spending conversations where -- 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 tons 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 their existing games. We know that we can activate them and accelerate them inside our new games. And 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.

Let's see. Do we have any questions? Or is everyone keen to go and grab some lunch? We have the questions. That's great.

Scott, great presentation. The obvious question, though, is as well as you've done, if you were to spend money on user acquisition, when did your return on ad spend be wet good and then the people come forth to do so anyway?

Absolutely. I mean that's part of why we're -- that's part of why we're here. And 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 BTD 6. So to us, it's sort of like it's not just about the free-to-play model. How about if we can make BTD 6 as a paid game work with profitable marketing? So that is a huge opportunity for us.

Thank you very much for the presentation. That was great. I'm really interested in the sort of creator economy sort of elements of what you're doing. And 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 types of game within the MTG Village?

I appreciate the question. Can it be replicated? Is it dependent on game or technology or time? So 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. So looking for ways to create that connection with the content itself. So I do think that, that bridging of trying to create. 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. There's also -- it's also really important, and we see this in most of the games, we see in all these presentations, the characters. The characters are really important to this to sort of give players something to connect to. So I think by having characters to relate to and play our 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 going to -- those are not going to work in other ways. But there are other ways that players are going to be playing and talking about those things. I do think that there's a clearly community -- 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 because now players are looking at the same thing at the same time. So 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 so much.

Okay. 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. [Break]All right, everybody. Welcome back and for people joining us on stream. Welcome back. Thank you for waiting. We're a few minutes late, but we hope that's okay. So I hope that it got us on food and hope that it got into stretch your legs. And I do hope that you've had everyone a chance to interact to meet each other and meet the NTG team, the wider team across the group, which essentially is the point of this day. So we will now bring on stage Shaun, the Founder and CEO of Hutch. He's a cool dude. The one thing I must say that he was trying to do November, but he broke because he didn't like it. So he has his moustache back, but we all love it. So Shaun, coming up and talk to us about game development.

Everyone. It's really nice to have you all here. I'm about to play a video about the studio, but also our games. I hope that video really encapsulates for you guys, how we operate or who we are as a vibe and our world-class culture as well. So let the video roll, please? [Presentation]

Yes, that. Okay. So started the business 11 years ago. I did have a test in as well. That's about a 2-year old photo. So Anton, I am doing attach all the time. But I am doing this for November. Yes. So 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 love to make games and a lot of management problems happen where people get involved and how the game is made. So we came with this energy of we can make a business that's different and better, really look after employees, and I've grown with these guys for the last 10 years. The business has 3 studios, one is 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 also starting to make games. And the large majority of staff are based in London as well. So I'm not going to walk you through staff, but we're all here, so you can meet and greet these people. And yes. So the business itself, we have launched, I think we're up to a 12th game. The main drivers of the business are 2 games -- if you haven't noticed on the video, we make racing games, and I'll talk a bit about that later. But the main drivers of the business at the moment are Top Drives and Formula 1 Clash and Top Drives is a collectible trading -- collectible card trading racing game. So you don't actually race in it, but you collect cards and you trade with them. And then Formula 1 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. So those 2 are really, really growing the business. We have -- it probably looks like we don't do that much, we just work in 2 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, the most successful. So we're working on 3 games at the moment, and it's a really, really exciting time for us in the coming year. So as a business, we're currently ranked #2 in the racing market. It's not good enough for us. We want to get to #1. And I think what's really interesting for this. When I started Hutch, I think games were predominantly made for men and 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 is -- it's diverse. So Hutch as a business also represents that diversity. We're pretty close to these numbers as well. And it shows how the market can grow even more and more, but our bias is 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, call it 19 quarters or something. Real growth happened in Q4 '19, and this is when we started to scale Formula 1 Clash. What got us here was a bunch of games, but also Top Drives really grew. And you can see how the revenues really stepped up. The last 3 quarters have been really good. Our best quarter last quarter. And then obviously, talking about those 3 games that are coming out in the next 2 years, we should ultimately see lots of growth as well. So in terms of the vision for the business, and I'll talk a bit about how we look at racing later, but the vision for the business is we really, really want to change the way that racing games are perceived and played, and we really feel like we can grow the market in that respect. So the vision is to really, really shape how automotive entertainment is played. And then we aim to be #1 in grossing, but we do this by really creating an amazing culture and amazing way to work and people are looked after, then they can actually make the best games for the business. And in terms of how we do it, so we've got really strong concepts, and I'm going to take you through how we get to those concepts later. But then in terms of racing, what really helps is authentic licensing and that really brings out the reality of what the products are and the content inside them. And then as Scott was talking about, community is a really key asset for us as well. So community enables retention but also marketing as well. So these 3 components allows us to be -- to create category invention games. So 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. And with this mindset and this value, the team is very commercially minded because we're creative. We've always got these ideas about things we want to make but actually, it's always about who's the player? What are they playing and how can we make better games for them.

Shaun, you're not in frame.

So left foot on X. Cool, Okay. So yes, so really, for us, cars and racing, like you probably think about traditional racing games or you have 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. And you think about it Fast and Furious, is like a top 10 grossing film. It's about cars and drama, merchant drama. Formula 1 is the second most watched sport in the world. Top Gear has got billions of views on YouTube. Forza, Mario Kart, massively play games that made billions of dollars. So 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 because we've got so much data, so much experience and all the games have played various different -- like prototypes and foot players where we've got so much institutional knowledge around what these players are playing and we're really influenced by the marketplace as well. So we often look at games that are doing really, really, 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? And then ultimately, we do a lot of work. We throw away a lot of stuff. We do a lot of prototypes and tinkering creativity and that is how we create our content to make market-leading games. And then we just learn and repeat and repeat. So first, I love the slide. So 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 plus, we can count 50. So 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 well down and what direction they're actually building just really get into the gameplay of it. And then there's this process called validation test, 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. And then we've actually published 12 games. And of those 12, 10 have been profitable, and 3 have been exceedingly profitable. So for me, this is a really proud slide. How can we get this figure down to $1 billion. I don't know -- we're working on it. We've got lots of games coming down the line. So very exciting. Now creating what I call a great work environment isn't just a sexy office, isn't just trials or doing a 4-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. And now the process is evolving all the time, changing all the time. So it's a -- if I presented this next year, there will be details that will change because we keep learning and we keep this rating. It's very creative at the start, and it's a lot more informed by numbers and data towards the end. So I'm going to take you through a real-world example of a game that's made over $100 million, that started off very much like this. So 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. And also you build out some 4 to 5 pillars of what this game could be as well. So this is Top Drives, originally was called collectible card trading car game or something like that. I forgot the name. But this was the original pitch. And it's really funny to look back to because it really doesn't meet this pitch. And that's -- and the team goes through probably thousands of these one-pages. I'll produce some when -- anyone on the team can produce them. So it's all about researching the marketplace and seeing what one-page you can come on 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, so an App Store, the fake app store, where you've got all the assets in there in terms of like 5 key assets for the game. The art style has kind of 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. So 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 derisk things to make sure we're building a game for the biggest possible audience for the right reasons. And then sometimes we want to ask deeper questions about what's appealing to them into the game. So quite often, we'll do surveys as well to figure out what's really ticking the boxes for consumers. So we find a game that's got some appeal. There's something really interesting about it. We then start to build prototypes. This is pretty ugly for you guys, but for us, actually really represents what the game play can be and really gives a sense of the flow and how it works. This is sort of behind the scenes what Top Drives have originally looked at. We don't think testing that with consumers is really going to work because it just could turn them off in terms of the bare ugliness of it. But it really gives us some really good sense in the craftsmanship that goes on in the studio to figure out. Is this the right flow? Does the game really make sense? What are the messages you're trying to understand? What's the objective of the game? And then as we approve this sort of stuff, which is again, part of this creative process, the game starts to morph into an actual game. And this is where it gets really interesting. So beforehand, there's very -- there's like very, very quick time frame to go through this discovery base of market testing and prototypes. But then we go into a really intensive process where we can actually get a game to market within 12 weeks, there's an idea, it'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. Because 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. And 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. So there's measures that we're looking at all the time and we're getting better at it as well. So this is -- this is -- I think -- will this video play for [indiscernible]. Yes. Okay. So this is Top Drive. So this is on validation. When we first built Top Drives management sort of sports games and other racing games just use circles to represent the car. We really didn't want to build -- so Top Drives has over 2,000 licensed cars. We don't want to build 3 -- 2,000 3D versions of the car. So we thought the this 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. But we've got an actual data point to check that this is actually leading to our thesis. This will make the game retain better. So 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 1 Clash. So when we first launched Formula 1 and we were going through a big meeting, do we take the license, it's a big risk for the business. It isn't really going to move the dial. And 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 fix the bug, the retention goes up. We make a loaded depth changes to the game to make it deeper in more of the full experience and the retention comes down. And then we added a bunch of things like drivers, a load of, load of full features but interestingly, adding those features plus the brand move retention up by 10%. So 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 business or a company and it really enables consumers to stick with the game. So these are examples of a lot of games that we've gone through validation process. Some games have really [told us]. 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. But the last -- the next 3 games have really strong indicators that they can prove to be big, big value adds to our business. So the last bit of the process, we learned from our launch of Puzzle Heist. So Puzzle Heist went through this process, had amazing metrics, amazing retention, amazing monetization but what we hadn't tested was scale of marketing. Now our fellow friends in our games have been doing scale testing for Rise of Cultures, and we were like, wow, just spending a lot of marketing before they launch the game. Actually, when we launched Puzzle Heist, as we started to scale the marketing, we started to find the CPIs went up. So as part of our process now, we really want to push and throttle the market spending to see what CPIs will get to, to make sure we're not building a great business that has traditional metrics that we've seen, but also they can really, really globally launch and get -- met scale. So overall, the process is all about creativity at the start, really learn, discover, throw away things but really, really enable the team to really experiment and try new things out. And then as we get to validation launch, we're really honing the game in terms of making it stronger and better. And this is a 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. Want to bring you back to this slide because I think this is the reason you don't see, I guess, a lot of activity from us but actually, the 3 games down here and the $250 million we generated from 3 games, we've got a success rate, and we're really, really looking forward to the next 3 games coming out in the next 2 years and really boosting this value up. So the 2 games. So there's a unfortunately, I can't announce them, which is really frustrating. But there's a new license motorsport game, learning -- leaning on the experience we've had with Formula 1. There's a new license game as well. And then there's also for Q4, there's a TV license that we've been looking at as well. So really it's exciting stuff and yes, it brings me to the end of my presentation.

Thank you very much, Shaun. Let's see if we have some questions. After lunch questions are the tricky ones.

That's good. I saw some pretty deep, tough questions earlier.

All right. If we don't have any questions? I'm sure there will be questions later.

Yes. We're just talking around the office. So there's lots of Hutches wearing tops. Put your hands up, we got a question there.

I was just wondering now being a part of MTG, what kind of benefits have you seen in terms of your marketing initiatives?

Yes. I -- we work very closely with [ Christian Pern ]. I'm starting to dream with the German accent. I spend so much time with them and I'm just quite happy with that. Yes. I mean there's -- we thought we understood marketing when we joined MTG, and then we realized there's still so much to do. They've been doing like -- Christian's doing great work in our games. A lot around the business intelligence and actually how we report and we can act on the information. So yes, we're working very closely, and that's a massive benefit. There's also an additional benefit just hanging out with other CEOs when you're benched with funded business, you tend to be in stealth mode, you don't share that much. We can very openly talk about our problems and our opportunities. So yes, there's massive benefit there.

And a follow-up. I think you were quite dependent on Facebook if I'm right?

Yes. That has been identified by Christian.

Yes. Could you please elaborate a bit about how what happened around Apple, either phishing issues and how you cope with that?

Yes. Well, it's definitely not been easy for us because we're so focused on a certain audience. But we tend not to be victims of things that happen and that are out of our control. And the app store has been evolving and changing over the last 10 years. Marketing has always been this thing that you whinge and moan about. But actually, we just look at it and we iterate it and get better operating around it as well. I think a lot of these things have calmed down as well. And we've also got a suite of sister companies to work with in terms of how they're operating with it as well.

All right. Okay. Thank you very much, Shaun.

Cool. Thank you, guys.

Okay. So 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. So Markus, the clicker is just behind you? And over to you.

Thanks a lot. Hi, my name is Markus. I'm the CEO of Kongregate and before we dive deeper into Kongregate, let's take a quick look at our video. [Presentation]

Great. So 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. It's 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 of the platform. And 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 of the platform look like from a proof of technology point of view. That all worked pretty well. So we decided to go down that route. And tested further. We even started by the end of 2021 to build an own team kind of we started with a handful of people that had the vision to start with this idea, to carry it over and made it up to 90 people in the blockchain segment. Today's Kongregate is basically divided into 2 areas of focus. We have the traditional games, and 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 in 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, but we also developed other games like Spellstone, Tyrant Unleashed on the CCG tech back end. We basically received a lot of know-how 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. So 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. So 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 I think -- so we developed this and try 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. And we have a couple of harvest titles that actually did create usually around casual idle themed titles. But 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 and we acquired the game in 2019. And around this IP, we have 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. And we took another existing IP from Spellstone, another collectible card game that will be extended into web3 as well. So again, our key focus is to really stick with the web2 mechanics but extend them into web3. So players will be able to decide, will I sign up for the new journey and kind of own avatars, non-tangible tokens to have a probably more advanced journey and own these elements. Or 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 their 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. And the way we recognize the revenue as a publisher of record was to show the full revenue in our books and the share towards the developer on the cost side. So with the 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. And this is basically because we jumped into own game development, which took a much higher margin share for us from the table, right? So 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, Arnd mentioned it earlier, I want at least to address the elephant in the room again. So what has happened around FTX and the thoughts around crypto and gaming in general. Well, looking into the data, has FTX breakdown influence the hole in gaming. It was rather speculative, let's call it, DeFi or GameFi trading that was affected by it for a reason. I would say users might -- users that might not be very experienced with wallet creation and how the whole process around crypto gaming work, they might be affected in a way to say, oh, this wallet stuff is pretty new to me, I see a lot of bad news, I need some guidance here, right? But all these wallets, it's basically like going on the Internet in the early 90s. It was literally not possible before Andreessen invented the Netscape Navigator. And 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. And this is where Kongregate basically steps in and 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 and the open metaverse and becoming owners of avatars of elements, getting right, getting additional perks because what else would come, right? If we just look at the market from a gamers perspective, there are so many stuff out there owning something, collecting something is still the most intriguing thing. So 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. So all these games are based on blockchain technology and we have done 2 NFT drops. So 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 Twitter, the Discord to really engage and stimulate the community. So community work has become more important than ever. Scott mentioned it earlier with the Ninja Kiwi example. So the organic outreach in these channels has become so important, and it's 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 slope. We are the igniter in the middle. At the end, we have 3 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 the token fund with ImmutableX. 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 box life image of it, and you can play it in Sandbox and you can train your pet there in the Kongregate tower. And because you're an NFT holder, we also send you to the Snoop Dog concert in December. So this is a good example for interoperability and what this can actually do. We have also other partner projects with Illuvium or Planet Quest, where your avatar becomes playable on the other side. And just imagine what this could do on a platform where developers can join on a similar technology because now 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 a 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 experience for players in an open metaverse. That's the key focus here. So 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 Kreds 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 the channel, right? So 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 site in early Q1. And the focus is always to play, to learn, to earn and to own. So the developer side happening on the platform is one thing. We have launched 4 games. I mentioned it earlier, 2 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. And the market is highly competitive. You can imagine blockchain, engineering, even finding game makers who have experience in the 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. So 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. So pretty much a unique setup to get it started from here. And 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. So the whole blockchain initiative as 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. And 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.

So let's kick off with a question from the web. So how does MTG and Kongregate plan to monetize web3 and blockchain gaming?

So 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 launched, this is already live. And NFTs will be sold -- we sell NFTs on a daily base currently on Rarible for example. There will be dedicated NFT drops opportunities to even win an NFT. And the combination of this monetizes the whole setup at the end.

Great presentation. You talked a little bit at the end about how blockchain technology could really benefit other MTG family members. So 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?

Yes. So 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 web2 meets web3 elements, right? This is certainly something that could come not saying it does. It's just my personal view here. and 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 REVV token, right, one of Animoca's big investments. It's certainly a great fit for coming into web2 meets web3.

We have a question all the way back, [indiscernible]. Just grab a mic so we can hear you.

The question about the players, like I expect that there are 2 type of players in the web3 world, which one will be just would like to play the game. Other ones, we will like to earn money. How do you imagine that to satisfy both type of users because expectations are we will be different, retentions will be different and the consumption rates will be different? How do you imagine to satisfy both type of users?

Yes. So I think it's a good question. The existing players kind of still sticking with web2, they will have the regular expectations that they already have, right? If they want to participate in earnings, they would actually need to sign up for the NFT route, owning an NFT, then the earnings 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. So we will not create 2 kind of players: 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? So 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. And then one last question, unless we get any more in the meantime. So you mentioned the complication around having wallets and actually wallet management and signing people up for wallets. So how do you manage that complexity to help players have an easy pathway into NFT gaming?

So 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. So you can actually already have your wallet being combined to the account, you can use Kongregate coin, the tokenized kreds, for example, to make your NFT purchase which you could then upload with the credit card in order to get it done from a monetary aspect, right? So you don't even have to engage with cryptocurrency at all or by 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 log-in. So you have an easy access. This is at least the first step. It's still -- 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.

So for I guess -- 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 Arnd. We're going to do it quickly. I'll have to give my mic away. But -- so we're going to take a break, but I would like to ask Everyone to just stick around. So don't go. It's going to take maybe 5 minutes, but -- and then we reconvene. If you need to use the bathroom, please go ahead, but don't wander off too far. [Break]

Please have a seat. Now just steal a bit from our presenters, let's further humanize the Game Makers Day. So there was a lot of information with on to you. But since we use this gaming village picture, I'm just curious, I want to see who actually grew up in the village here? Only you? The rest are city slickers? okay. So village means personnel also means -- at least the village I grow up, someone next to the Dutch border. You help each other. You build something together. That's why we want to keep it cozy. Then the other personal thing, I really liked since the reason why probably Shaun joined our company is because during COVID times, I have 2 teenage girls, 12 and 14, and bought a pony. So as you see in Hutch, sorry, in Ninja's Kiwis presentation, a lot of cute pets. So who has a pet here from you? Who has a pet? All the investors have no pet, grow up in the city and okay, good. But we want to discover more secrets, learn more about our entrepreneurs and build 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 the collaborate with each other. And also let's hear some founder story. So A big welcome for the last round of discussions with our game entrepreneurs. Please come on stage.

It was very crowded already in the village. Not the COVID safety measures, I would say. Great. So I would kick it off with some questions, and you can join me in later with the questions you always wanted to ask. But I'm always curious what drives people, what motivates them. I mean all of them could have probably sold to anyone. But why MTG? So what was really their personal motivation, why did they join the gaming village in the first place? So let's start with our friends from India. So you had another process, why this Swedish company with the name MTG.

I think that's a long story. I think about the other process, which I will not get into detail. But I think -- so I think we started -- I think -- I'd have to go back slightly to answer that question. We started the company 8 years ago. We were at a large corporate and sort of busy 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. And we found some folks who believed in us. We believe in ourselves for sure. And the rest of the cofounders also who are not here. And we were out there to essentially prove that, hey, we can build a great business out of India. And as we sort of build that over the course of time, we raised capital. So we had to give that exit to our investors like some of you folks here. But 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. And like to 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're running and I think it was the second wave of pandemic, and we had only one condition. And whoever you move forward with, we have to meet them in person. I think at that point in time, [ and in Maria ] for 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. And that literally sealed the deal for us. And everything that has happened over [ Post Ad ] has been almost similar to whatever we were told. And 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.

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.

The Pony was a big deal for us. Now like when you were speaking -- and I spoke about it before, that we came from PlayStation and Microsoft, and we worked at big gaming companies. And we had all these pictures and they like one call, I think it was like 20 people, Senior Vice President of [ Toilets ] was there. And I'm all about making decisions and moving quickly and then 4 people came up from MTG and you talked about Ponies and I'm like I don't really like this guy. I'm not sure of his taste in horses. But I was like, actually that's the mirror-image of what I really want to work with. And then second to that, I always actually -- I've never told Andrew about this, but I've always actually followed you guys, I've always been really fascinated. I felt like you were a bit of a stealth company and it was like a [ named ] and the growth was just phenomenal. And the big thing for us is we want to grow our marketing and I was like, well, they're doing pretty well. And the good -- you and Maria were like great people to work for. So that was the big thing for me like I want Hutch to be as big as it is today. And I thought, example is a great one. But I felt like would Kongregate, I was the first one on to the boat, the MTG village.

Thank you, Sean. I mean, Scott, we all could feel energy today. Some will go home with some merchandise. We have been on a date for quite some time. So first time we met at the GDC. It was actually 4, 5 years ago. And then you already knew Kongregate and we've been building the partnership. But like anyone who has been on a date, it's not always -- I mean it was love at sight, but then the question is, are both partners ready to get married? And then we had a first attempt but us being listed company, we had certain requirements. And I always like the story, we said, hey, we need to run a financial DD and the guys highly profitable. They said, here's our bank account, just check the cash. All is good. No, no, no. There was a good reason why we paused it. So how do you feel, since we needed like 4 years of dating, how do you feel now?

It's the kind of thing. So I mean I think it was love at first sight with at least some of the people at the meeting. So it's a present company included. But it really was about focus and where MTG was at that point and where [ Jaques ] at that point. We had never really wanted to enter a process. We just wanted to continue 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, we'll just get -- we'll get a banker, and we'll see whether there's any value here. And 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 connected through Kongregate separate from that. And 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 because Marcus, we've been working together for 10 years. And MTG and Kongregate have been closely aligned since the early flash days. So that was a huge endorsement of MTG but at that point, MTG was still connected to the broadcasting business, and there wasn't the clarity in that first conversation. And there wasn't -- and 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 -- 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 the business doesn't need to be confusing. And so yes, we waited a couple of years, and then those things clarified. And 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. And then it was really clear about what we could do with these 2 companies, like with the background already from Kongregate and InnoGames that we could that we can 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. So again, it was a skill and culture fit. And then the deal that we put together a deal that really made sense, gave us our ownership. One of the things that I've always said to Chris was just like, after working for a number of bosses, some of them fantastic and others less so. I told Chris, I never wanted another boss. And 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 the decisions, express myself, be a little bit crazy, and that that's okay. So it's been a very transformative change for us in all the right ways.

I mean someone who also never had a boss in his life, probably only in kindergarten, it's Hendrik. So smart thing to do is start your own company. And Hendrik was the first, we pitched our -- being a German pitching the Swedish family model is kind of an irony, but I deeply believe this Nordic culture and the respect, the consensus and all the good things and being so successful at InnoGames over all the years, always profitable, scaling the business. And today, it's quite interesting, Hendrik bought into the family model, but I think it was always important for him to continue what they have been successfully doing. But today, he has to have. And that's for us an ideal setup. I mean Hendrik is the Founder and the CEO of InnoGames. Sometimes he's the biggest shareholder in MTG, which is quite interesting. But that's the commitment we want to see, when we talk about earnouts and everything else, where I firm believe everyone is looking longly on the earnouts. But it would be interesting since you were the first and on this first part of journey, we had this crazy e-sports business with big vision, loss making. And then you're like, our lights on the gaming side, delivering, delivering like a machine and really growing the business. What has changed before you joined MTG and then after?

So first of all, I had a boss for maybe 1 year when I was an alternative service in Germany back then. And this was a good time because this allowed us to have enough time to create our first game, Tribal Wars. So very helpful time.

Grea boss.

Yes. Great, great boss.

And employee.

Yeah, I did my hours. I think I did my hours. So nowadays, they don't have it any more in Germany. So I think it was a good match for us, together with MTG. So we wanted to keep our autonomy entrepreneurial freedom. And of course, everyone assesses and for us, what was helpful to also work together with MTG, new arm from before, Marcus by Marcus had connections to [ Art ]. I knew that MTG in Sweden, where you also feel a bit more comfortable than having a company on the other end of the world. So that was also helpful for us. And that were the reasons why we said, okay, this is a good fit. And it actually worked out. So we had -- we kept our level of autonomy. We kept also connections we had before with our BC investor, which was also very helpful. Of course, a bit more financial reporting, which has to be done a few days quicker. So you don't have to have a full month to wait for the financial report, whatever stuff. But it was the case. We already set up 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, yes, super happy that we took this decision, didn't go to some other partners, some other opportunity, but decided for MTG.

Yes, and we're happy you're here. Thank you. Let's go into the village, yes? And 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, yes? So I mean, Mr. Flow is Mr. Christian Pern. Here, he is our walking flow platform and brings all the knowledge he has built up and apply it at InnoGames, now to the flow platform. So probably to start with you, Christian, is this like in a total 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. And obviously, also, there's many people and many hands being involved in making that actually happening. So no, it's not a corporate world. I had the chance after starting 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 want to work in a place where I want to work. And I would say that's the case that's 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. And if you have a good idea, you want to get some benchmarking, share your expertise, get insights of the others, then that's easily done. And I mean, you've seen a lot of faces here today as well. But I think it's also worth noting that there's, again, many people behind us, and they also share their ideas, that different departments reach out and it's really a good community and staying in the picture. I would say, we might want to change that in the future. In this village, the doors are always open.

And Marcus, Actually, you have started with the first collaboration on a bilateral basis with Ninja Kiwi. I mean before [indiscernible] joined the family and the village, you have been working in ad monetization and also help the Ninja Kiwi products to integrate more ads and so forth. So how is the collaboration going? And what have you done so far?

Yes. Like Scott said, we started 10 years ago already when flash was still a thing. And since then, it has continued to kind of consult with each other, to see where we can learn something from what Ninja Kiwi has done in the community. And we have our marketing people [ Atman ] traditional UA that we actually route through Christian directly, of course, also into the other companies to really keep 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 crew.

Okay. When we speak of the technology you want to share guys. I mean, Hendrik mentioned that he has developed over many years. This tool service, which are now sitting in the cloud and are accessible to everyone. And you have your ad stack and on cost 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. So where you see the biggest really synergies, both on the cost side and also on the revenue side, probably if you want to start?

Yes, I think -- so I think when we were sort of working in our previous company, I think cross-promotion was something that really helped. So I think it was Zynga. But one of the challenges that we were facing there was that the games that we're trying to cross promote or trying to get across promotion, used to face a lot of hindrance in resistance from the other games because that would come all of a sudden, and they stopped their road map. And we figured that, that was one of the problems that we need to solve. So I think from that -- and to make it really worthwhile for the donor games to actually look at it in a rather attractive way. So 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 gave 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's all it on the cross-promotion side. Likewise, on the ad side, I think experimentation and AB 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." So to do it well, we have to leverage data and analytics which our infrastructure really helped and 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 users over the course of time, I think it's essentially that, that infrastructure that we had allowed us to sort of leverage data. We believe in God for everything else. We look at data. And 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.

Okay. 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 dare to ask Hendrik, and they are like, a majority not monetized. Why don't we show ads and he really killed us say, "No, I want to keep the game experience as it is." And now Hendrik really appreciate that we integrated apps into the newer games, it's another interesting, I think, synergy potential, if I call it, a bit more academic, but it is simply a new revenue stream still to the games industry. And the biggest digital businesses, platforms are built on ads, like the Google and the Facebook. So in 5 years ahead, where do you see the Flow platform. Sean you have an idea?

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. And what's interesting about this group is I kind of see us as the Avengers. I know it sounds really egotistical, but we're all quite different. And 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 having and at the moment, it's early days. So we're a bit disjointed at times. But like, yes, 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 business, I have to say, the amount of creativity and data-drivenness and tech know-how is pretty unique in games. But aside from the tech, we all know it's about the people. And hopefully, you can feel that this is a group which was on yesterday, that we also was fun. So we like to spend time together and travel to different places. But when it comes to culture and probably you can continue since we're here at your home, and you did a pretty bold move with this 4-day work week. I know that Volkswagen tried something back then with, I think it was 4-day production. But what has -- how has this changed the culture? Why is -- what was the feedback when you introduced this and honestly, explain us how it works when you have only 4 days to work?

I mean it's pretty insane thing to try but like thank you, Maria and [indiscernible], for supporting me on it because it's a wild experience. The context of it is we're coming out of lockdown, got a huge pressure to move to remote working. We don't believe in it. We've been hybrid working for 10 years. And we're seeing great benefits of hybrid like working from home, but also working together in the office. So if we went to remote, we heard people with Microsoft telling us like they're losing 20% with remote working. So 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. And you're like, "Oh my God, like I need to try and do what we call 100, 80, 100. So 100% of 5 days and 80% of the time, and you get 100% of the pay. So -- and I've been clearing my e-mails every week, which I've never done in a 5-day working week because there's a level of intensity that feels like you're a start-up again. And it just is pretty intense and hard. So the guilt goes away because suddenly, you're working really hard. You're not seeing -- sometimes you're not seeing your friends much during the week because you're just necked from work. So 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 a Monday.

I'd like to quote you said yesterday. So someone from the service said, "You know the 4-day working really help my marriage." And we tend probably to forget how important to socialize. And again, we firm believe if you put the people first, they will do great work and launch great games. But then 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, but everyone in the office and suddenly COVID hit and you went fully remote. So what has changed now in the post-COVID time at InnoGames?

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. But it was also clear that some of this is based on the connections that people have made before COVID times. So 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 the meet in Hamburg. And we have, on a team-based level also, teams meeting together also in the office, have their creative exchange. So I think there are areas where remote work is very good. This is, for example, when everything is clear, just producing something. But for the creative processes, it is also very good if people come together but you don't have this 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.

Your company has been a remote setup even before COVID. You can say your office is in one of the most expensive cities of the world, in San Francisco. But how have you managed to create such a strong company culture from a remote setup?

Yes. As you said, we had that kind of situation already before the pandemic. But people were moving away from San Francisco. So suddenly, there was not really the need to have an office any longer. And it was kind of a -- I would say, we were struggling bringing people to San Francisco because it's so expensive there, right? So hiring became a real issue when we still have the office with us being 100% remote. Right now, it's actually much easier to get higher. And with the acquisition of Gamaga, we have certainly mixed a very focused Chilean team into the mix. But we started to work with them as work for higher 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. But nevertheless, we started already when MTG stepped in, in being kind of distributed all over the place in the U.S. So it was not really a big change for us. It was already kind of in the DNA.

When we flow down to Auckland to visit Ninja Kiwi after they opened the border in May, we were quite surprised. I mean, a super elite team and from the distance we thought, why don't you hire more people, you have such a long pipeline. And we found, when you meet the team, then you understand the magic and the commitment to the games and when they play [ hemp ] altogether, which is not the [indiscernible], you know it's a school game, totally different. But this playful culture, but this passion -- amount of passion and commitment to the product. So what makes Ninja Kiwi culture so unique? And then in sitting there down in Auckland and the other studio in Scotland, and they've been working together for 3 years and never met before. And then so you merged and became a great partnership, but how can you retain talents in such a competitive environment?

Yes. I'm glad you mentioned that. That's 1 of our favorite stories with David and Barry because they had been doing the license work on Blooms for many years. We've made millions of dollars together and had never met in person. And then we were going to meet in San Francisco, GDC for the first time. And they knew that the license term on Blooms was coming up. So they thought they were going to be fired at that point. We're like, no, we want -- we just finally want to meet you guys, and we want to talk about how we're going to work together in the future. So anyway, that's just a funny aside. But I guess it kind of represents the trust that we built up over time and over distance. This is a continued theme here. You can get a sense for people, and you can work together. But 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 1.5 years. And then you -- I don't know. Our culture is just -- I don't know. It's just so careful, full of care. Christian, 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 or there was really something that was special and intentional about everything that we did. So 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 with everything that we did and the way that we grew staff, opened up doors, continued the flat management, really encourage people to take ownership of things across the board. It fit in with our working model, in our COVID experience. So we were locked down in some pretty intensive New Zealand with really hard core. And so we absolutely had no chance to meet. We had to work everything remotely for quite an extended periods of time. And when we came out of that, we got together, we was like, okay, look, some of these things worked. And so 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 their strengths, manage their commutes, manage their fuel costs, all the kinds of advantages that would come from that. But 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, Hitch. I just look at you because that's what I'm thinking. I just want to dance tonight, never dance like that again. But Hutch chose one way, but we got some input from team members. It was really important and so 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. Like everybody had a chunk of work to do, and you could always go until the end of the day or beyond. But to be able to section off some time... So anyway, we've come up with this system called [indiscernible] we play the Dundee game, so 4:00 on Monday through Thursday. We're we're getting together, and we're playing some of the iteration of what we worked on that day, that week. And then on Friday afternoon, we take the afternoon off. We get our last builds in midday on Friday. And then Friday afternoon is either dedicated skill development for the team because that's another thing that you never have time for during your week, when do you do your skill development? So 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. We go to the beach. We do things. So that's how you create the culture, but that's some of the things that we do, and 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, we have some German folks here. My mother taught me, always taught me, try to make it fun. And that's for me, the coolest thing with all these companies. When you travel them down to India and I listen to this podcast from this about [indiscernible]. So we all want to live longer. So you said there are 4 things. I share the 1 thing you can do to live longer. And that is surround itself with young, energized, optimistic people. And when you go to the office of [indiscernible], the average age is 24. And they are so incredible, ambitious and smart, that I ask myself, how you manage such talent? So all probably want to build some kind of play simple and conquer the world and how do you develop the talent, average age 24?

Yes, you want to take that one? [indiscernible]

Well, we have a bunch of -- yes, we have a lot of folks joining us straight round of college, right? So obviously, they come with like a huge amount of energy. I think, yes, average age is 24. So there's probably like 60% of our guys are like just 2 years or under, out of college. So yes, it's tough to manage and definitely can't do remote work. So we actually got back to -- 100% back to the office late last year. And it's -- honestly, it's a tough balance to strike because we have fewer of -- 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. So we have a long way to go to sort of build out the kind of culture that Scott here was talking about or Sean was talking about or Hendrik, because I think they're great with numbers, but that's still a long way to go.

Yes. And I think to add to that, we're also the youngest company in the portfolio. I think we're only 8 years old. So I think versus our peers who are, I mean, a lot maturer, 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 challenge is, 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 quite time as well as to be around with a lot of positive energy, we have sort of gotten back to work, where they have come back and said, "Oh, this is so good. I wish you would have done this sooner."

Yes. And then being back to 12, honestly, I have to admit it's also good for a marriage. So it's very positive to turn a bit and spend time abroad. I don't know, you had nice way of dating set, 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 received from the investors like, hey, they own an earnout, what's going to happen when it relapse? Will Sean becomes whatever DJ, model? Will Hendrik start probably, I don't know -- become a pool golfer? So what's going to happen beyond the earnout? Why are you in games, what drives you? So how do you look into the future? Probably let's start with Mr. Sean?

Yes. I mean, I'm in a great position to really do what I really enjoy life, which is making games. We're still not #1. 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, but -- or I can -- I could live my dreams here. And I'm pretty happy doing what I do. And I don't have to worry about my fuel cost anymore. So sorry, that sounds 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.

We know Hendrik's plan. Otherwise, you wouldn't have become the biggest shareholder in MPG. You can't get away, you're locked in. And now, your long-term commitment, I think, is clear. Scott, I know you would -- your biggest dream is writing a book, as I recall, but there's still so much time. So what are your plans like the next...

Well, and again, I mean, we're all at different life stages and whatever. I think Arnd and I are sharing the sort of the oldest people in the company. Tag in, no, no, sorry, the sexiest? No. No, we can't say that. The boldest? Boldest, Okay. We'll go with boldest. And so I mean, yes, 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 we've seen and the kind of -- 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 from 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. I've been seeing things and relationships differently than I do. Makes me question 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 because they were able to make a little bit of money that we're making, 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 going to help energize and be that story of informing and enabling the next generation of developers. And maybe some of them will want to work for Ninja Kiwi and the MTG family because that's where they got started. So that's a pretty good story. And in terms of writing stories, let's write that one, too. And then I've got a whole bunch of book ideas, but I still need to -- so -- but part of that is -- No, no, no. I always have to do this, but it's taking -- it's having both. Why can't we have the wealth that has come from the businesses that we 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? So I think like, okay, great, you've got some money in your earnouts. So enjoy that. But continue to do things that you love.

I mean, you all want 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 if [indiscernible] is also -- how to tell a 6-, 7-year-old. So I was always jealous when the guys with a real job like doctor, architect, there were the heroes, yes? And I said, what can I say? But now I can point to Blooms. And we all, as investors show whatever you want to be part of the products. And we've legacy and Bloom, I think, is a great example, Forge is a great example, all your games become the biggest innovation. So last question before we open up regarding the future. I mean it can become the biggest thing in history, blockchain, yes? Or it can go south or somewhere else. So the high blockchain gaming, we've seen X Infinity, where all the stories about people making millions with the Xs but extracting value from a game economy. And I think Hendrik gets a clear view on this. Any an economy will include if you just extract. So 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 the next years?

Yes. So you brought up actually, I think that is a good example for actually the short-term speculation that went into craziness, right? And I think this is something the future in gaming will definitely not have. I think in, let's say, 5 to 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 it doesn't really -- 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 tech, the development. It has already opened the door and speculate, this is where we start. It was the same with the Internet. It was the same with free to play, started with blockchain, and it will go in a similar direction. So I'm not really anxious about the future, let's put it that way.

It's a bit like with Homer Simpson. If you remember this quote? And he said, "Internet, is this thing still around?" So this is a bit like blockchain. And probably to close with the key trends since you are the fourth one, and we have the recession on the horizon. So how will this affect market and user acquisition, everything. Do you think this will hit us?

Might come up in the QA but good you asked. It's a bit like a crystal ball. And I think there is no clear answer. There's no, this right or wrong. There's different scenarios to draw. And I personally think that what we heard earlier, it's a form of entertainment. And 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? So 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. And I personally can at least imagine that there's some industries that see somewhat more of a down trend and might stop advertising, which could be in our favors. I guess then it's to be seen how that is actually equaling out. But 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. And I think that's the way on how we can actually win.

Now if there's any questions left, now it's time to ask them before we can have some beers.

Thanks. It's a great panel. And the thing that really comes across is the chemistry. You'll clearly get on, and there's even a very different organization, there's obviously a shared backbone. I'm interested in what how -- maybe this is a question for Maria, actually, but the -- how you add in additional houses to your village, so to speak? And how do you make sure that there's a cultural fit? And what happens if it's just a really great business, but you don't get on?

Yes. I mean, we're in a quite, let's say, comfortable position with our balance sheet. And I think we did everything right with e-sports. 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 a 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. But it's a question of timing when we can sell such a deal, also the capital market and explained why this is a stellar deal. Then, b, we want to keep the folk company somewhere else. So yes, it would be active, but in the end, like in any dating process, it's a timing -- matter of timing.

And I think the piece Arnd mentioned was one of the [indiscernible] 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 group could be really helpful that with uncertain times that we're living in, just to call 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.

And one of the other things to say just 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. And somehow it's okay as opposed to Hollywood and other places where it's like, you got to protect every day, you don't let anything. I know, now data, like we're not -- this is data is one thing. We're pretty protective of data, but 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 going to have some of those same values. So I think by being who we are, we're going to find the right people.

Cool. It was a long day, hopefully, insightful. Play our games, become a real -- like join the monkey world, play Forge, do some way thing, play crosswords, help us to earn money and enjoy our games. And with this, I hand over to Maria, who will close the day, yes?

Yes, I'm not sure of like how to top this after the panel discussion, but I also want to say some final few remarks. First and foremost, when I started today and in our opening presentation, Me and Arnd, we told you that today, we really want to 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 eyes, get them on stage, present to you what is unique about the company? 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. So a 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. And 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 a reliable office. Hopefully, you got Hendrik's presentation, it's a take away. But we also have an interesting pipeline of new games. And I think, of course, I mean, you got questions on that as well at the end to complement this organic growth, where we are a firm believer that with our strong evergreen IPs, we're going to continue to grow that 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 going to be able to make us even more successful in the future. So thank you, everyone, for dialing in. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting our journey. And I hope to see the vast major of you of having dinner and drinks later.

Thank you, Maria. So 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. We'd 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, there will all be on the third floor and here, so 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 -- we all want to win in the end. We're going to do this, obviously, grabbing a beer on the way. It's a casual format, but we're going to do this for as long as you feel that it makes sense. And then we're going to take a break, and we hope that as many of you as possible can join us tonight. So 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 shortage Soho House, which is a very, very short walk from here. The address is 13 Bethnal Green Road. I mean, Hutch is, we are now here. So it's a very, very easy walk, where we'll continue this casualty. So chat to the entrepreneurs, let's have a nice time. Then everybody we have is depending on what you want to do, do some e-mails, do -- have a catch up, have a rest, and then we hope to see it 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.