PlaySide Studios Limited (PLY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to PlaySide's First Half of Financial Year 2025 Results Presentation. The results have been released to the ASX this morning and up on your screen. From the company today, we have Gerry Sakkas, Co-Founder and CEO, and Chief Strategy Officer, Benn Skender. Before I pass over to Gerry and Benn to go through the presentation, I'll just remind you that you can submit questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen and we'll endeavor to get to those post the end of presentation. Gerry, I'll hand over to you.

Thank you, Simon. I apologize for everyone, I'm a bit sick today, so if I'm a bit mellow, that's why. Thank you for joining the call. I thought before we discussed our results for the half year, I would first go back and run through the trading update that we released to the market at the end of January. While our Work for Hire book continued at record levels during the first half, when we announced our financial guidance for the year, last October, we knew that we would need to continue to grow these revenues in the second half in order to achieve it. We were already in late-stage negotiations with several counterparties regarding new work. And with more than a decade of experience in signing contract work, I felt very confident that we will be able to deliver on our numbers. Unfortunately, the majority of those negotiations have been pushed out in terms of when our clients are ready to commit to the investment decision, which is not what we were expecting. And as a result, we had to lower our guidance for the financial year. We often get asked about the share price on these calls, and I understand that the share price has responded very aggressively to this downgrade. I own a lot of shares, as do a lot of my friends and a lot of our staff. So it's been a very painful experience for me and the management team, and I'm sure it has been for many of you on this call as well. I think to be a founder of a business and particularly in a creative and competitive industry like gaming, you've got to naturally be upbeat and optimistic about what you can achieve with the resources that you have and continuously strive to reach the bigger and better things. I think a lot of -- in a lot of respects PlaySide has been on that path since IPO, and we still are tracking towards delivering on our bigger goals. But I do want to acknowledge that relative to what we had communicated regarding our revenue for the year, we have fallen short of what you expect from us and what we expect from ourselves as well. I still believe that the long-term value in PlaySide lies in our Original IP portfolio and growing that over time. Hopefully, we'll be able to demonstrate that today on this call is that our revenue, while a bit lower this year and we -- our revenue is a bit lower this year, and we continue to be in the middle of a period of heavy investment in building out that original IP portfolio that our projects are progressing very well, and we are managing our cost base appropriately. If we skip across the operations slide, we launched KILL KNIGHT on PC, console in October. It was a very small investment for us, a little over $1 million. However, it was strategically important because it will be the first time PlaySide has simultaneously shipped a game on a dozen different platforms and one where we wanted to make sure that people knew we could make a game that gamers love. The review score of 95 on Steam and the Metacritic score of 88 tells us that we absolutely hit the mark with our audience. The review score is the highest we've had of any game launched on PC at PlaySide. And the Metacritic score meant that the game was in the top 20 best reviewed games of 2024. Financially, we felt it had the potential to really pop-off, but its success was a lot more modest than we expected. We knew that KILL KNIGHT was a niche game, but we also thought it had the potential to get picked up more broadly. So we marketed it to a wider audience of gamers. We ended up having a higher percentage of refunds even though the game was reviewed exceptionally well. So we can only assume it was really down to that audience being a bit too wide. Since the launch, we ran a promotion on Epic Games Store where the game was free for the players on a weekend, and that saw around 0.5 million extra people playing the game and more than that, that downloaded the game, which is excellent marketing for our brand. So I won't say our execution was perfect, but there was a lot of positive things to take away from that launch. And internally, we are very pleased with that. It is important as well as to go back on this one more time. The reason that we wanted KILL KNIGHT to be such a critical success was for the games that we've got coming. It's very important before we do MOUSE and before we do Game of Thrones that we have a game in the market that players can look at and say, PlaySide know how to make video games. And it's super highly reviewed. So that's it for KILL KNIGHT. We launched Dumb Ways: Free for All on Meta Quest in November. That was a title we made for Meta that we paid development and license fees for. So that was a meaningful contributor to our financial results last year. Again, in the context of the broader plans we have for the business, this has expanded our Dumb Ways brand into the VR space. If anyone was at the PAX expo in Melbourne last year, they would have seen a long line of kids and adults signing up to pay Dumb Ways: Free for All in VR. And that makes us think that the brand is ripe to tap into a whole new audience of emerging young gamers, which is exactly what we're trying to target with the console game we are developing for Dumb Ways at the moment. We also really upped our game when it came to Dumb Ways: Free for All trailer. And I'm trying to make sure that our marketing teams, in terms of trailers for the next slate of games we launch is even more impressive and reflects well on the studio. We launched Thrive on Steam in November. That's our first publishing title. So we've been funding a studio in Canada called Zugalu that has been making the game. It had a few teething issues on launch into early access. And our plan was to get those fixed ahead of 1.0 launch later this year. We've already been able to address most of those issues. The Steam review score from the game has gone from mixed to mostly positive. And we can see some of the individual people that have reviewed the game have actually removed the negative review and gone back and made it into a positive one. So we're feeling quite good about where the game is heading towards the 1.0 launch. Finally, Shattered launched on to Meta Quest in December. This was an escape room style game we pitched to Meta to make back in 2022 with a view that we could really show off some of the mixed reality features of the Quest headset in an engaging way. We were paid to develop the game, and we also received a small profit share post launch. The reviews in the Meta store has been positive. Meta execs have given us very positive feedback on the game, particularly with respect to the mixed reality features. And it scores very well on some of the internal benchmarks. They look for the performance of the games on the Quest headset. So we continue to do good things in VR and MR space, which is important. I'll now hand it over to Benn to discuss our financials.

Thanks, Jerry. When we look at the P&L, our revenue was at similar levels to what it was in the June half with a slightly different mix. Our original IP revenues were a little bit lower as even though we have the launch of KILL KNIGHT, we had completed the major work on Dumb Ways to Survive back in March, which offset that. But we've won some small extensions and expansions on our Work for Hire projects, and that got us back to $28.5 million for the half. We reported an EBITDA loss of $3 million. Again, if you compare to the June half where we did similar levels of revenue, this time around we had higher costs, which is why the EBITDA was lower. The June half also saw us book a $2 million cost offset from the DGTO, which is the government's digital games tax offset. So we didn't have that benefit in this half either. But I think the main call out there is much higher marketing expenses during the half, which is effectively us continuing to gear up for the launch of MOUSE and the commencement of our marketing campaign for the first Game of Thrones title. We can't capitalize those marketing costs. They go straight through the P&L. And when we -- they go straight through the P&L when we incur them. And I think it's pretty clear in our industry that marketing is critical to enhancing the value of a game from a sales perspective, but we can't capitalize that. Headcount is the other important call out there. Our average headcount through the period was a little over 10% higher than the June half. Our trading update made references to some cost savings on that front. And as we sit here today, we're nearly 30 people lower than our peak through the half. We've tried to manage that really carefully. I think Gerry and I started the year expecting that we'd be doing a flat year from a revenue perspective, and we quickly realized that the only thing we have a lot of control over in a year like that in terms of managing profit and cash flow was our cost base. So as soon as it looked like our Work for Hire negotiations were going to get pushed out, the first thing we did was let contractors lapse when their terms ran out. So somewhere between 5% and 10% of our headcount is fixed-term contractors. They're often remote, they're signed on for an agreed period. And as a result, it has the least impact on our business from a cultural perspective when we let those agreements expire rather than renew them. During this half, we've really just focused on rightsizing the cost base. So PlaySide is a business that's pretty much added 100 people every year for the last 3 years. And I think when you're growing so fast and there's so much to do, your priority is getting as many people as you can into the building with as little friction as possible. Same for some of the corporate overheads. You're working really quickly to build out a structure that can support bringing so many new people into the studio that need computers, software licenses and other infrastructure that your priority is more about making sure you don't have to think about whether your teams in operations, HR and IT have got enough resources to get everyone onboarded. So once you get a period where that growth isn't happening and hiring is a little bit more selective, that's naturally the time you start turning your attention to identifying easy wins for cost savings. And I think we've definitely started tackling that. From an operating cash flow perspective, we still delivered a positive operating cash flow for the December half. Something that perhaps isn't appreciated as much is that the company's Work for Hire pipeline and our back catalog of mobile titles have been more than enough to cover the cost of the company's overheads in recent periods, including in the December half. And that's really the starting point for us, when we do decide to make investments in our original IP portfolio. This half, our operating cash flow of $1.1 million is arguably understated because we're spending a lot in marketing for future titles. And Gerry has also got a team working on a AAA quality demo project that we've elected to expense rather than capitalize. He'll talk a little bit more about that later. But as you can see, capitalized costs are going up a lot, and that's really a function of developing 2 major titles in the Game of Thrones game and the Dumb Ways console title, as well as our investments as a publisher into MOUSE. When you look at the movement in our cash balance from $37 million to $28.5 million, so that's an $8.5 million drop. It includes spending around $13 million in investments to support the future launch of those titles. Just expanding on that comment, this slide here tries to break that out a little bit better. So investors can see that, firstly, our business is and has been a cash flow positive one before our growth investments as well as being able to see how those growth investments have really started to ramp-up in the last 6 months in particular. And that's why we worked so hard through FY '24 to get our cash balance up as high as possible because we knew we were going to be going into a period of multiyear investment in original IP games, which, as Gerry said, is where we believe the ultimate value lies in the business. Finally, on the financials, just a snapshot of our revenue growth over the recent journey. It doesn't look as pretty as it did last year, but it still tells an important story about our studio. You can see how in FY '24, the signing of the 2 major license deals for Dumb Ways to Die really accelerated the growth in our original IP revenues. And as those projects finish and we commenced the transition to developing games with multiyear lead times, the original IP revenue line is a little softer until those games launch. You can also see that Work for Hire revenues are still at record levels, albeit as Gerry said, we've had a few things get pushed out, and that's prevented us from delivering the revenue that we would have hoped to at the start of the year. I'll hand back to Gerry to give some recent updates on our games.

Thanks, Ben. We put out the full version of Age of Darkness last month with multiplayer being the major feature that was included in the 1.0 version. Our marketing team actually advocated for a decent discount on the 1.0 launch. And the view there was that with so many major projects coming out under the PlaySide banner over the next year or 2, we should make it a priority to get as many players exposed to our games as possible. And so we ended up selling a lot of units and getting more concurrent players into the game than we ever did when we originally launched Age of Darkness a few years back, which is exactly what we'd hoped for. I guess as a side point, which we hadn't mentioned before, was that we also bought back the publishing rights to that title back from Team17, who we used as a publisher when Age of Darkness first launched into Early Access. So that game is fully owned by PlaySide now. We are also finally able to disclose that we made the VR version of Civilization VII for 2K. We've had that contract in our hand for a few years now, and I've always had to bite my tongue when we meet investors and that we really love some of the great strategy franchises like [indiscernible] Age of Empires because we've been under NDA on the project until early this month. But I've been so happy that we could lead the work on that title. That's the first entry into the Civilization franchise into virtual and mixed reality space. And this work is a demonstration of the trust that AAA studios like 2K put in PlaySide to take care of their valuable IPs when making games for them. We continue to invest into building out our slate of mobile titles with our main focus being our Match 3 title Wedding Planner and our Idle game, Candy Critters. The metrics for both, in terms of user retention and spend are good enough to justify further investment into these games. However, we continue to be disciplined in monitoring their performance and have strict performance hurdles that each title needs to deliver in order for them to remain in our catalog of mobile games. We have a profitable back catalog of mobile -- on mobile of more than a dozen titles that continue to perform well for us. And our intention is to selectively invest to see if we can continue to build out that pipe. We used this slide previously, but I think it's important to reiterate that where we see PlaySide's value in the long term is based on us building out a strong portfolio of Original IP content that we either own, have the rights to publish under our brand or can use under license to create content. The next slate of Original IP content to be released by PlaySide represents what I think the biggest opportunities are. We have what will most certainly be our biggest single investment in the 2 Game of Thrones games. We have MOUSE launching later this year, which is now inside the top 30 most wishlisted titles on Steam and our continued push with the Dumb Ways to Die brand to move into the console space. You'll hear a lot more from us about MOUSE as we move closer to the launch, but the wish list on Steam continue to head into the right direction with the wishlist numbers now in excess of 800,000. For those unfamiliar with the term, wishlists are registered when PC gamers express their interest in being notified when a game comes out on Steam, which is the main platform when people purchase PC games online. Wishlists are highly correlated with sales, and it's our goal to target when well -- and it's our goal to target well in excess of 1 million wishlists on Steam before launch. Based on our data, that is the minimum hurdle we need to reach in order to give the game the chance it needs to be one of the better-performing games on Steam this calendar year. Keep in mind, we will also launch across all the console platforms as well. There's a lot of anticipation for the game, and we want people to be able to buy MOUSE on whatever platform they prefer to play games on. The other thing that is really important to get -- is getting velocity of new wishlist moving in the months immediately before launch. So you'll see us being very active with our marketing and social media efforts to keep trying to put MOUSE front of mind so that anticipation for the title is at peak when we launch. So just as a summary, this is a big year of investment in PlaySide. We've talked about the 3 major titles we're developing and investing in, and MOUSE will be the first one of those titles to launch in December half of this year. We're also working on a AAA quality demo using Unreal Engine 5 and an IP that we've developed internally. The intention there is to start building the next opportunity for a major launch beyond our current slate of titles. While we don't have the resources to commit full development on that title at the moment, having a high-quality demo enables us to pitch to some of the largest publishers in the world, which could be another massive opportunity for us. Thanks for listening, everyone, and happy to take questions now.

Great. Thanks, Jerry, and thanks, Ben. Few questions up on the screen. "Do you have any plans in launching your games on Switch 2 launch period?

Yes. I guess I can't actually say what game that is. But yes, we do. I just almost said it. Yes, I think it would be almost obvious what it is. But at the end of this year, we do hope to have a Switch 2 release. The goal is to really have a hard copy version of that game in stores, hopefully, in time for Christmas. We'll see how that goes. This distribution is quite difficult, and it will be the first time we're doing it. But regardless, we will be launching a title on Switch 2. I think Switch 2 will be possibly one of the biggest gaming platforms ever. So we need to make sure we're on it for launch.

Great. Thanks, Gerry. "Those Work for Hire contracts that you pitched for, how many of them are substantial? And how many are still on the mix to win? How many did win this out on?"

I can answer or you can go for a bit.

No, mate, go for it.

They were all substantial, and they were with major partners, 2 of whom we haven't worked with before, but are some of the largest companies in the world, both in gaming and in tech. So we were pretty confident. And they are, as we sort of said, they've been delayed. To what point, to be honest, we don't know. They are -- it is based on internal budget numbers and whether they want to go ahead with some of those projects. So they are still there. It's just we don't know when they'll be signed, or if, to be fair, like they could end up not doing it. But at the moment, they've been delayed. There are obviously other -- we've got multiple other games that we've already pitched for with partners and some of them are in those final stages. But yes, of those ones that we didn't get, they've just been delayed, and they're not current ones that we're pitching for again or anything like that.

Yes, probably add there as well, Gerry. When we provided our guidance in October, that sort of Work for Hire pipeline was really just a snapshot at a point in time. As we're sitting here in February, we've just -- our BD team has been up at DICE in North America, which is a major industry conference. They've got GDC next month, the Game Developers Conference. So there are 2 major catalysts to sort of get in front of everybody and sort of assess people's budgets for the year and other opportunities. So that Work for Hire pipeline actually continues to sort of build in terms of potential work that we can do.

Thanks, Ben. "Based on current guidance, where would you expect headcount to sit at financial year end?"

That's a good question. I think what we said in the update was that we just didn't expect it to be above where we were at last year. And obviously, we're at 335 or 336 at the moment. So I think from there really depends on levels of Work for Hire activity in the second half.

Great. Thanks, Benn. And a final question. "You talked about using Unreal Engine 5 and how that's a big help for AA studios. Do you still feel this way? And can you explain a little bit more, please?"

Yes. I mean we are using it on 2 titles internally at the moment. One of them is announced. The other one is the unannounced one. The unannounced title that we're developing Unreal Engine 5 is really using the full breadth of what that engine can do. And what it allows us to do is create games that look like they're AAA with a small amount of developers. So the game that we're making internally currently, you wouldn't really be able to tell the difference between that and something like a God of War or on Uncharted or something like that by the time we're done. So yes, Unreal Engine 5 definitely allows us to compete side-by-side with the bigger studios, which is very important for sort of the next step of games that we want to make after these ones.

Great. Thanks, Gerry. Thanks, Ben. That concludes the Q&A segment. I might just hand it back to you guys for closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you all for joining us. As I said at the start of this call, it's been a tricky period and not one that we've enjoyed going through. But everything that we have been set out to do, we are doing. And so the most important thing right now is that the original IP is being developed at a high quality and that we believe that we can market it well. And they are two things that we do believe. It is important to really pay attention to MOUSE. I think that's one of the biggest value drivers of the business right now. The launch of that will be very important. So stay on socials, check Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it, and look at TikTok, things like that. If you look at X at the moment, MOUSE is performing better than most AAA games is in terms of virality. So almost every tweet we do is just going viral, and they're not overly ambitious tweets to be putting out. They're very simple videos of the game, and that shows you how many people are looking forward to it. So yes I think pay attention to that. And just know that every time we do one of those posts all it's doing is increasing wishlists. So yes, our goal is to really get over that 1 million wishlist mark sooner rather than later and then head towards launch for it.

Great. Thanks, Gerry. Thanks, Ben, and thanks all for attending.

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