PlaySide Studios Limited (PLY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to PlaySide Studios First Half of Financial Year 2026 Results Presentation, where we have on the line the CEO, Benn Skender. Before I hand it over to Benn to go through the presentation up on the screen, I will just remind you. [Operator Instructions] With that, Benn, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks.

Thanks, Simon, and thanks, everyone, for dialing in. We're very pleased to be sharing these results with you this morning. While we're naturally looking forward to a stronger second half as we gear up for the launch of MOUSE, this first half is an important milestone for us. It clearly demonstrates the significant strides that we've been making in improving our operating processes and gaining firm control over our cost base. We believe at PlaySide that we've built a very stable foundation that will allow us to scale effectively when the opportunity presents itself. If we jump into Slide 2, we've summarized our financial highlights for the half. We've delivered revenue of $20.4 million, which came in ahead of our guidance range of $19 million to $20 million. You'll notice that about 3/4 of that revenue was driven by external projects, which is exactly what we'd expect during a period where we didn't have any new major original IP launches. What we're especially pleased with is our EBITDA of $9.5 million, which landed at the top end of our $8 million to $10 million guidance. That represents a significant turnaround compared to last year, and it's important to note that this strength holds true even if you exclude the impact of the Digital Games Tax Offset. And this has flowed through to a very healthy bottom line. We delivered positive NPAT and positive operating cash flow, leaving us with a net cash balance of around $14 million. We'll dig into the numbers a bit more on Slide 3. To give you the clearest picture of our trajectory, I think it's best to compare our recent first half numbers against the June half, which was right after our April restructure. This apples-to-apples view really shows the impact of the changes that we've made. If you look at the table, you can see that there's a significant step-up in how we're executing operationally. Even in a quieter period without major new launches or announcing any major external projects, we've managed to keep revenue flat. In this industry, maintaining that kind of stability while we're internalizing a restructure is something that we're incredibly proud of. On the original IP side, we've become much sharper at getting the most out of our back catalog. We've taken advantage during the half of platform-specific sales campaigns for titles like Age of Darkness and Kill Knight. And as our portfolio of well-reviewed games grows, so does that opportunity for creative bundling across those titles. Because development for these titles are already expensed, every new sale contributes directly to our bottom line. That might seem like an incremental win, but it's high margin and highly repeatable. In external projects, we've added -- we've extended our long-term partnership with Meta on Horizons through to the end of calendar 2026. I want to be clear upfront, despite Meta's internal restructure of Reality Labs in January, our work remains steady and unchanged. While we didn't announce a blockbuster new contract this half, we stayed very busy with scope expansions, and you can see that in the numbers. Interestingly, much of that came from Meta's push into mobile. So for those that know our VR work with Meta, this is a great full circle moment for PlaySide. Meta is pivoting its 15,000-person Reality Labs team towards mobile and AI. And because PlaySide has such a deep pedigree in mobile gaming, we were perfectly positioned to catch that wave. Finally, the area that I'm most pleased with is our operating costs, where we've achieved $7 million in annualized cost savings. If I'm being honest, the internal numbers that we look at are even better if we compare the weeks immediately prior to the restructure, but we've stuck with a conservative methodology that aligns strictly to our audited accounting periods to come up with that number. That way, you can all see it in the P&L. Our marketing costs were also a little bit lower, but that's more of a timing thing. Big campaigns for Game of Thrones and MOUSE were conducted in June last year. And then, as we delayed the launch of MOUSE, some of the initiatives that we would have spent money on in the December half are happening right now. Slide 4 shows our historical revenue. FY '26 is a bit of a unique year for us in that our revenue generation is centered around our original IP portfolio, specifically the global launch of MOUSE in April. But I'm also confident that we've got an internal structure that can support a much larger external projects business going forward as well. If we turn to our cash flow, we can see a trajectory that very much mirrors the improvements in our P&L. Whether you focus on our shift to being operating cash flow positive or the net cash flow after our capitalized development, the story is the same: we're becoming a much more efficient business. You'll notice that our capitalized development costs have increased during the half. This reflects the larger team that we've deployed to bring Game of Thrones to life as well as the final push of investment required to get MOUSE ready for its global debut. We view this as high-quality capital being put to use in the projects that will drive the next chapter of our growth. Regarding capital management, we raised a small amount of equity during the half, and I'd like to thank those that participated in either the placement or the share purchase plan alongside myself and the Board. The injection of those funds made it easier to make a call on delaying the launch of MOUSE, which was originally going to come out during the December half. This month, we also made the strategic decision to secure $6 million in debt financing, which is fully backed by our $7.8 million DGTO claim. For those less familiar with the DGTO, it's a 30% government rebate on our Australian development spend. We've already lodged the claim for $7.8 million and expect the cash later this year, but we saw a clear advantage in being able to access those funds now. This isn't just about giving us more flexibility regarding the MOUSE launch window. It's also about supporting several long-term initiatives that we believe are in the best interest of the company. While we've been very disciplined with cost savings during the restructure, we also recognize that you can't grow the business by cutting alone. We've identified clear areas where investing today is going to help our long-term trajectory, and those funds allow us to stay on the front foot and execute on those plans regardless of broader market timing. We'll talk about some of those opportunities on the next few slides. We've started to get busy expanding our global footprint. As we noted in our recent shareholder letter, we've brought on 2 new business development executives based in Dubai to lead our efforts in the Middle East. While the local scene there for development is still in its early stages, the region, specifically Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar has a massive mandate to grow the gaming sector. The Saudi 2030 vision alone aims to contribute more than 13 billion to GDP and create nearly 40,000 jobs from gaming. Currently, there are over 100 studios in the region, but very few have access to the kind of B2B support and scaling expertise that PlaySide provides. So we see a significant opportunity to be an early mover there. By having people on the ground building local relationships, we can navigate the risk of a new market while capturing those government-backed tailwinds. We're keeping this expansion small and targeted with a clear internal mandate to focus on securing high-value contract work. To complement this, we've also welcomed Stefan Kreutzer to the team. Stefan is covering Europe and supporting our U.S. efforts, and we're incredibly pleased to have someone of his caliber on board. He previously led global business development for Behavior Interactive, which is a company that looks very much like a larger version of PlaySide. Stefan has got a proven track record of signing pivotal deals and scaling a business that, a lot like ours, balances original IP with a large external projects division. He brings a level of sophistication and a strong network of client relationships that will be invaluable for PlaySide as we aim for that next level of growth. So it's about putting the right people in the right places to ensure that our trajectory remains ambitious but sustainable. Last week, we were excited to announce a new global publishing agreement with MVRX Games for their upcoming platformer Dew. Every deal in our portfolio brings something different to the table. While Dew hasn't had the viral trajectory that MOUSE had, it offers a different, equally compelling advantage, and that is having a veteran team behind it. The developers at MVRX haven't just made games before, they've led development on a major franchise in this exact genre with massive commercial success. Here, you can see some of the key art that we have for development. Our journey with this title started when we first saw it in a conference in Asia last year. We were immediately struck by its quality, which led us to travel to meet the team in Sweden. And what really sealed the deal was their enthusiasm for our work on MOUSE. And it's been incredibly rewarding to see that kind of halo effect starting to form. Even before MOUSE has launched, its reputation in the industry is opening doors to high-caliber partnerships like this one. And we're moving quickly to capitalize on these types of opportunities, and that momentum is another reason why we proactively sought the additional funding that we discussed earlier. We want to ensure that when we find stunning games like Dew, we've got the resources to bring them home. If we move on to MOUSE, our marketing campaign continues to perform exceptionally well and exactly in line with expectations. We've reached 1.1 million wish list on Steam, 1.3 million wish list in total, and our current velocity is accelerating. In February, for example, we've been adding wish list at twice the rate of January, putting us on a very clear trajectory to hit our 1.4 million wish list target by launch. February was just really the beginning of our final 7-week push. Partners like IGN have been incredible advocates for the game, which continues to drive massive exposure for us. We have a robust road map of new content trailers and announcements ready to go. And with the game now in the hands of media under embargo, we expect a significant wave of coverage as we head towards launch. As a team, we've made the collective decision to move the launch date slightly to April 16 U.S. time. Our absolute priority here is quality. Along with the developers at Fumi, we want to ensure we stick the landing and meet the high expectations of our global community of fans. While quality is the primary driver, this was also a tactical decision. As we lock off content, the situation is dynamic. You're ensuring the game runs flawlessly across half a dozen different platforms and hardware specs. In this industry, the reviews in those first 48 hours are critical to a game's long-term sales curve, and we want to ensure no technical hurdles get in the way of that. Thankfully, we've been monitoring the broader release calendar since our original announcement in October. We've kept a close eye on unannounced titles and platform-wide sales across Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo. We always maintain a plan A, B and C for our launch windows. And last week, we decided that shifting to mid-April provides the best possible clear air and technical readiness for a successful global debut. Moving to Game of Thrones. We're very pleased with the progress that we're making. We've been quite intentional with our marketing beat so far, having only released our initial cinematic reveal trailer and the developer diary. To already have nearly 0.25 million wish list at this early stage is a fantastic result, and it speaks to the enduring power of the brand. Sundays have become a little bit of a highlight for us lately at PlaySide. Every time a new episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms airs, we see a clear spike in traffic to our Steam page with a significant percentage of those visitors converting to wish list. It's a great reminder that the Game of Thrones universe is still resonating deeply with the global audience and the positive reception of the new series provides a wonderful backdrop for our launch. We're keeping a few things under wraps for now, but we'll be sharing more on our specific marketing initiatives later this year. We expect that once we get live gameplay in front of the community, it will really shift the conversation and drive another significant leg up in our wish list numbers. We're in a great position where we can be patient and time our reveals for maximum impact. Here, you can see some of the progress that we've been making. The team has playable builds and runs continuous team-wide play tests to derisk technical and design challenges along the way and find ways to make the game feel even more fun before we put it in the hands of the community later this year. Our Dumb Ways to Die franchise has had an incredibly productive half. We announced Dumb Ways to Party and finally launched the Dumb Ways characters and emotes in Fortnite, a move that was received with a lot of excitement from our community. To better align this brand with our broader goals, we've decided to integrate Dumb Ways to Die under the leadership of the General Manager that oversees our original IP projects on PC and console. This ensures we've got a cohesive gamer-facing brand strategy across our entire game portfolio. As part of this transition, the team has been temporarily focused on exploratory prototyping. What we're looking to do there is build a robust pipeline of Dumb Ways titles, allowing us to test exactly what our fans are looking for before committing to full-scale production. We're already seeing some very promising results from this experimental phase, and it ensures that we're investing our resources in the highest potential projects for the brand going forward. Beyond digital gaming, we continue to diversify our revenue streams. We're particularly excited about our partnership with Spin Master, who will be launching a brand-new card game this March. It's all part of a broader effort to make sure that the brand remains a powerhouse, both on and off the screen. Here, you can see some of the screenshots and social content from the Fortnite campaign. These initiatives serve a dual purpose for us. They keep the brand highly relevant with a massive audience while establishing the message that Dumb Ways can be a brand for gamers. On this slide, we've highlighted the industry themes that are most relevant to PlaySide right now. Rather than go through all of them point by point, we thought it would be more useful to provide a broader outlook on the environment for external projects, an area where we know our shareholders are looking for momentum. I've just returned from the D.I.C.E conference in the U.S., which is the first major touch point of the new U.S. financial year for the industry, and that gave us a chance to speak with studio execs about their content demands for the year ahead as well as meet one-on-one with several peers in the outsourcing space who have also been navigating a tough couple of years like we have. The general sentiment has definitely shifted towards optimism. While we're still seeing some large-scale restructures across the sector, those dynamics are beginning to stabilize. And what's most encouraging is that the volume of RFPs has lifted significantly in the last few months. To give you some context on that, our team has worked on more pitches in the last 4 months than we did in the entire year prior. We're also starting to see M&A activity ramp up again from players intent on putting capital to work for new content. Because many AAA studios are not yet rebuilding their internal headcounts, outsourcing remains their primary path forward. We're seeing a market that is hungry for high-quality partners, and we feel that PlaySide is ideally positioned as those deals move towards the finish line. So in conclusion, and as we look ahead, the tailwinds in the industry are picking up, and we believe we've never been better positioned to capture new contract work. We've deliberately expanded our business development team and our geographic footprint, giving us much deeper relationships in the right markets. Combined with a refined pitching process and the halo effect from some of the IPs that we're working on right now, PlaySide is absolutely on the map for major global partners. In the immediate term, our primary catalyst is MOUSE, which will launch on April 16 U.S. time. We're reiterating our FY '26 guidance. This half clearly demonstrates the impact of the restructure in streamlining our operating costs and MOUSE remains the key driver for our expectation that FY '26 revenue will exceed the previous year. We naturally expect to provide an update on our guidance shortly after the MOUSE launch. While the exact timing of that will depend on the game's initial performance out of the gate, we anticipate being in a position to share these details with you within a few weeks and certainly no more than a month following the launch. We're incredibly excited about the path ahead. Thank you all for your time today, and we're happy to take any questions. Thanks.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Jasper Struwig at Canaccord Genuity.

Congrats on today's result. I think just meeting and even exceeding your internal targets is exceptional, especially given the rough last 6 months that you've had. But just in terms of the MOUSE delay, so I appreciate that you really want to get the game into its best final position ahead of launch. Could you maybe -- or now that you actually have an extra month, could you maybe give us more detail on the specific marketing initiatives that you plan on implementing just to ramp up that wish listing velocity into launch?

I won't give you the specifics because I don't want to steal the marketing team's thunder, although they're on the call. But to give you a general flavor for them, we've got marketing beats running pretty much weekly now through to the launch date. So we'll have -- I think, it's at least 7 marketing beats over the next 7 weeks. And really, they vary between trailers related to gameplay, a few things on the merch and music side. So we've got some music collaborations that I won't share on the call, but are really exciting, and then a couple of big beats right into the launch.

Perfect. And then I appreciate you can't talk to a specific number, but could you potentially comment on the expected pricing for now? So is this sort of -- would you expect it to sort of come in at the more premium end for a game that's sort of online?

Yes. So I think we're going to reveal the exact retail price in about 3 weeks' time once it starts going live on some of the platforms. But to give you a bit of context, I mean, you've had one of the best-selling games this year is ARC Raiders, which came out at, I think, USD 40. There's a significant amount of content in that game. And I don't think it would be appropriate to price MOUSE at, say, $40. At the other end, you've had several indie titles come out that are sort of around the $20 range, and I think we can do a little bit better than that. But as for the specific pricing, we should be able to reveal that or it should be at least available on the platforms, I think, in about 3 weeks' time.

That's awesome. That gives us a lot of context. And then maybe just turning to the External Projects division. Are there any larger opportunities still under negotiation sort of from the last calendar year? And then could you potentially sort of comment on what the immediate pipeline of opportunities looks like?

Yes, sure. So to sort of get to the crux of your question, there's definitely some of the bigger opportunities that we're still discussing. I guess the best way to talk about it is probably to say what are we seeing at the moment and what the pipe looks like. So right now, our pipeline is a mix of 3 distinct tiers. We've got a handful of RFPs that are live for smaller work in that sort of $1 million to $3 million revenue range. Parallel to that, we're in active discussions with IP owners for midsized development projects, so I think sort of between $2 million to $10 million of revenue. And then we're still at the table with the major studios for those larger $5 million to $10 million annual revenue contracts that are, say, 2 years plus of work. If we look back at '23 and 2024, we were heavily indexed toward those massive $5 million-plus jobs with a few specific partners. And I think the lesson that we and the industry learned over the last couple of years is that when those giants restructure, those big projects are often the first things to get put on hold. So over the last 6 months, we've intentionally shifted our mindset around what we're prepared to pitch for and win. We've gone wider and, frankly, we've gotten a lot hungrier as a team. We're heading into GDC, which is early March at what I'd call full power. We've got the strongest BD presence we've ever had, a completely overhauled pitching process. And really, we've got more brand equity than ever because of the noise that we're making with MOUSE and Game of Thrones. I know everyone is looking for a specific date for new wins, and I want those signings as much as you do, but the reality is the timing often sits with the client. What I can tell you is that the volume of RFPs is lifting across all of those tiers. We've done the work to set our business up nicely. And when that work lands, it's going to flow through to the bottom line much more efficiently than it has in the past.

Up next, we have Jules Cooper from Shaw and Partners.

Can you hear me, Benn?

I can, mate.

Great. I just wanted to sort of touch on 2 of the sort of strategic initiatives in the period. So one was signing a publishing deal for Dew. I just wondered if you could talk about how that evolved and why it sort of fits into your portfolio risk framework and also just the sequel on MOUSE. Just wondering if you can talk to -- do the economics largely match the original agreement there? Or has that changed?

Yes. In short, the economics haven't really changed relative to the first deal, which is great. Obviously, if the game goes well, just the fact that we've secured the rights to the sequel makes it a more attractive deal for us in that sense, but the economics are very similar. It's been a great journey working with the team, and I feel like it's a nice indication that we're working harmoniously and see it as a good fit from both sides that we're able to sign that in advance. As I mentioned on the call, regarding Dew, it was one of the things where our GM of Publishing was at a conference that -- I think it was gamescom Asia, saw the title and thought this looks fantastic, talked with the owner of a gaming conference in Sweden who gave us an intro to the team. We went up there. I think then he went from -- it was when Melbourne was 45 degrees or 44 degrees or whatever, went down to negative 20 the next day in Sweden, and got that deal over the line. But as I said, the main reason they are excited to work with us was because of the work that we've done with the Fumi team on MOUSE. And it's that halo effect that's really starting to ring through, not just in publishing, but also when we're looking at opportunities on the external project side. So that was part of the reason we proactively looked for more capital in advance. There are other opportunities that we're discussing at the moment as well. We just want to make sure that we're able to capitalize on as many of those opportunities as makes sense. We put Dew in front of the entire leadership team, and it was unanimous that, yes, this is absolutely another game that we'd be keen on signing.

That concludes the Q&A segment, Benn. I might just hand it back to you for closing remarks.

Nothing else from me. Thanks, everyone, for dialing in to the call and happy to take other questions and do some presentations later in the day.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Benn. Thanks all for attending.