Ten Square Games S.A. (TEN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

March 25, 2025

Warsaw Stock Exchange PL Communication Services Entertainment earnings 62 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#1

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the conference summarizing Q4 2024 in Ten Square Games. My name is Andrzej Ilczuk. I'm CEO. I'm joined today by Magdalena Jurewicz, our CFO; Janusz Dziemidowicz, CTO. Good afternoon; and Nina Grabos, responsible for contacting the market. We'll begin by financial results of our company. Allow me to take the floor. A key summary of our business. 2024 wasn't an easy year, neither for us nor for other businesses. What we wish to highlight is that we are resilient. We are able to generate cash flow. We've had some bad years. We've had some better, but 2024 was a year where we continued on our path to financial resilience. We've been able to generate cash quarter-to-quarter. It was a very stable year result-wise as far as EBITDA is concerned. The quarters were similar to one another. And as you remember, in February 2024, we shared our cash with you in the form of a buyback, which is a record-breaking buyback consisting in PLN 114.6 million. I wish to remind you of that we are resilient. We are generating cash flow. And although the amount of bookings have been decreasing, our result is still very solid, all due to our cost-cutting initiatives that were undertaken in our company. This is what we wish to highlight. I think we're having some technical problems. One last comment from this particular slide. In 2024, there were a few on-off -- in the previous years, we had some one-off events. This year, we haven't had such a situation, which is reflected by our financial standing. Moving on to further matters. We are very happy whenever we can present our business to you, and we wish to provide you with some solid knowledge of what is going on in our company. As you remember, COVID-19 was a huge black swan. It's changed everything in the habits of our players. Then we had economic turmoil. For the first time, we have been hit by inflation in many, many years. The market was unstable. And I believe this was felt by everyone. We all are affected by various decisions that are taken every day. We've seen such decisions affecting the American market. We can say this is what is conducive to our gamers being less decisive in their actions. Throughout 2024, as we started, we saw it to be a very good year from the very beginning. This year, for over a decade, the lowest number of games have been issued comparing to previous years. Top 10 games. No new players have entered the game, if I may use the comparison. Many players from the gaming industry have had struggled many studios that were successful before we closed down. It was a period where many people were given a sack. We are talking about 15,000 people who were made redundant all over the market. Some also say there were as many as 60,000 people who were made redundant. And we are talking about changes that haven't been seen for years in our industry. How does it reflect on our situation? 2023 was a year where we concentrated on our key products. We optimized our costs, and we restructured our company. We decided to change something. In 2024, we initiated many talks with companies from the industry. We asked them why their businesses are operated the way they are. We talk to companies who are more successful or by the same token to companies who lost a lot of their revenue. We wanted to know where we are, what is our potential to growth, where is the potential for our products and where we are at the moment. At the turn of March and April, we created a list of subjects that we believe we can address to become better. There is a lot of potential in many of our projects. So on the turn of March and April, we had a very concentrated approach. We recruited specialists. The purpose of the recruitment process was to allow us to hire people who would help us in the tasks that our current team needed support. The recruitment process concluded in January this year. In February, all the new hires started working for our company. What is hugely important and what we are happy with is that we still see some room for growth and improvement in our games. There are many things we can do better, increasing our revenue or improving our engagement KPIs. our game demonstrates a lot of potential. Now as we are heading towards 2025, we have a solid team. We have a list of priorities. All our directions for growth have been mapped, and we are rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. Talking about the results delivered by our key products. As we've said already, we try to be open in our communication with you. We do whatever we can to be honest with you. The fourth quarter was concentrated heavily on the engagement of our key products. As you can see, we did our homework. However, engagement isn't much if it's not followed by monetization. Therefore, from -- in Q2, we are planning to introduce new changes to the monetization of our games. We talked about engagement and what we mean by improving engagement, we want to improve the feedback of our content in the games. It's essential because our games are based on new content. If we keep getting negative feedback, this would risk our business. The new location, which was published at the beginning of March in Fishing Clash was very well received by our players. We broke the trend, to be honest. We reversed it. So we increased our KPI -- our engagement KPI, and now we're moving full ahead to monetize the game. As we've already said, the list of priorities, the things we want to concentrate is only a small chunk of what we do. We need to further segment our games. We need to concentrate on it as it is a basis of our operation. We still see a lot of room for improvement here. We need to personalize both the game at its very beginning of its existence, and we need to personalize the offer we provide. And third on the list is content. However, from the perspective of revenue, this might be critical. Having this plan of action, we know what we need to do and our team with Q2 ahead of us is starting to work hard on monetizing our games. We have summarized the performance of our main titles. And now let's talk about our simulators. As you can see in the slide, we have a very good year for Wings of Heroes. Year-on-year, the improvements are clearly seen. What we would like to tell you is that looking at the number of downloads, Wings of Heroes is still a small title compared to the competition. There are more bigger players in the market now, but we want to improve lifetime value, and it can be seen in the bookings. Despite the fact that we only have 2.5% of the entire ocean, so to say, we can see that we have a product that is becoming more and more important compared to the competitors. So you can see that our work on the product is fruitful, and we want to continue these activities in the months to come. Now let's move on to the details of Wings of Heroes. You can see that we have a triple increase in monetization of Wings of Heroes, and this is a very good result. We want to continue this trend. And we are at the very end of our works, but still we want to work harder on the early retention because as you may know, improving the retention index with greater marketing expenditure is going to translate into a better development of the game. Now Real Flight Simulator. We would like to talk more about the title from RORTOS. This is a game from 2019. And year-by-year, we can a see record high performance. This is a new model with a company that is specializing in a particular segment of the market. They understand the player very well. The gameplay is very good. And additionally, us as Ten Square Games, we contribute as far as monetization goes here. So all this translates into very good results. We are very happy with the performance of this game. And we can see that Real Flight Simulator as a subscription-based game after 6, 7 years can still be successful in the market. And now let's talk about prototypes. In 2024, we launched a market test phase for our 2 products, Trophy Hunter, we talked about that previously. And the engagement here is very good. Also, in the last months, we conducted conversion testing that was very surprising for us as far as the results go. And as far as real flight simulator, this is a very early stage of the game. Let me say that these are more of a close testing. What does that mean? This is a stage during which RORTOS, together with the players who love these titles. And we know that as far as aviation games, RORTOS has a great number of engaged players. But these players give feedback on our game loop, on our gameplay. And before we start more extensive testing, we want to make sure that the gameplay is as best as it can be. And now TSG Store. One of the things that we are proud of talking about 2024 is the development of our store. As far as Fishing Clash goes at the end of the last year, the share in bookings was 21.2%. We would like to achieve 25%, and we are working on achieving that. In 2024, the development of the store was affected by fish [bugs] and also the IP activities related to incentive programs. So we worked on social media. So the Discord as well was a great contributor to this situation that was launched last year. As far as the total percentage goes, this is 14.8% of the share of TSG store bookings. In terms of Fishing Clash, the share is growing, but we would like to have more, of course. So we are planning to intensify our works on TSG store as far as Hunting Clash goes. So the objective for Hunting Clash is the same. We don't want to rest on our laurels. So we want to improve the store and its share and bookings. We are going to work on the new appearance of the store. This look and feel is going to be better. We want our players to be happier so that they do not notice that this is actually a website. And we are working on the optimization on the commissions of our booking providers. Two weeks ago, we changed our supplier in the EU. So this is one of the effects of cost optimization process. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, now a summary quarter-wise and year-wise. So our net profit, our growth and adjusted EBITDA. Okay. So our net profit dropped quarter-on-quarter, but Andrzej talked about why this happened. We wanted to focus on our player engagement in Q4, and we hope that the results of these activities are going to be visible in the months to come. Marketing expenditure, similar year-on-year, similar share per product. And we can see a bigger share in the wings of heroes and marketing expenditure is essential for our products, and we do invest in that. Q4 usually is characterized by lower marketing expenditure because numerous other events happen then. So we do not fight for our users. We wait for Q5. So this is a period starting mid-December. GA costs. So all the costs apart from marketing expenditure and commissions, we control that. Everything is under control. We try to stabilize these costs and every expenditure is analyzed. So the effect -- cost-wise effectiveness is being analyzed throughout the year, and I hope that this is going to be continued throughout the next quarters. Are there going to be any cost-related initiatives? Probably not extensive ones, but still we want to continue our initiative in the future. All this translates into the best adjusted EBITDA quarter-wise and almost EUR 110 million total annually. There are no write-offs. There are no one-off events. So our result is much better than that achieved in last year. And what about our tax audit? Well, the audit has been delayed. I'm talking about the completion of the audit. The date has been again shifted. We hope that the audit is going to be completed, but we don't know when this is going to happen and what the result is going to be. Okay. So -- so you can see some data in the slide. All this translates into very stable cash flow. We generate cash quarter-to-quarter as far as operating activities goes. Sometimes we have one-off events like payback or earnout, earnout to the previous owners of RORTOS and the balance value at the end of the year is PLN 143.8 million. I'm talking about 2024, of course. And that's why we want to show you our generated cash that has been shared with our shareholders. And we would like to propose dividend payment in the amount of PLN 100 million. 20% of dividend yield, and this translates into PLN 15.73 dividend per share. So we would like to pay the dividend on the 26th of June 2025, and the dividend day is the 20th of June 2025. So why do we recommend this solution? This is because of your feedback. So we collect your feedback. We listen to you -- to your opinions, but please believe me that usually 50% of one version, 50% of the other version, we always analyze that as the Board, we decided to this -- to adopt this particular solutions in order to reply to your needs in order to answer your needs. But this does not change our dividend policy. We want to share our cash with our stakeholders and the form of this payment can be chosen. We want our business to generate cash so that we can share this cash with you since you are our stakeholders. Summarizing our situation, I wish to remind you that 2023, we are very effective. 2024, we concentrate on understanding the engagement. In 2025, we wish to concentrate on improving monetization in fishing and hunting cash. We wish to increase growth in wings of heroes, and we wish to add new games, new concepts to our portfolio. As for 2026, as we look ahead, these are going to be very strategic mergers and acquisitions. We will be ready to add another studio to our group. We will continue on scaling up our games. And we will continue to share our profits with the stakeholders. Before we say something about our monetization plan that is supposed to support our vision, and it's a great token of our belief and faith in our product, it's related not only to our EBITDA, but also to the increase of the valuation of Ten square Games. But this is going to be the subject of Magda's presentation. This is only a proposal. We are still working out the details. So please bear with us for a few more days or a few more weeks before we present the plan to you. We wish to see you at the General Meeting of Shareholders where this is going to be decided, whatever. What we think for now and how we wish to structure it, we've been in talks with our Supervisory Board. We talked about the 5-year perspective from 2024 to 2029 with 3-year goals. Our accumulated results, adjusted EBITDA that has to be reached over the period of 3 years. There is another market component. This is going to be related to the value of our stock and its position in the WIG index. These are the conditions which will have to be met to qualify for the program. As [Beneficiaries] are concerned, the program is directed to key managers in the Management Board of the company. The idea behind the program is that if we keep on delivering increasing results, if the company is well received by the market, we also hope to share some part of the profit with our managers. We want to reward them for their good work. This is the sketch of what we wish to propose to the Supervisory Board and the shareholders at the meeting. That's it when it comes for the presentation. Now I wish to give the floor to Nina.

Unknown Executive

executive
#2

A few words about where -- when you can suppose to meet us. We will talk about bookings in the first quarter of the year. in 2025. The next expo meeting of shareholders have been scheduled for May 2025. And you might expect a first report for the first quarter 2025 of the 19th of May. As a company, we are going to meet you on the 8th of April. This is due to courtesy of mBank. We are also planning to participate in the Wall Street conference dedicated to individual investors. And on the 28th of May 2025, we are appearing on the conference organized by Nasza in Warsaw.

Unknown Executive

executive
#3

Now let's move on to the questions from our investors. One general question concerning the market, the gaming market, to be precise. How has the global market been doing? Is there any revival seen in the market? Is it going to continue to increase or is it going to continue falling in its activity?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#4

It's a great question. If I only knew the answer to it. Now as I look how the market is behaving, we were one of the first who concentrated on our key products. We reduced employment. As we look at the market, we could say that it is still in a transitory period. It's very hard to deal with the uncertainty in the market. Day in, day out, we receive a lot of mixed signals when the market is going up, the other day is going down. This causes a lot of uncertainty in our gamers as well, especially in the U.S., and it's reflected in the bookings. When it comes to Europe and other markets, we've been doing pretty well. However, North America is mired by uncertainty, and this affects the behavior of players in the market. We don't really know what the market is going to look like because some of its aspects are beyond our control. However, what we decided to do, please remember that 2024, we tried to understand what we were doing. So the persons who started working for us in 2025 come from Northern America. They understand the market very well. So if there was one thing we could do to better address the problems we faced in North America, we did pretty much everything we could.

Unknown Executive

executive
#5

Thank you [indiscernible] for the answer -- the next question concerns ideas for development. What are your plans for the next quarters? At the moment, you seem to look like you are squeezing a lemon. Isn't it time for more -- for a bolder approach?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#6

If in 2024, we had decided that everything was going well in our games and they were optimized and that we are years ahead of our competitors, I would say -- yes, we definitely need to change our approach. Without acquisitions, at the time, we wouldn't have been able to reverse the falling trend. Yes, I agree with your assessment of the situation. However, as we work towards finding out more, we decided there were some things we could do better. This is why we decided to assume this approach. We hired new persons. We have worked on our know-how. We have developed a new approach, and we changed a lot in terms of our product development. As of now, we totally disagree with the statement that we are squeezing a lemon. If we reached such a point, we would be much more active in the M&A segment.

Unknown Executive

executive
#7

A few questions concerning Wings of Heroes and the increase of its marketing expenditure. I would like you to offer a word of comment. According to the person asking the question, MAU has been stable for a few quarters. And the next question concerns marketing expenditure in Wings of Heroes. Do we see any roadblocks to increasing expenditure for a user acquisition? Or are there simply no more worrying signals in the field?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#8

Well, let's talk about the marketing for starters. One month, something works very well. another, some forward of advertising doesn't deliver its expected results. Marketing isn't very stable because it's a living organism. Sometimes our activities are more or less successful. However, as for the scaling of MAU goes, I would have to say that we maintain our marketing expenditure on a more or less stable level. And we are not surprised by the fact -- still we don't have many downloads compared to the entire pool of flight simulator games. We wanted to compare Wings of Heroes to similar products. However, the market is much larger.

Unknown Executive

executive
#9

Another question concerns key products of the group, Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash. The expected changes in the monetization of the games, are they going to be concerned with an increase of your activity in M&A? And perhaps would it also prompt you to increase your marketing expenditure in the games?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#10

Well, first of all, when we improve the operation of the product, that results in a better KPI, we analyze our marketing benchmark. If we decide that we can increase marketing, we do it. That's the only way we approach it. That's the only thing it's ever worked. If the product is supposed to work, then we only take decisions which allow us to scale up our products. The better the product, the more we spend on marketing. However, we are not going to scale our products by loosening our benchmarks and creating so if I can say it, artificial growth.

Unknown Executive

executive
#11

The next question pertains to the new employees in the company. Have they helped in adjusting the strategy for the flagship product? If so, when can we see the first tangible effects of these activities?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#12

So the last person started acting with us, working with us from the beginning of February. And we wanted this person to understand our games and our company. So we wanted this person to take some time. Albert Einstein said, if you do not have an hour to fix a problem, you should devote 55 minutes to understand the problem. So this is what we wanted to do. Maybe somewhere, we lost something on our way, and we wanted just these people to understand the world of our games. As far as Hunting Clash goes, I think that we are already 90%. With Fishing Clash, we need some more time in order to conclude the entire process. So has this translated in our performance? Well, it has translated into the project works. What I'm happy with is that we require more and more from ourselves. So we ask difficult questions to ourselves. If a given product is going to be led in a better way, if the requirements are more extensive, if we are able to find the source of a problem, this will mean that we are going to be able to offer a better product to our players. And at the end of the day, we are going to be able to monetize this product better.

Unknown Executive

executive
#13

Okay. Let's change a topic for a while. Let's talk about financial questions. And we have a question pertaining to earn-outs and dates for these earn-outs this year and last year. And I'm talking about RORTOS, of course. Well, the date will -- this is April -- April, May. So after the financial statement has been concluded. And the goal of the incentive program for 2025, we are talking about adjusted EBITDA. This is an ambitious plan from the perspective of the main trends of the main titles. So are you planning to rebound with your revenues or maybe you are planning to implement cost optimization? I think that Andrzej already answered this question. We want to change the trend as far as our main titles go. So we want to see a rebound in our revenues. But as far as cost optimization goes, we would like to control the situation, but we want to see a bigger share of TSG store. We want to increase our commissions. We want to polish the commissions. And the main factor here is going to be an increase in our bookings in our net profit. Okay. People employed in 2025. The number of employees dropped in 2024 compared to 2023. What about employment in 2025? Are you going to have some layoffs? Well, I would like to say that we are still in the process of publishing our ESG report, and we are talking about our employees also employed on B2B basis, let's say. But CSG is over 300 people, not 200, 300. I would like to emphasize that. So please understand that. But to answer this question directly, employment, well, there are always people who resign. There are always people who are employed. There are not going to be any major fluctuations here, but all this depends on our development teams. people working on fishing and hunting games. If any of the new prototypes is successful and is scalable successfully, we probably will employ new people. This is an option, of course. But only if this is profitable. We are not going to employ any people now. First, we need to see the results. This is the main idea of running a business in our company. And another question about employees. Are you not afraid of losing key members of the Board of RORTOS after earn-outs are finished, completed. Are these individuals are going to be included in an ISO program? Or are they going to be included in some other revenue sharing programs? These are key players in our company. So we want to keep them in TSG. So we are going to try to adjust the revenue sharing package for these people so that it is very attractive for them. But still, this is dependable on our profitability, on our performance. So we are conducting negotiations here, but we would like to keep these individuals with us. Okay. And now an entire range of questions, so to say, about Trophy Hunter. They pertain to parameters as well as the road map, road map of works, can you share anything about that? Can you say something about the parameters and works in relation to this title? Let me repeat what I said. conversion, engagement, KPIs in these areas look very well. We want to improve the looks, appearance of the game. And this depends on the market conditions.

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#14

This aspect is not looking very well, I have to say, honestly, but we are working on that. And also, we want to improve the visual aspect of the game and some other aspects that I would not like to mention at this particular time. With the team, we work in 3-month intervals. So if the team is able to achieve the goals that they have during this 3-month period, we continue further in the product. And if KPIs also confirm that, we continue investing in the product. The quality of the product is very important, but these parameters also, they need to confirm that our team can perform very well on a given product.

Unknown Executive

executive
#15

Okay. And some other questions pertaining to the flagship product of the group, Fishing Clash, Hunting Clash. So what are the assumptions of the improved road map? And when are you planning to implement all the changes? And also a question pertaining to your main projects, Hunting Clash, for example, the effects of changes introduced in Hunting Clash and monetization -- monetization pertaining to the increasing player base in this game.

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#16

Okay. So indeed, we want to focus on monetization, and we are introducing changes here, and we are introducing changes in both of the products. Segmentation test, the first test have been started already. They have been going on for some time, adding new locations. This is one of the examples that we have. We have a new approach doing tests and also new members of our team also influence the process of testing new locations. Let me give you an example. So for example, this new testing approach allowed us to find very quickly some problems with the new content, problems related to monetization. And as a result, we were able to address these problems very quickly. When will the results be visible? Well, we have been working together for, well, let's say, 2 months. So that is why I wouldn't like to rush all these changes. What I would like to do is for us to better understand what is going on with our products before we make any major decisions, for example, about changing the entire segmentation of the game. In the past, when we launched new segmentation and after a very short period of A/B testing, it turned out that the segmentation did not do very well, and it did not meet our expectations. That's why I wouldn't like to rush. Let's stay calm and let's focus on consistent improvement of our performance. So instead of rushing, let's stay calm and let's work slowly. And these new people also bring new quality to the work of the dev teams. And this needs to -- has to translate into good financial performance.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#17

Your comment on the results comparing January to March. What is the reason for decreases in main products? The first thing is the term of content. We have switched from 4 to 6 weeks. Therefore, we have seen fewer or less more content created quarter-to-quarter. This has to increase. This has to affect revenue. We knew that our new hires would start working with us in January. Therefore, we wanted to be ready for their onboarding. We wanted to present them with some key information that will help them work. We decided to do it still in the fourth and in the first quarter. At the beginning of the year, we wanted to conclude all before the fourth quarter. However, we didn't manage to achieve that. We are 1 quarter behind. Therefore, we are starting a new offensive in the second quarter. I'm talking about monetization.

Unknown Executive

executive
#18

Before we move to questions concerning acquisition, I wish to ask one more question concerning the Google privacy policy. What is the schedule at the moment?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#19

We -- the question could be different. We would like to know it ourselves. Officially, Google has said that we're going to share this information as long as it's available. So conference to conference schedule hasn't been made public. There was one more thing we would like to remind you. There are 2 aspects in this new privacy policy. One of them concerns web browsers, Google Chrome and the second concerns Android. We concentrate on Android. The web browser has had a specific deadline. The deadline for Android hasn't been specified. Please follow this news on the Google's website where you can find all this information updated. However, the Android segment has been idle, and we don't know where to expect any information. And we still haven't got it.

Unknown Executive

executive
#20

Thank you so much. The next question concerns the commission that you pay on the bookings made through TSG Store. At the moment, it's around 10% with a slight decrease in tendency due to optimizations that we've initiated. Two weeks ago, we started working with another payments provider in the European Union, and we hope we will see some downward movement on the commission. There are 2 more questions concerning acquisitions. Has anything changed in terms of your perspective on the acquisitions? The entities you mentioned at previous conferences, are they more open to corporate? When can we expect some acquisitions? Will these be on the national entities, maybe international entities? Are you also thinking about share issuance?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#21

Well, it takes 2 to tango, as you know. At the moment, we don't feel it's a good idea to add another company to our portfolio. Due diligence of games. Well, I have to say, and it's a very conservative estimate, it takes from month to 3, if you want to assess a product. We would have to take our best product people and task them with estimating the potential of a game of a particular studio. Obviously, we have done some of this work. However, when this time comes, we would have to be much more concentrated and be much more detail oriented to analyze a full potential of the game. We strongly believe this is not the best moment to start such processes. Therefore, we keep on talking just as with RORTOS. It took RORTOS some time to understand they would like to join forces with us. Similarly, we are doing exactly the same right now. We're not in a rush. We understand our situation and position very well. We know where our potential lies. And I know that other players in the market don't really know where they're going and what they would like to do, if I can put it in life. At the moment, it's a tough question to answer. It depends on a potential partner. Some prefer cash. Others want to play part in a bigger body of a bigger entity. We haven't had any talks to this effect. We haven't talked about the method of payment. So as for now, it's only speculation.

Unknown Executive

executive
#22

Thank you so much for this question. One more question concerning investments and disinvestments. There are some projects you have abandoned. Don't you think you could have sold these products to other companies?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#23

Yes, of course, we could have. However, the price usually is between PLN 0 and a few hundred thousand. So I don't know if engaging in cutting off the product from our structure is profitable because somebody might spend $500 on marketing. I don't believe this is what we are looking for. 10%, 20% of such a transaction, it's pennies to be honest. Whenever we look at publishing, whenever we concentrate on such deals, they are not very profitable compared to the scale of our operation. Of course, they could be noticeable by other entities. However, it distracts our people. It distracts our organization. Explaining front end, back end, the code to someone, the graphics to somebody to make PLN 100,000 doesn't make much sense in my opinion. I wish also to add that there are many similar elements in our games concerning analytics, analyzing what happens in our games. This is not something we wish to share with anyone.

Unknown Executive

executive
#24

Thank you so much for taking the question. There are also questions about the future. And the results in March. So I'm going to put them all together in one block of questions. Websites such as Sensor or Tower or App Magic demonstrate a slight decrease of daily revenue of Wings of Heroes in March. Is it reflective of the future? If yes, of the reality? If yes, what's the reason for that? Have you managed to stop the decrease of MAU in the fourth quarter in Hunting Clash? What does it look like in the first quarter of 2025? What are your expectations towards this indicator over the next quarters? And what is the reason for a decrease in MAU between the fourth quarter 2024 and the first quarter 2025? One more question concerning the first quarter of 2025. How high is your marketing expenditure? Is it going to be near similar to 2020 -- at the end of 2024 or to the beginning of 2025?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#25

Let's start from marketing. We spend as much as we can compared to our benchmarks. If somebody, let's say, our competitors wish to spend more money and keep us out of the place, well, that's going to happen. We don't say that, look, this month, we have to spend EUR 1 million. The next we need to spend EUR 2 million. We plan our spending relative to benchmark. If our products deliver good results, we spend more. If not, we spend as much as we can. That's our approach to marketing expenditure. As for MAU -- MAU, it's a very hard KPI to analyze because it groups an entire world in one figure. Because of that, MAU might be 3x higher, but the majority of traffic can be generated by 3 category countries or second category countries. We are very permediated in our action. We don't concentrate on the market-by-market analysis. We predominantly concentrate on the most calorific markets, if I could put it that way. It's nothing new. Our games are still capable of attracting new users through both marketing and organically. Therefore, there isn't a lot to change. As for Wings of Heroes, I don't look at our titles week-by-week or a month-on-month basis because if we -- how shall I put it, if we keep scaling our products in a moderate way, our team tests a lot of features. We have A/B tests to make sure that what we do is right. We have a lot of time or enough time to test all our changes. We keep on working on scaling. Our benchmarks are very strict. It's all in order for us to be able to do what we need to do and not to repeat our mistakes from the past.

Unknown Executive

executive
#26

And we have a question about Gamesture. How do you assess the potential of Gamesture's games?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#27

Gamesture operates in a slightly different segment compared to our other titles. Right now, these products are not significant as far as revenue goes. So this potential does not seem to be very extensive now. But these games do have a monetization potential. What we lack is, well, actually finding a good pool of players. So that is something we are looking for. These are small games for now, but I think that these games do have potential.

Unknown Executive

executive
#28

Okay. And several last questions that we have that have previously been asked. These pertain -- and let me paraphrase here. There were many, many -- so this question was very long. So you have discontinued Undead Clash and you decided to focus on 3 main titles. But in the meantime, you started working on 2 new games, Real Combat Simulator and Trophy Hunter, but the revenues from the main titles are not that big. So why are you planning to invest in the new titles?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#29

We are a game-oriented company. And whenever the behavior of players changes, we need to understand why this happens. So creating new titles, we are able to be more bold in our testing compared to Fishing Clash or Hunting Clash because then any change in the gameplay can end very badly. That's why we are testing new approaches with Trophy Hunter, and Real [Combat] Simulator. Here, we can be more bold in our testing. We are focusing on A/B test as well. So the fact that you can see something in the game does not mean that other people will see something else. So -- this is one important aspect. Another aspect is that looking at our entire team, there are people who work very well in maintaining games, and there are people who are very good in creating new games. So we need to manage our talents, and we need to use them as best as we can. And that's it, I think.

Unknown Executive

executive
#30

And one more question. This is a question pertaining to the following. So discontinuation of Undead Clash was supposed to optimize costs related to these projects. So didn't you think about discontinuing works from Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash because this would result into decreasing the cost of operations of the company.

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#31

Well, let me answer this question directly. We see what we see. We have a list of priorities. We have a list of things to be improved. We have talked with tens of different entities, and we try to benchmark ourselves compared to these entities. If we did not see a potential in Ten Square games, if we did not see any improvement then yes, maybe we should make this decision and focus on smaller gains. But now here and now, we believe that our products have significant potential, and we can still achieve a lot with them.

Unknown Executive

executive
#32

Okay. And the KPIs of Fishing Clash Hunting Clash, do you believe that these titles are back on track compared to 2022?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#33

That's a very good question. Everything we do at the end of the day should translate into higher bookings. And as a company, we need to be better in this area. And I keep repeating this, but we try to communicate beforehand that, for example, Q1, Q4 focus on engagement, and this might affect our revenues. Why? We want you to understand what we do. We want to show you that we have potential in Ten square Games. Sometimes we want to show you that there's no potential like for example, on YouTube and traders who say that, "Oh, yes, I invested in this or that company last year. And then after 1 year, you can see the results or you don't see any results. We want to work in another way. We first want to show you what the situation is. We want to tell you beforehand that we need to improve in a given area. That's why we decided to employ new members of our team. Their task is to improve the quality of our work -- product-related work. That's why we conduct reviews of our products, all this because we want all this to translate into increased revenues.

Unknown Executive

executive
#34

Okay. And your activities related to business development, do you -- are you planning to strengthen your team by employing new people?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#35

Well, we have a lot of product-related tasks and sometimes it might turn out that we need another person, but it's difficult to say what's going to happen in 1 month, 2 months, 4 months. Yes, it might happen that we need another person.

Unknown Executive

executive
#36

Okay. And your discontinued titles, Fishing Masters, [indiscernible], Golf Royale. So how much time would it take for these games to bring some returns on investment? Do you think that these games were worse compared to your other products?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#37

I think that these games had poor KPIs. And we just simply could not have spent significant marketing-related amounts on these games. I am aware that [indiscernible] was liked by many players. But this is one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a game developer. If you like a given game and you invest in this game, it does not matter. What matters is that a wide range of players like the game. If players do not like the game, you should discontinue works on that game.

Unknown Executive

executive
#38

Are you working on fishing Clash 2? We cannot comment on that. And finally, the last question. And I think that it pertains to the previous one. Why have you not used your previous titles, those that you have created before in the process of launching new titles? Well, because KPIs of these games were not good, and it's difficult to build something stable on poor foundations. I know that the Thunder was liked by many people, but KPIs tell you another story. Okay. So finally, we have 3 last questions because we are running out of time, as I said. So a significant drop in revenues in the Apple platform.

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#39

Hunting Clash. Okay. As I've said before, Hunting Clash is being rebuilt at this moment. And okay, what's the situation now? I don't know how to say this. It is all connected. It's connected with the traffic. It's connected with the approach to new content. It's not an easy answer. There are drops in revenues in the United States. And for example, Apple and Android, there are differences here. So this is one of the reasons.

Unknown Executive

executive
#40

How does real combat simulator differs from Wings of Heroes? Is it a direct competitor in the aviation area? Is it a game for younger audience compared to War thunder?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#41

Well, this is a completely different game in this particular market segment. It's like a test really. We want to check whether this game is going to work at all, whether it's going to steal a slice of cake from the simulator games segment. So the asset of the game is functioning the blue ocean or finding this blue ocean. So it's about looking for an interesting segment of simulator-based games that we could enter in.

Unknown Executive

executive
#42

And the final question, why do you believe that 2025 is going to be a groundbreaking year for Ten Square Games?

Andrzej Ilczuk

executive
#43

Well, groundbreaking is a huge word. I don't really know how to understand the question and the word. We can offer you the following thing. We promise we will be very scrupulous about our approach. We try to understand a problem before we spring into actions. We have strengthened our team. In Q2, we are starting works on monetization. Again, I wish to repeat that for now, it seems we have everything to achieve success. Obviously, sometimes life presents you with a surprise. However, whenever we see that something is not going the way it is supposed to, we are the first to take action. We are very quick in responding to changes. We are very thorough in our understanding of what's going on. And our teams provide us with a sense of belief that what we do is right. This is our safety net, if I could put it that way. We know we are going in the right direction. We have exhausted the list of questions.

Unknown Executive

executive
#44

Time for the conference is up. Should you have any additional questions that are submitted, please do send us to our e-mail address. We'll be very happy to address them by e-mail. Thank you very much for being with us, and we hope to meet you at the next conference. Thank you so much.

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