tinyBuild, Inc. ($TBLD)

Earnings Call Transcript · March 19, 2026

AIM GB Communication Services Entertainment Earnings Calls 47 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

Operator
#1

Good afternoon, and welcome to the tinyBuild, Inc. Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where as it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to the team at tinyBuild. Good afternoon.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#2

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the full year 2025 results presentation. With that, we're just going to skim over the disclaimer and go straight into introductions if you have not met us. So I'm Alex Nichiporchik, CEO and Co-Founder of tinyBuild. I've been in the business for 20 years now, and tinyBuild actually is turning 15 this year, which is really exciting. It's close to half my life at this point. I've been into game production, marketing, journalism and essentially like my whole career revolves around game development. And at the company, I handle mostly the production side of things, alongside being the actual Chief Executive. And with that, Jaz?

Giasone Salati

Executives
#3

Yes. Hello. Jaz here. I also have over 20 years' experience in finance. I joined the company in 2021, just before the IPO, and I was appointed CFO in 2023. Over to you, Alex.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#4

All right. So today, we're going to do a brief operational review, then dive deep into the financials with Jaz, and then we'll talk strategy and happy to answer questions as they come along. So that said, if we look at 2025, I'd say that we are back in the game. The things that we have been talking about for the past 4 years, namely building out franchises, finding new intellectual properties, finding ways to expand them. A lot of those things have finally started paying off. We will talk about our recent hit, The King is Watching, and how that came to be. We also have strong operating leverage resulting from our own IP strategy, and I will talk about that a little bit in detail when we have detailed slides. But we also have one of the strongest pipelines we've ever had going into 2026 with 7 games in the top 200 global wish list chart. At the same time, we are keeping very tight cost controls in place and using data-driven decisions for our investments. So we will focus on what works and pivot what doesn't work. And whenever we see a great opportunity, we will make sure to get it done right. For us, it's really about quality over quantity going into this year, and that has proven itself last year as well. So some highlights. I will just call out that we had a very significant adjusted EBITDA swing in 2025, which is great. And we have also built up $4.6 million in cash by December of last year. That said, let's just go into some of our usual slides. We still have a very healthy own IP portfolio mix. Now we will sometimes have it go a little bit lower, and that depends on when we do strategic third-party deals. By strategic, I mean developers that we really love working with that we have a long-lasting relationship and that we know are going to be successful. For the rest, what we do is we do want to own the intellectual property. And I will just kind of contextualize that because it can sound really harsh out of context. What we want to do is give developers the creative freedom to create something really, really impressive. And we will guide them. We will help them with production and sometimes get more involved than some other publishers. Now when and if the IP becomes successful, what can sometimes happen is that the developers or the original creatives may lose interest in working on a game that they just spent a couple of years on, and they will want to do something else. That is absolutely normal. What I was annoyed at for years when we were doing mostly third-party publishing was when this happens and then we have a hit on our hands, and we know exactly how to make it even bigger because when you have something that is already big, making it bigger, scaling it is much easier than going from 0 to, let's say, first 0.5 million copies sold. So this is why we invest in our own IP. And by doing so, we create this structure where the original developers can still benefit from us continuing to scale it, and they may even come back for later games in the franchise, which is exactly what we want, and this is exactly what is happening with Hello Neighbor 3 right now. Now back catalog. As a reminder, when the game launches in the previous calendar year, it is considered back catalog. So we did launch a few new IPs last year with The King is Watching being a runaway hit. But at the same time, we launched a little game called Deadside on consoles. It has been available on PC for about 5 years prior, and it was a runway hit for us on consoles, on PlayStation and Xbox. And we continue to update and expand both that game and the technology that powers it that we are also able to scale to other games. And with that, let's dive into the financial overview.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#5

Just starting with a short summary of the main KPIs. Starting with the net game revenues. This excludes DevGAMM, our events business and excludes Red Cerberus, our Brazilian QA business sold at the beginning of 2025. That is excluded for 2024 and 2025. We're pleased to report that revenues from games are up for the first time in 3 years, up 17%. That is the result of a very strong performance from that side in H1. You remember us talking about that. But also other games, for example, The King is Watching as a new release. And one of our oldest franchise, Hello Neighbor coming in strong in Q4, not just Hello Neighbor main title, but all of the other titles in the franchise witnessed a rebirth in terms of revenues, especially on PC, thanks to factors Alex will delve into details later on. In terms of EBITDA, we can see a big swing from negative $6 million to positive $5.6 million. That shows how strong our operating leverage is, partly the result of revenue mix. We have a high percentage of revenues coming from owned IP, which has a high flow-through, partly cost discipline after the cost action put in place in 2023 and 2024. And on the right-hand side, software development costs, they declined again to just short of $12 million. This is a level we now feel comfortable with. We are back to roughly the same level we were pre-pandemic in terms of as a percentage of sales, around 30%. And that is a level that seems right for the size and for the growth we want to achieve. Looking at the adjusted EBITDA more in details, you can see the different components leading to $5.6 million at the end of the year. Cost of sales includes royalties paid out, and that's where you see how small it is relative to some of our competitors due to the fact that we own the IP and we retain a higher share of royalties on average. In terms of development of cost amortization, you see a decline there, partly driven by the impairments of the previous years, partly driven by the fact that in 2025, we launched a relatively small number of new games. And then SG&A, where you see mostly the impact of our cost action and the cost discipline we continue to put in place going forward. On the impairment side, $7.2 million negative. That's roughly half impairment of games and half impairment of brands, including $1.8 million for the Versus Evil brand. Looking at the whole P&L a little bit more in details. At the top, revenue from games up 7%. Development Services includes pretty much everything to do with platform deals. It's up to $2 million. That number is not something we're committing to for 2026. As you know, platform deals come and go and right now, the market is pretty light on platform deals. The negative number in 2024 is due to an accounting adjustment, revenues which were accrued for a game that has been canceled, and that's how it shows up. Cost of sales, we discussed. And in terms of marginality, I want to touch on adjusted EBITDA the margins we achieved in 2025 of 16% are a good start for us. This is definitely not the arrival point. As an own IP focused company, we think we can push the business way further. We're going to continue to maintain a focus on cost management to make sure that operating leverage comes through loud and clear when revenues land. Moving from the P&L to the cash flow statement. Most important line there is the development costs. Development costs have been brought back in line with the size of the business at around $12 million. You can see in gray on the left-hand side that the M&A movements. In 2024, we made 2 small disposals of IP. And in 2025, we sold the Red Cerberus, the Brazilian QA business. On the right-hand side, you can see the project concentration. We have a very diversified portfolio, over 40 projects currently under development. Every project typically doesn't go above 10%, and we have a good number of projects, 9 projects with an annual budget of over $0.5 million. We try, as you see from the chart, to keep a good balance between relatively larger projects, which come typically with a higher potential and relatively smaller projects with a much faster development cycle, which can deliver a much higher ROI if on smaller terms in absolute terms. Looking at the cash flow statement in more details. The cash flow from operations pretty much doubled from $6.3 million to $12.6 million. That is the result of strong EBITDA performance, more than offsetting a couple of million adverse movements in terms of net working capital. And as you see, cash at the end has increased from $3.1 million to $4.6 million at the end of 2025, strong cash flow generation that we want to continue work in the direction of increasing our cash position. We feel like we have a strong financial position, and we feel like we can continue to invest and strengthen our cash position going forward. Cash utilization, most of the cash came in from operating profit, the $2 million headwind I mentioned in terms of net working capital and the software development cost is the lion's share of cash utilization. In terms of tax paid, we have a large amount of losses carry forward. Here, you see in the tax paid in 2025, part taxes due for 2025, part taxes due for adjustments of previous years. We expect a smaller amount in the coming years. Another look at the balance sheet in terms of net working capital, receivables decreased by $1.9 million, timing of receipts on several large contracts. And in terms of payables, the decrease in $5.1 million is mostly due to a reduction in accrued royalties. accrued royalties either due to a settlement where we didn't have to pay royalties or other royalties, which have actually been paid. In terms of intangible, you see the big drop from $41.8 million to $35.3 million, and that reflects the impairment we discussed talking about the P&L. Deferred revenues, to close on net working capital, is $1.9 million from $0 in the previous years. It reflects contracts that have already been paid for larger deals and for which revenues have been deferred. Back to you, Alex, for the strategy.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#6

All right. Thank you so much, Jaz. So if you have been following us for a while, you may have heard about a game called The King is Watching, which has sold over 0.5 million units. And this is a prime example of how we work today. We have small teams working independently on games that they love, and they know exactly what they're doing. Now this game was initially supposed to take about a year to develop. And at about month 9 or 10, we saw that players are enjoying very specific parts of this game. So we pivoted. We talked to a developer and mutually agreed that it needs to be more of a rogue like, more of a game that you spend a lot of time in. That really worked. There is a recent article on gamesindustry.biz about how we did it, so please take a read. We talk about how we had about 40% of sales in China, how we were breakout on the Steam Next Festival in February. And we just recently this week launched the DLC that is also doing quite well. This is exactly how you start the franchise and continue expanding it. Finally, things went right when we are able to continuously update this game. And this is our top 3 launch on Steam, which is phenomenal. And like I said, over 0.5 million copies sold. Now let's talk about Hozy, and I've actually seen some questions in the chat about this specific game, which makes me very happy. So we revealed it last year at the tinyBuild Connect, an annual event that we do for the company where we present our upcoming games. We revealed it with a demo. This is something that a lot of peers have also started doing when instead of just saying, here is a game, here is a trailer, here's what it's about, we say, just play it. And players did play it. They loved it. Within the first 4 months of the game reveal, we hit 150,000 wish list. We dominated the Cozy section on the last Steam Next festival, which was just last month. And right now, we're sitting at over 450,000 wish lists. On March 18, we had 400,000. The game launches on March 30. And let's just say that I'm cautiously optimistic about this title. And this just kind of reinforces our strategy of working on tiles that have really high potential, finding the right audience and also working on it as a portfolio, working on all of our tiles together. This is really key to understand if you're maybe a new shareholder or a potential shareholder in tinyBuild that it's not just about the one game. It's very easy to start focusing on just this one potential tile and then all the questions are about it. But remember, it's a portfolio. This is why 2025 was so good, and we are really happy with the upcoming portfolio going into 2026 and also our existing tiles that we continue to work on because for successful tiles, once they are live, work only begins. Now a slightly different case study. We talk a lot about franchises, and you've probably heard about Hello Neighbor, which we will give you guys an update on. But also franchising on an engine and technology level is something we have been quite successful with over the past couple of years. So Deadside, while it does use Unreal Engine as its core game engine, the underlying technology behind this multiplayer component is extremely unique. It took years to develop with a very brilliant team. And we were able to prove that we can use that same technology and rapidly develop spin-offs with a game called Duckside, which was developed in under a year and met its profitability target quite fast. So what I'm getting to is that using internal studios and internally developed technologies does give us a lot of flexibility when it comes to sharing knowledge, technology, game engines, et cetera. And I'm really excited about where this will go next. Now a little bit about the pipeline. We mentioned the 7 games in the Top 200 chart. We have talked about Hozy, which is coming on March 30. Then ALL WILL FALL is launching very shortly after, also really excited about that one. And then we also have a lot of really interesting upcoming titles. I want to highlight The Lift, which we did announce, and we will have an update on that quite soon. But that is also an internal studio working on a really unique and original concept that we verified quite early, and we are now confident that the game will find its audience. A very similar thing is happening with a lot of these. And if you haven't seen the game ReStory yet, it's from the creator of I Am Future and the original let's say, idea man behind the game Graveyard Keeper, which was a hit for us a few years back. In it, you run a little repair shop in '90s Japan with very familiar devices, including officially licensed Atari devices that will be in the game. So check these out. We're really excited about this portfolio. And remember that these are just the announced titles. And a little update on Hello Neighbor. A few years ago, I've heard this expression that you will unlock a franchise's potential maybe on Year 8, sometimes on Year 15. And often, it's even later than that. So the theory is that it will take you 2, 3 decades to fully unlock the potential of a franchise. And we've just seen that with Resident Evil Requiem, which, I mean, technically, it's Resident Evil 9, but depending on how you count, it's like, I think, Resident Evil 20 something, and it is the best-selling one in the franchise. Now what happened with us last December is we are working on the Hello Neighbor 3 development logs quite often. So we revealed the design of the main character in Hello Neighbor, Mr. Peterson for Part 3. We also have a lot of hype for the animated series that is continuing to gain more fans and reactivating existing fans. People are really excited about the upcoming movie. And at the same time, the modding community -- so when you create user-generated content based on the tools that we provide in the very original Hello Neighbor went absolutely viral. So this created a portfolio effect. And 8 years after the launch of the original game, we had the best month on steam for this title. So the game launched 8 years ago and the best month for it on steam was last December, which again reinforces all of the strategic investments that we do in this franchise and how we are building a blueprint for our other titles. So multimedia is working for us. And the more branches you have, the stronger your franchise becomes. And we are really excited about the progress for Hello Neighbor 3. And I just -- a couple of slides ago, I said, don't get excited about very specific title, right, get excited about the portfolio. So just keep that in mind in context, right? This is the prime example that took us 8 years to get here from that is showing the blueprints that we're working on for the portfolio. That said, 2025 was definitely a turnaround year for us. I'm really proud of the team. We have over 70 people working in production, and they're doing a phenomenal job at all of these titles. They have a lot of authority in the company. And when we restructured a couple of years ago, this is what they wanted. I wanted to have small teams that work in a start-up fashion that are able to make decisions really fast. And now we're seeing the fruits of that strategic decision. So with that said, shall we move on to Q&A. And I will just put the core strategy slide on here while we talk about that. I'll use the Q&A slide.

Operator

Operator
#7

[Operator Instructions] As you can see, guys, we've had a number of questions both pre-submitted and throughout today's presentation. So thank you very much to all the investors for submitting those. If I may, perhaps, Alex, just hand over to you just to read out those questions where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#8

Yes. I'm just going to -- Jaz, if you can see if you can like combine some of the questions. I see a lot of them. I'll just pick out a couple here that I can immediately answer. I will not be able to -- [ Shahin A ] I guess, is asking about our studio in Belgrade and what we have there, what kind of offices. And I can use that just to talk about our geographical spread right now. So we have 3 main locations in Europe. We have Belgrade, where we have several studios, some of our publishing teams. We have Studio Riga that was responsible for Duckside, Vision Sim and Hello Engineer, and now they're working on a really exciting project. So they're in Riga, Latvia. And we also have a couple of other people there. And we have Studio Netherlands, which has, again, some development, mostly for Hello Neighbor 3 and some publishing. Now the reason it's spread out what seems like without any logic is because a lot of the people relocated 4 years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine. So we were essentially locked by people's ability to travel. A lot of people were able to travel to Serbia, but couldn't go to the European Union. So that is why we founded a location there. Right now, it is working out quite well for us because people can essentially move between locations and they do, depending on their lifestyle and choice of preference. What I will say is that Belgrade is a really nice city. In all 3 locations, the goal was to have offices in the center to make it a walking distance to wherever you live, and we incentivize that. I really like the European style of offices where you can just walk around. Now that is the publishing. Our studios are in -- also in other locations across the U.S. and Europe. That's it. Jaz, did you have a moment to review the questions? I see a lot of overlap here.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#9

Yes, yes. There are a bunch of questions on Kingmakers, and we might as well address the elephant in the room. In terms of Kingmakers, we're not going to discuss the state of advancement of the date of release. For every game, not just for Kingmakers, we try and meet the best we can based on expectations. Of course, if expectations blow out o f-- way beyond what we were planning for, we have to adapt, and that's what is happening with that.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#10

We will share news when we have them on all games, including Kingmakers.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#11

There's one question on Kingmakers, which is worth addressing, which is if Kingmaker is released until financial year 2027, can you still meet market expectations for 2026? And yes, Kingmakers was planned for 2025, and we still met and surpassed market expectations based on that. So we are not working. Our forecasting is not based on a single game carrying the whole company. It's based, as Alex was saying earlier, on a portfolio, and that's really what is allowing us to generate growth right now.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#12

I see another question about Kingmakers, if it's co-op or P2P, if it's going to be coop. We do confirm that. I see an interesting question from Edward G regarding SAND. It's actually a logical question. So SAND had 5,000 playtesters during its last public play test. And Edward is asking about if we should do a server slam like ARC Raiders did, et cetera. Yes, that is actually happening. It's just that it's happening behind closed doors. So you don't see it publicly. But remember that the game has been announced for PlayStation as well. So you can kind of like infer on what is happening there.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#13

I'm just walking through the questions.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#14

Yes. Thank you so much. We've never had this much activity in the chat.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#15

Do you think ALL WILL FALL can be an engaging game without the water level mechanic, for example, just building on a flat plane?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#16

There are so many city builders that have done that. You have to like have some sort of, I won't say gimmick, you have to have something that stands out. And that mechanic definitely makes the game stand out. We will see. Like once the game launches, who knows, we might go into user-generated content or something like that. It's not an announcement, just a possibility where players might be able to do that themselves.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#17

Another question on Hozy. I played the Hozy demo and found it to be unique and enjoyable, but I share some of the criticism regarding not knowing what is in the boxes and the subsequent cluttering. Do you plan to add some quality of life features before release, something like icons on the boxes to give some information on what is there in store outside the room?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#18

Happy you played it. And yes, the team is working on that right now. We received a lot of feedback during the playtest and the demo. All of it is being taken into consideration.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#19

Another one from Shahin is about can you talk about the nearly 200 employees, how are they distributed across publishing, marketing, HR, game development and are third-party studios counted in. So this is stuff, tinyBuild stuff. So it does not include third-party studios. The split is -- this is mostly about game development. We have a large publishing team. We could probably carry more game at a push, but the rest of the structure, HR finance is really small.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#20

Yes, just on a structural level, this is what I -- sorry, Jaz. I'm just excited talking about that because a few years ago, we noticed that we were slowing down internally in terms of decision-making because when you grow, you have like layers of management on top of each other. And I really don't like that. I want to have smart people on the team that are able to make decisions independently. And that's how we structure it. So we have about 70 people in publishing and the rest are mostly on development with a support layer of HR finance that are doing a lot of work for the amount of people that we have there.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#21

Does the release of GTA 6 in Q4 mean that we cannot release games in Q4?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#22

Unless -- well, we'll see if it actually launches. But there is always a Q4 window when you should not be launching games. That is always due to AAA. So I mean, what will happen hypothetically this year is if it does launch, it means that some other AAA games will shift from the period where we won't launch anyway. But again, it really depends on how well the games market perceives the launch because expectations are quite high, and we all know that it's become a that this happens before GTA 6 releases. I hope it does, but we will be avoiding that launch window, and we usually do avoid it if you look at us historically.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#23

Question about our credit facilities and cash management for working capital. How does the firm forecast cash? And what is the status of its credit facilities? So in terms of cash forecast, it gets a little bit nerdy, but we run 2 independent models, and they check on each other on weekly cash flow and a bigger model that goes out 3 years. In terms of credit facilities, we do not have any credit facilities right now. We have a minimum, absolutely minimum use of credit cards. And how we manage cash is we tend to forecast for the worst case. So our forecast and market guidance, as you've seen, tend to be on the conservative side has been so since I arrived as a CFO, and we continue to work on the same assumptions. Games can -- of course, our expectations for games is that we invest in are very high. But when we forecast for cash, we have to take a much more conservative view. Another question, is tinyBuild considering a sale of certain back-catalog games to generate funds or perhaps return capital to shareholders? I can take that?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#24

Yes. Continue.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#25

So we have sold very small IPs back in 2024 when just after the capital increase, it was appropriate. We are not looking actively at selling any franchise, any catalog title. If we were approached at a very interesting price, definitely, we would consider that. But what Alex said about building a franchise for the long term, when you own the IP, you really keep working that franchise, and that's what we're doing. We're doing that with Hello Neighbor, but we're doing that with other titles as well. You see the sequel of SpeedRunners, you see the sequel of Streets of Rogue and so on and so forth. The more announcement to come on other big franchises we have in the portfolio. So for now, we have no active desire to sell anything in the catalog. What are the drivers of growth in general admin expenses from $7.1 million in the first half of 2025 to $8.8 million in the second half, excluding trade receivable release? It's mostly timing. There is nothing else than that. In 2024, we also went very, very tight on costs. Some of that has to come back and came back in the second half of 2025. How does tinyBuild valuation compared to peers? So I'm going to take that. As management, we don't like to speak about valuation. We'd rather the market do that. But I can tell you what I read from analysts. We are currently trading on the lowest multiples, both in terms of EV sales and EBITDA. Why? I think it's still a legacy of the financial problems we had 2 years ago. We have raised capital. We have demonstrated now for 2 years that we can manage a tight ship in an uneasy market, and we have the best pipeline ever. So I'll let you draw the conclusions in terms of where we think valuation should go. Another question. What is the reason for the decline in gross margins in the second half despite higher revenues and the success of The King is Watching? So gross margins are impacted by royalties and by other small factors. The mix of the portfolio is what really drives the variance there, nothing structural. Another question. Will you implement the formal capital allocation policy so investors can get confidence in how cash will be allocated once larger budget games are launched? Yes. Capital allocation is already something we're doing very formally internally. I think you're looking for an explicit guidance. We're looking at everything. If we were -- let's run a scenario. If we were to hit big with any of the game in our pipeline, we would consider everything from signing new titles, of course, because we are a growth company, all the way down to share buyback. It's not something we have been putting as top priorities in the past few years because we were adjusting, we are rightsizing the business, and we were making sure that we were building that big pipeline. But if we had excess cash, everything all the way down to share buyback will be considered very carefully. Another question. How will you generate ongoing revenues and ensure ongoing players progression beyond the first few weeks for SAND, Raiders of Sophie?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#26

That's a great question. And I can see there is some other questions regarding the game feature sets, et cetera. So during the playtest that this person probably played, there was essentially accelerated progression and not all of the content was in the game. We do believe that it is primarily a PVP, player versus player experience. And one of the reasons we've been doing so many public play tests is to make sure that players understand that. that there's going to be a small PVE component, but it's not the focus of the game. Because what we found during playtesting is that what the team is very good at is player versus player interaction. And as a reminder, the team previously did a game called Secret Neighbor, which was one of our top sellers. It was the multiplayer spin-off of Hello Neighbor. So they know what they're doing. I fully trust them. And I play the game twice a week, every Tuesday and every Thursday, seeing a lot of progress. So I'm actually like scheduled to play it right after this call.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#27

Will you be releasing a demo for Kingmakers or at least a single public playtest?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#28

We will talk about this marketing campaign when it's the right time for that specific one. So we can't like spoil our marketing plans in investor meetings. I did that before, and it's not the right move.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#29

Graveyard Keeper has a proven fan base and strong brand recognition. What's the strategy for monetizing that IP further? Could you develop a multiplayer open world version?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#30

Multiplayer, I'm not sure. But let's just say, we are very excited about Graveyard Keeper. Same thing as was the previous question. I can't talk about our marketing plans, sorry.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#31

Another question more directly. Any share repurchase expected this year? Again, depending on cash, excess cash could well be used in that direction. Okay. Some of the concerns on SAND are lack of PVE content, nothing...

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#32

We can't address that, sorry.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#33

Sorry, apologies.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#34

Yes.

Giasone Salati

Executives
#35

Do you believe you will maintain sufficient cash buffer even if key games slip? Yes, that's basically the core of my job is making sure that we have enough resources to keep investing in games even if we stumble on a game. And it's happened. Last year, we delayed SAND and Kingmakers. And you've all seen FEROCIOUS, which was highly expected, didn't perform as well. And still, we delivered ahead of expectations. So I'm pretty confident that we are forecasting conservatively. Are there any other title experiencing delays?

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#36

Well, I mean, you have a delay only if you announce a launch date, right? So games are a very unpredictable medium that often requires some time. What I will say is that for some of our announced projects and including The King is Watching, which did launch last year, including DUCKSIDE, including Pigeon Sim, we have been practicing to release games really fast as in shorter development cycles are a priority for us because the market changes, teams can get tired of working on the same thing for several years. So we use a lot of data-driven decision-making, a lot of playtesting, like I mentioned, for games like SAND to make sure that the target audience will like what they play. It doesn't make sense to release something if we have data suggesting that players are just not going to like it. I mean, was the point, the publicly available reviews on Steam, on PlayStation, on Xbox are very critical of any kind of issue. Did I lose everyone or did we just lose Jaz?

Operator

Operator
#37

Jaz has a disconnection momentarily, Alex.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#38

Meanwhile, there is an interesting question about more frequent business updates. And the answer to that is maybe not necessarily doing more frequent business updates. But over the past couple of years, we've been like very deep in production of titles that we didn't spend enough effort on, I guess, corporate PR to give potential investors, players, partners an idea of what is happening. And you can already see that changing with the recent interview I did about The King is Watching. And the idea is to have more frequent stories on what we're doing, how we're doing and essentially sharing knowledge. I feel like we need to do a better job on that, and it is one of the priorities for me this year. Okay. I just pressed something here, sorry. Okay. Jaz is having some connectivity issues. So let me just scan for more question. Could we build an MMO game like Fortnite using the Deadside engine? Now it needs a little bit of elaborating. Fortnite is a session-based multiplayer game, similar to PUBG or CounterStrike, it doesn't need a persistent world. And MMO assumes that you have a persistent world. And this is exactly what the Deadside engine is really good at doing. It has features like a huge map, 100-plus players on that map. Each is able to build their own base on it. We have vehicles. We have enemy bots with AI. And those things seem like they're really easy to do. But once you scale it to a persistent world that needs to live on for weeks or months, we found that it's incredibly difficult to do. In fact, I've been wanting to do games like this for the past 12-ish years ever since I got into the original Day Z mods for Arma way, way back. And I just couldn't because it's really difficult. And a result of that difficulty is that many games try to do MMO open world, persistent world and end up becoming session-based. We see this time and time again. And this is the reason for acquiring the studio, Bad Pixel, that has developed that side. And now we're seeing fruits of labor behind that decision, not just for the original game, but for other games that use the same technology. And I guess final question here. Was this analyst call recorded? Will it be accessible? And I guess the answer to that is yes.

Operator

Operator
#39

Meeting is recorded. On that note, Alex, thank you and Jaz for taking all those questions from investors. Thanks to the investors for so many questions today. That's brilliant. The company review all the questions that submitted. If there's any others that we can put responses to, well, of course, publish those back to you. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to you and the team, Alex, if I could just ask you for a few closing comments, please.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#40

I mean it's -- a lot of people, at least for my generation, want to make games because they think it's easy and a fun job. It is a fun job. It's not easy. And it's one of those things that I'm not going to do anything else in life. I have hobbies, but my work is video games, and I love video games. Not going anywhere. We're going to persist here and I'm really excited about the progress over the last couple of years and the work that the team has done. So hopefully, you guys stick around with us for the journey.

Operator

Operator
#41

Fantastic. Alex, Jaz, thanks indeed for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session? You should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order for the team can better understand your views and expectations. It will only take a few moments to complete and it's greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of tinyBuild, Inc., we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session, and good afternoon to you all.

Alex Nichiporchik

Executives
#42

Thanks, everyone. Thank you.

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