Modern Times Group MTG (B) Stock

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our Q2 and half year 2026 results. My name is Anton Gourman, and I'm the VP of Investor Relations at MTG. Hosting this call today are our CEO, Maria Redin; and CFO, Nick Hopkins. [Operator Instructions]

I now hand over the call to Maria. Maria, please go ahead.

Thank you, Anton, and hello, everyone. I'm very happy to deliver a second quarter with continued good business momentum. And before we go into the detailed number, there are 3 things I want to call out that I'm particularly proud of. The first one is another quarter of strong financial results, combining organic growth, healthy margins and high cash generation. This demonstrates that our portfolio and our logistics strategy works well.

Our key growth highlights in the quarter were PlaySimple, which has delivered another outstanding quarter from scaling new games and also RAID: Shadow Legends, which had a strong second quarter after the exceptional Q1 that we saw. The second is the progress that we're making across our strategic priorities, including our rapid pace of AI adaptation and also our direct-to-consumer initiatives. By integrating AI directly into our internal tech and tools and leveraging our vast amount of data, we are accelerating and amplifying work in our marketing and data platform in the mid-core district as well as the PlaySimple technology platforms.

And to give you just one complete example, on the marketing side, one of our best-performing marketing creatives in RAD this quarter was actually produced entirely with AI tools. The third that I want to highlight is the progress that we are making on our key value creation initiatives. We continue to make strides with the transformation of the Midcore district with shared central services now live and supporting our studios. We have also developed a new brand identity for the district, which I look forward to unveiling to you later this year. And on the casual side, the preparatory work to list PlaySimple is continuing as we work towards a potential listing in the second half of the year. This progress that we are seeing across our different studios and the group continue to showcase the strength of our people and the quality and the longevity of our games. But let's now turn to our financial results.

We reported nearly $3 billion in net sales or approximately USD 312 million in Q2. That is representing a 6% year-over-year increase in constant currencies or 2% in reported currencies. This growth is all organic. So therefore, the pro forma growth rates are the same this quarter as we began consolidating Clarium from February 2025. However, as we talk to year-to-date rates, they are different with 10% pro forma and 9% organic growth in H1. So we will, therefore, continue to report on both organic and pro forma growth throughout 2026.

Q2 also marks our seventh sequential quarter of organic growth. We're very happy to see that we continue to find good opportunities to invest in marketing at attractive return levels in the quarter. We invested a total of SEK 1.2 billion in marketing, and that is just above USD 120 million, which was a 15% year-over-year increase on a constant currency basis or representing 39% of total net sales. This level is a step-up of 3 percentage points from last year, and it primarily reflects 2 things.

The first is the ramp-up in marketing behind rate during the last year to help unleash the full potential of the game. And the second is a rapid scaling of PlaySimple's new games, driving the growth we keep seeing in our Casual District. As to EBITDA, we reported SEK 707 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q2. That is equivalent to roughly USD 74 million with a strong 24% EBITDA margin in the quarter and 25% for the year-to-date. Adjusted EBITDA was up 10% year-over-year in Q2 and 20% in the first half. We generated SEK 474 million in unlevered free cash flow in the quarter. That is equivalent to $50 million, which corresponds to a cash conversion of 81% on a rolling 12-month basis, which again exemplifies our capital-light and capital disciplined business model.

So let's now take a closer look at our revenues and our largest games. As I just mentioned, our revenues were up 6% year-over-year in pro forma terms for the quarter and 10% for the first half. Our Midcore District generated 75% of our revenues in the quarter and the Casual District contributing 25% versus 78% and 22%, respectively, in the first quarter. Our 3 largest games, RAID: Shadow Legends, Forge of Empires and Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus together accounted to 48% of total revenues. That is down from 53% in the first quarter. The mix dynamics reflect the fantastic growth momentum we are seeing in PlaySimple with a continued rapid scaling of several new casual titles, albeit still with solid growth in the Midcore District.

Let's go further into the different games then. So starting with RAID: Shadow Legends reported revenues just under SEK 1.1 billion in the quarter. That is growing 9% year-over-year in constant currencies. And I'm particularly pleased with this performance, which was underpinned by the ramp-up in the user acquisition in the last year I just mentioned, as the game deliberately had a more measured pace of new content in the quarter following the exceptionally strong Q1 that we delivered. Highlights in the quarter included the launch of new champions, the second iteration of our human IP partnership and [indiscernible] events. Looking forward, RAI has an exciting content slate for the remainder of the year, and the plan is to step up the pace of new content during the second half of the year and into the important fourth quarter, as we have previously mentioned.

Moving on to Forge. Forge of Empire revenues were down 22% year-over-year in constant currencies to SEK 189 million. This shows an improved trajection from the first quarter where we saw a 30% decline in revenues. And as we discussed last quarter, the team is focused on delivering new content aimed at retaining and engaging our long-term players, and we do expect to see this being deployed and give effect starting from Q3 and onwards. And in the meantime, the team is remaining focused on having an active live ops schedule, and that included in this quarter, the new King Arthur events. Revenues in Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus were up 5% year-over-year in constant currencies to SEK 169 million and was up high single digits in the underlying U.S. dollar currency.

The game delivered a very strong June on back of a well-received event following a slightly slower April and May. The team continued to expand the games content, including the Thousand Sun Survival style season events and a major skull events. And in June, celebration of the launch of the 11th edition of Warhammer 40,000, the latest version of the Games workshops tabletop war game with a dedicated in-game events. Looking across the broader group then, revenue from our other games were up 10% year-over-year in constant currencies, and this mainly reflected the continued rapid scaling of PlaySimple's new titles, Crossword Go, Cryptogram and Tile Match, which are now included in other games. We will look closer at our casual game performance when we discuss the Casual District with Nick.

Moving forward and then looking at the revenue streams. Our revenue mix reflects the dynamics that I've already alluded to. 74% of the Q2 revenues came from in-app purchases, while 23% came from in-app advertising with 3 percentage point increase in the in-app advertising contribution from Q1, reflecting again the rapid growth we're seeing in PlaySimple. We continue to focus on the direct-to-consumer revenues to drive lower platform fees, and this is one of our key strategic priorities we'll be talking to you about. We're, therefore, happy to see the proportion of our total revenues coming from DTC within our Midcore District, which include direct user billing web stores, the [ Pay-and-play ] launcher to be up 51% in the quarter, and that was 49% in Q1 and significantly up from the 31% we had in Q2 last year.

The increase reflects major D2C initiatives in RI and Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus in particular. At a group level, the proportion of total revenues coming from DTC was broadly flat quarter-on-quarter given the PlaySimple growth. And as a result, total platform fees has been reduced from 17% of total revenues in Q2 last year to 12% in Q2 this year.

Next, let's look at our user acquisition dynamics to which I will hand over to Nick.

Thank you very much, Maria, and hello, everyone. So in the quarter, we invested nearly SEK 1.2 billion or over USD 120 million in user acquisition in the second quarter, and this represents a 15% year-over-year increase in constant currencies or a 10% increase on a reported basis. Our total UA spend, therefore, represented 39% of total revenues in the quarter, up from 36% a year ago. This increase of around 300 basis points was driven by higher marketing spend in both of our districts.

So in the mid-core district, we increased marketing spend by 5% in constant currencies in Q2, and this largely reflected higher marketing spend to support the continued momentum in RAID, offset somewhat by lower UA spend in Forge of Empires and select other games. Double-clicking on RAID, the game had very good momentum in the quarter, as Maria has already mentioned, after an exceptional Q1, and that's in part driven by the user acquisition investments we have made in prior quarters, which were successful in attracting high-value players. This is a great case study of our UA philosophy. We invest behind titles when our data and our algorithms point towards strong player LTVs.

This is a long-term mindset where we are able to translate UA spending into value and returns over multiple years. It is also why we stay disciplined in our spend and maintain a holistic portfolio approach to how we spend across titles and channels over time in order to optimize the pace and channel investment and therefore, our returns. The casual district scaled UA spend by 36% in constant currencies, in particular to support the continued scaling of new games, including Crossword Go and Cryptogram in the Word genre and Tile Match in the non-word genre. There is a similar dynamic at play here as per the mid-core district with users acquired into these newer titles in recent quarters, delivering higher monetization when compared to some of our more established casual games. And this is underpinned by PlaySimple's AI-enabled platform little engine, which enables faster time to market and at a lower unit cost, again, driving higher returns.

So now let's turn to profitability. As Maria mentioned, we reported adjusted EBITDA of SEK 707 million in Q2, which is equivalent to approximately USD 74 million. This represents an increase of 10% year-over-year with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 24% in the quarter, up from 22% in Q2 last year, despite the increased UA investment that I just spoke about. The year-on-year margin improvement was primarily driven by the strong growth momentum in RAD as well as the positive margin impact of our DTC initiatives that Maria already just talked through. Our adjustments to reported EBITDA came to SEK 17 million, and these related to adjustments for M&A transaction costs, which mainly reflected the performance-based revaluation of put call options related to the acquisition of Snowprint.

So now let's turn to the performance of each of our 2 districts. The Midcore District reported total revenues of just over SEK 2.2 billion in the quarter. This represented revenue growth of 1% year-over-year in Q2 and 5% for H1 on a pro forma basis. Growth of RAID: Shadow Legends and Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus more than offset the continued decline of Forge Empires and certain other games that Maria mentioned earlier. The Midcore District delivered a strong adjusted EBITDA of SEK 581 million in Q2, up 9% from SEK 534 million last year with a margin of 26%, up from 23% in Q2 last year. This margin expansion reflects 2 main drivers.

Firstly, the healthy player base in RAID with engaged long-term players who drive an increase in ARPDAU in the game when we have strong content as most acutely seen in our Q1 results. And second, the continued strong growth in our margin accretive D2C revenues where the savings on platform fees directly flow through to the bottom line, of which we partially reinvest those into disciplined user acquisition. On that point, I'd like to reiterate the milestone that Maria just mentioned earlier, whereby the mid-core district generated over 50% of its revenue from direct-to-consumer sales in Q2.

Daily active user levels for the district was stable year-over-year at SEK 4 million, and ARPDAU came in at SEK 6.1, down 2% from SEK 6.3 last year. This was driven by lower ARPDAU in several games more than offsetting ARPDAU growth in RAID. Now let's turn to the casual district. The casual district reported revenues of SEK 736 million in Q2, up 29% in constant currencies. This continued outstanding performance was driven mainly by the rapid scaling of Crossword Go and Cryptogram within the word genre and by the rapid growth of non-word games, in particular, Tile Match. But was also driven by growth in several of our established titles.

The District reported an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 177 million in Q2, up from SEK 151 million last year, and this corresponds to a margin of 24%. Despite significantly higher UA spend, PlaySimple's margin was only down slightly year-over-year as this increase in UA was offset by slightly lower-than-expected operating expenses in the quarter. PlaySimple had SEK 4.5 million DAU in the quarter, down from SEK 4.7 million last year as the rapid user intake in new games was offset by lower player count in some of the established titles. Now just as a housekeeping note, our historical casual district DAU figures for 2025 have been updated to align with the calculation and disclosure in PlaySimple's draft red herring prospectus, which reflects PlaySimple's internal data rather than third-party measurement.

Q1 and Q2 2026 have already been calculated with the new methodology, so this only impacts 2025 numbers. ARPDAU was up 28% year-over-year to SEK 1.8, and this dynamic reflects the evolution of PlaySimple's portfolio as the new rapidly scaling games typically have higher levels of monetization enabled by Little Engine and are also predominantly focused on higher ARPDAU Tier 1 markets.

Now let's look at our cash flow and balance sheet. We delivered cash flow from operations of SEK 471 million in Q2, and this comprised income before tax adjusted for items not included in cash flow of SEK 621 million, taxes paid of SEK 187 million and a positive contribution from changes in working capital of SEK 36 million. Our CapEx remained consistently low at SEK 66 million, primarily comprising capitalized development costs. Our consistently low CapEx levels reflect the asset-light nature of our business model that Maria mentioned at the start and our prudent approach to capitalization. Adding back both realized currency effects and interest paid, we generated unlevered free cash flow of SEK 474 million in Q2.

And therefore, on a rolling 12-month basis, we have now generated over SEK 2.3 billion in unlevered free cash flow, which corresponds to an unlevered cash conversion of 81% of adjusted EBITDA. And this is well above our medium-term guidance of conversion in excess of 60%. This strong performance reflects robust underlying cash generation across the group, complemented by the timing of certain working capital items mainly related to accounts receivables. We, therefore, continue to expect some quarter-to-quarter variation during the remainder of the year due to both the natural seasonality of our business and the timing of working capital items. But for the full year, we expect unlevered cash conversion to remain materially above our medium-term guidance.

We also delivered adjusted net income of just under SEK 1.8 billion on a rolling 12-month basis, and this translates into an adjusted EPS of SEK 14.72 and an unlevered free cash flow per share of SEK 19.56, up from SEK 13.54 and SEK 18.5, respectively, when we spoke to you this time last year. And then turning to the balance sheet. This was an important quarter as it relates to paying our acquisition-related commitments. During the quarter, we paid USD 52 million to the sellers of Plarium, which is a combination of the deferred consideration from the 2025 acquisition and also the first performance-based earnout, which has now been fulfilled. We will also have exercised the final put/call option for Snowprint by the end of July, after which we will own 100% of the studio.

As a result of these as well as the final earn-out payment to the founders of PlaySimple in Q1, all major acquisition-related commitments on our balance sheet will have been resolved by the end of July. This reinforces our financial flexibility and further strengthens our ability to drive returns and shareholder value going forward. So our financial net debt amounted to SEK 3.4 billion at the end of the quarter, corresponding to a financial leverage ratio of 1.29x based on our LTM EBITDA, whilst our total net debt, including the remaining earn-out liabilities and put call options amounted to SEK 3.8 billion and corresponds to a leverage ratio of 1.45x.

So thank you for listening. And with that, I'll hand back over to Maria to conclude the presentation.

Thank you, Nick. Before we move back to Q&A, I would just like to summarize where we stand now that we are halfway throughout the year. As you will have seen from the report and also heard on this call, we are very happy with our performance this quarter and for the first 6 months of the year. We continue to make good progress across our key strategic and operational initiatives, and we have equally an exciting second half ahead of us. This includes several games going to soft launch, major new content going live into some of our biggest titles and continued evolution of our service organization in the mid-core district.

We have a strong balance sheet with low leverage, reinforced by a highly cash-generative business. And as you just heard, we have also just closed all our significant M&A-related commitment and earn-out that we had on the balance sheet by the end of July, which means that going forward, the cash we generate will provide us with increased optionality when it comes to executing on our strategy and driving direct returns for our shareholders. We will also continue to execute our share buyback program, which was approved by our AGM this year, which is 25% larger than the program that we delivered on last year.

On back of the performance we're seeing, we reiterate our full year 2026 outlook, and we remain equally committed to deliver on the medium-term targets that we presented at our Capital Markets Day. Last but not least, also, we continue to work towards the potential listing of PlaySimple in India during the second half of the year. And that concludes the presentation from me and Nick. And operator, we are now ready to move to questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

I have a couple of questions, but I'll take them one by one. Starting a bit on cost control. I mean it was very good cost control in the quarter despite the nice increase in user acquisition. Just one question I have there. You talked a bit about lower-than-expected costs within the casual segment. And I note, for example, that personnel expenses were down SEK 50 million roughly quarter-on-quarter. So I'm just trying to get some more flavor on how big that delta was versus your expectations in casual and how much was driven by the cost savings you announced at the end of last year for Midcore?

Yes. And thanks for the question. So if you look overall at our personnel costs as a group, as you rightly point out, those have been on a downward trajectory. And in particular, if you do a comparison against Q4 last year when they're at their peak, you are now starting to see the benefits flow through from that run rate cost savings that we've been executing on, and you can see that in our quarterly performance. And so the large part of that personnel cost reduction does relate to that cost-out program. There is also then the offsetting impact that you mentioned to within PlaySimple, we did have a reversal of some personnel-related costs, but that is a less material part of the quantum compared to the overall cost savings that we're achieving across the group.

Very good and clear. Just speaking a bit about DTC then and focusing on mid-core, it continued to expand as a percentage of sales here sequentially, up from 49% to 51% of sales. And would you say -- I mean, given all the nice work you've done RAID and Tacticus already, would you say this is kind of a good level, plus/minus 1 percentage point or 2 to expect here for the remainder of the year at this level?

Yes. Thank you for the question. I think we said last time as well, there is not a perfect percentage point. I think that's -- we are always trying to get the customers to come through our channels, but we also respect that there's a freedom of choice and they should use the channels they prefer. I think the one thing that is outstanding a little bit is the ruling now in the second half that we are waiting to see, especially on the Google platforms.

So I think that is one part that could potentially impact the levels that we are seeing. But I think what we are excited about is sort of how our web stores and the Play and Play progress is going. And I think that's an exciting avenue for us that we will continue to try to double down our initiatives on backup.

Very clear. Another question, if I try to work out the residual within other games for mid-core, it was a bit on the weaker side this quarter. And are you able to add any flavor on the Formula 1 Clash performance this quarter or any of the other noncore titles within Clarium? I guess maybe Formula 1 Clash has been impacted a bit by all the turbulence for the season with the Middle East conflict and also the World Cup. Any flavor there and also Plarium.

No, I think it's a fair assessment that you're saying. I think on a good note, our top titles and franchise is performing extremely strong, which we're happy about. I think there is more that we would like to see in some of our smaller games. And I think the work that the team are doing for the second half of the year should hopefully drive progress. When it comes to Formula 1 in particular, you're absolutely right. I think that the start of the season provided a challenging start in the sense that it was races that were canceled and so forth.

So that created a hiccup in the excitement around it. And I think also in general, I think this has been a season that has created probably less excitement compared to last year when I think the excitement around the season was extremely high. On top of that, you had the movie. And I think the season reset we did last year was also extremely strong. So I think the combination of different sort of external factors and some internal factors has sort of driving a negative performance in the game year-over-year. I think the team is excited to continue to build on the game, and we're now starting to think about the reset for next year.

So I think that the focus and the momentum is there. But for sure, we would like to see better progress in the game there. And there are a few smaller games that we would like to see it as well. I think on a positive note, I think we have stabilized in Ninja Kiwi and BTD 6, which is driving growth, which is positive to see. So I think you see it's still a mixed bag, but I think some of the titles that are in the bigger games in the other games has not performed as well as we would like to see them. But that gives us something to work on.

Very good. Just a question on casuals or PlaySimple's organic growth here. I mean it was really strong, keeping the same number as in Q1 at 29% despite the more challenging comps. Comps are getting a tad more challenging here in H2. But I mean, given the ARPDAU trends and the scaling of new games, is there anything we should be aware of when we look at the Q2 growth rate here outside of the comps in H2?

Yes. No, I do believe what you should remember is that Crossword Go and Cryptogram, which are the 2 key games are scaling. We started to scale up in the second half of the year last year, which means that we are getting into tough comps in the second half of the year, which also will impact the year-over-year growth. Having said that, of course, PlaySimple has a really exciting slate of new games. But it's always that sort of question about when and which game will they be ready to start scaling. So I think that is what can drive the incremental growth above and beyond. But I think that growth you should expect are getting into tougher comps in the second half versus the first half of the year.

Very good. And just a last question without getting into too much details, but just summarizing the outlook for mid-core, I guess what you're trying to say here is that good growth opportunities for H2. However, I guess we should be aware of that you had plus 11% in comp in Q3 and it's minus 2% in Q4. So the growth prospects for Q4 should look a bit stronger relative to Q3, if I understand you correctly.

Yes. If you're moving now to Midcore, I think that Q3 is the quarter where we will have the toughest comps for sure.

The next question comes from Simon Jonsson from ABG Sundal Collier.

So first of all, on casual and maybe a bit of a follow-up here on Jacob's question on the growth. But can you maybe explain a bit more about the dynamics between sort of organic growth trends and -- or organic sales trends rather and user acquisition costs and what we're seeing here for the segments? Because when we look at recent quarters, you, of course, invested in the second half of last year, and you saw also a quite significant step-up in sales because of that.

And you have carried that into Q1 and Q2, maintaining sort of a higher sales base, but the user acquisition is down a bit. So I guess my question is if you've been able to sustain flat sales here throughout Q2 or if you have seen sort of sales fading a bit through the quarter here given the slightly lower base of user acquisition costs.

Yes. I can start and can continue. I think that what you need to remember is that the 2 key games or you can argue, Crossword Go, Cryptogram and Tile Match, they were launched in the second half of the year last year, and that's on back of those 3 games in particular that we scale up marketing. That means that even though we are keeping marketing at a higher run rate going forward, I mean, you're just simply pure math, you're going to come into tougher comps in the second half of the year.

So even though we continue to scale marketing at the same high level, I mean the year-over-year comps will just be more difficult to achieve this growth levels that we've seen in the last few quarters in particular. Then I think that the other part that also, of course, fits in is in general, the marketing environment to make sure that you can also deliver the marketing spend with healthy ROS and that is incrementally to the new games opportunities that we're seeing and the existing games opportunities, we also need to make sure that we deliver the ROS and CPIs needs to be manageable. And I think that's where we probably scale back a little bit on some select few games.

But I think in general, we are keeping a good level of UA that we are excited about. But I think to come back and continue on the strong growth momentum as a number point of view, we need to get some of those games that we have in the pipeline to have them to go live. And I think that is always a million-dollar question on which game and when. And I think that's what the team is very focused on working.

All right. So if I understand correctly, it's fair to assume that absolute sales levels could be relatively flat, excluding new games, that is?

Yes. I mean we don't provide kind of very specific guidance on a kind of segmental basis, but it's fair to characterize that as Maria just alluded to, given the natural kind of growth phases of those games, which we really start to scale up in H2 last year, kind of if we do look forward into kind of key growth drivers for the rest of the year and moving into 2027 and that positive momentum, it is going to become kind of increasingly incumbent on those new games coming in to be the primary drivers of that growth as we work forward, but not the total drivers of that growth.

All right. Then just one more for me on mid-core. And I'm curious to hear a bit more about the productivity gains you talked about coming from AI tools. You have shared some examples and all that. But I'm curious if you can be a bit more specific on tangible results that you expect from this? Is it going to be mainly on the growth side and player retention? Or will it ultimately be more of a factor driving cost savings, you think, if we look coming year or coming years basically?

Yes, I'm happy to say with that. I think ultimately, it will hopefully be a combination of both, but where our primary focus is, is more on the growth side. So it is about achieving kind of more with the same teams rather than kind of reducing the size of the teams. And to give a couple of kind of context and examples around that, that is, for example, as we look at the new games pipeline and how the studios are setting themselves up around kind of early-stage development of new games, that is with a kind of very AI native approach to it, so much smaller leaner teams, exploring more projects so that we can then actually have more shots on goal over time.

But it also holds true for some of our existing games as we think about either content for those games or creative campaigns, as Maria just alluded to, for example, the RAID campaign, creative campaign this year, which was made exclusively using AI tools. So it's more about primarily doing more with the same size teams. That being said, of course, we will evaluate if there are actual opportunities to drive underlying cost efficiencies, which we can take down to the bottom line and/or reinvest in other areas of the business. And we do believe that there will be those opportunities over time, but that's not the primary near-term focus.

All right. And then maybe a more philosophical follow-up on that longer term. Given that most likely most of your competitors have tools to be more efficient. So how do you actually view the long-term potential to what the actual benefit will be of producing more if everyone else is doing more compared to focus more on the cost side?

Yes. No, but I think it comes back to saying what do we believe we are great at and what's our sort of reason to win and why do the players play our games? Well, it is because we have amazing team creating amazing content and the talent and the creativity that the team sits at. And I think that's something that AI does not have today, the creativity and the experience that our team have, and I think that is what sort of sets our games apart because there's a lot of games out there, but players keep coming back to our games.

And I think that's a testament to the teams that we're having and the vast amount of data that also we collect and how the team, together with AI in all fairness, analyzing that data to continue to enhance the player experience. So I do believe that is a true skill set together with the marketing sort of publishing platform that we're having. So I think that if we use AI in the right way, it will amplify everything that we do. But I don't think in any short to midterm, that will take away the need of the creativity and the talent that our teams bring. And I think it's a mix of the 2 that's going to make it great.

The next question comes from Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken.

So a few questions from me. Looking at PlaySimple, the growth looks to be rather more on the monetization led instead of the audience. So what are the key drivers for higher ARPDAU here? Do you see traction from earlier localization initiatives? Or what are the key drivers you say?

And just a nuance on that one. What I'd actually say is whilst it's not necessarily an increase in audience growth from DAU and it is a DAU shift. And so as we commented on, we have seen kind of a significant increase in DAU across our rapidly scaling new games. And whilst overall DAU numbers, we haven't seen a material increase, we have seen that shift in DAU from some of our older, more established titles to these new rapidly scaling games. And those new rapidly scaling games, there are 2 items to it.

One is they overall do have higher monetization levels just for the way the actual games are developed using Little Engine, so they do have higher monetization. But then also, whilst we do continue to explore further localization and attacking kind of Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, these new games, their primary focus at launch and in that early rapid scaling phase is primarily in Tier 1 markets such as the U.S., where also those Tier 1 markets do have higher monetization levels. So overall, that ARPDAU mix increase that you're seeing is actually from a kind of DAU mix shift to these higher monetization games targeting higher ARPDAU geographies as well.

Okay. And on mid-core then, the ARPU is declining, but shouldn't this come up as well as we are seeing higher DTC revenue mix?

Well, sorry, just 2 things. One is we actually are overall delivering within some of our select games. So for example, Ray has continued to deliver ARPDAU growth. Overall mid-core ARPDAU is just, again, due to a mix impact. So for example, the 22% decline in Forge of Empires within the quarter on a constant currency basis has an impact, therefore, on our overall ARPDAU for the mid-core segment. So it's a mix impact driven by, in particular, the decline in InnoGames and select other games which have high ARPDAU monetization, which is offsetting that kind of rate growth and some of the other impacts from initiatives pushing through.

Yes. Okay. And unfortunately Empire here, do you see this as a structural decline? Or is this 22% negative growth in Q2 more related to less content in H1? And do you think that -- do you have confidence in offsetting this negative territories that we have seen in H1 in going into H2 with new content that you highlighted for Q3, et cetera?

Yes. I do believe that adding the content for the more mature players gives us the ability to do so. I mean there are never any such thing as a guarantee. The team has done it before. I think there is and I said it as well at the Q1 results that we should have done better. I mean we should have seen this one happening. So again, that's on us. Now we're getting it right. So I think through CRM initiatives and active campaigns around it, I think it gives us a good opportunity to actually bring these engaged players back into the game and actually start to also both enjoy the new content, but also enjoy our events and key activities in the game as well.

So I think it gives us a good opportunity to do so. I think the team is highly motivated to see it. I think they're excited coming out from a good event now in June in the game. So clearly, we see that when we do good things in the game, the players respond very well.

All right. And one last question for me. The platform fees declined some SEK 140 million year-on-year. How much of this was the D2C benefit how much did this mix benefit to EBITDA versus reinvested in user acquisition? And how much further upside do you think you will have from this on the margins?

Yes. I mean, to put it in relatively simplistic terms, our platform fees, as we spoke about, is roughly down by 500 basis points year-on-year versus our user acquisition spend is up 300 basis points year-on-year. I appreciate that's not a perfect comparison because platform fees is really only related to our mid-core district, whereas I was giving kind of the UA figures for our overall group. But you can see, therefore, that we have been broadly reinvesting half of those kind of platform savings into incremental UA spend, albeit a lot of that incremental UA spend has been [indiscernible] and PlaySimple, but also RAID and select other games.

So we will continue to evaluate whether there are opportunities to further increase UA spend, in particular, as we've spoken about, there is new content coming across for a lot of our established games in Q3 and into particular the kind of Q4 critical quarter. And then there are the new games pipeline coming through where we want to spend UA. So we'll continue to explore ways to increase UA spend to support those attractive rise levels. But if we do not find those opportunities, then we will just take down any kind of DTC or other savings down to the bottom line.

The next question comes from Rasmus Engberg from Kepler.

Just coming back to the previous question on platform fees declining. If I look at mid-core, which it will be, I guess, a bit harder to transfer savings from platform fees in mid-core to UA in casual going forward if the IPO happens. So how do you think about that going forward? Is it -- because if you look at the first half of the year, UA spend in this quarter is pretty flattish, even though you had a lot of content in Q1, but not so much in Q2. So how should we think about that for the second half of the year?

Thanks for the question. I think just one thing to clarify is if you look at -- and I know Maria mentioned this during the results is if you look at the ramp-up in spend that we've done on RAID over the course of the last year, it is material. And so therefore, I'd say that the redirectment or reinvestment from those DC savings has been twofold. It has been RAID, which also just given the size of that within our group, that is very material. And then also the other aspect has been that 36% constant currency increase in UA spend behind PlaySimple.

And so therefore, I do believe that if we are able to generate further savings from DTC initiatives or other initiatives, then we should be able to see opportunities to continue to hopefully increase that UA spend behind rate, in particular, as we do have that new content release slate coming through in Q3 and Q4 this year. So we do believe there is opportunity to really kind of continue to drive UA within mid-core, and it is not the kind of DTC savings goes across into PlaySimple or the casual district. So we do continue to see opportunities there.

But as we spoke about also on the kind of casual side, even in of itself, if we are able to scale those new games, that is part of the reason that we do have that kind of medium-term guidance out there as to where we believe the margin goes to that we do have that flexibility that we can also drive incremental UA investment required to scale those new PlaySimple games even if we are not able to generate further DTC savings.

Can you update us a little bit on -- in terms of new games? What's your current thinking? Is there anything in the second half? Or does it come mainly in next year?

We did call out that there are a few games coming out in the second half now, especially 2 from Ninja Kiwi, Bloom Split is the first one coming out. That is probably not as big as we also gave a teaser that Plarium is working on a new game, and that is due to come out in January. So that will be one of the sort of bigger games.

So I think that's a mix. I think the game slate that we have for second half is probably some of the smaller games in size, I mean, still equally exciting. And then you have a really big one potentially then early next year. And for PlaySimple, it's a little bit different because they always have games in the slate and the pipeline. They probably have between 6 to 10 games always that they're testing iterating. So of course, we would love to see one of those coming out both in soft launch and global launch in the second half of this year. But I think that's what we should wait and see which game and when.

And on the Casual side, I know it's almost a bit difficult to talk about recovering your UA spend. But what -- in what time frame do you -- when you do the calculations, in what time frame do you expect to pay back? Or how soon is the recovery of the UA investment in Casual?

Yes. I think that in particular, you can appreciate with everything that are going on in -- with the potential listing as well for us to kind of give disclosure around returns on recoup levels is probably something we're not in a position to be able to give much disclosure around at this point in time.

I think what's fair to say is that -- I mean, when we talk about the mid-core titles, we talk about 2- to 3-year sort of return on ad spend models. And I think on the casual side, we look at 1 year. So I think that's how you should look at them in a different way. So -- but I think that it's -- I think what the team has shown, I think, across the studio, we've shown extremely high discipline to make sure that we always keep high accuracy in the ROA calculations to make sure we can allocate spend accordingly.

And I think now being both the cash on the mid-core district, we also have the benefit of -- as we're seeing savings on DTC, we can shift them both to casual and mid-core subject to we see the best return for the group, still optimizing each individual game.

Just a final like a kind of a housekeeping question. Nick, can you give us an outlook for PPA amortization in the second half of the year?

Well, let me come back to you separately on that, Rasmus.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

Thank you, operator. We have no written questions at this time. So I would like to thank the speakers. I would like to thank you, everyone, for joining us today in the summer, and we hope to speak to you again as and when the time is right going forward. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today, we have a slightly expanded agenda for you. We will start with a normal Q1 presentation and Q&A hosted by our CEO, Maria Redin; and our CFO, Nick Hopkins. After this, the CEO of our Midcore District, Oliver Bulloss, will join us on the stream to share an update and answer your questions on the progress of our AI adoption in the Midcore District.

We're also, of course, making really great exciting strides in our Casual District, even though we will not focus on that today. When it's time to the Q&A, please use the online form if you want to add questions to the live stream or follow the instructions from the operator if you're dialing in by phone.

I will now hand over to Maria. Maria, please go ahead.

Thank you, Anton, and hello, everyone. We've had a great but also intense start on 2026. And there are 3 things in particular that I'm proud of. The first one is a fantastic set of financial results in Q1 with a record quarter characterized by strong growth, healthy margins and high cash generation. The second is the progress that we made across our key group-wide strategic priorities, namely our rapid pace of AI adaptation and the continued strong increase in contribution from direct-to-consumer revenues.

The third is the implementation of our new operating model with 2 Gaming Districts. In our Midcore District, we continue to make great progress in the evolution of our shared services and platform. Whilst in our Casual District, you may have seen that on the 23rd of April, we filed a Draft Red Herring Prospectus for PlaySimple, which is a key milestone on the path of a potential listing in the second half of 2026. And achieving all of this at the same time is a strong testament to the strength of our people, the quality of our games and our focus on the strategic execution.

So let's now turn to our financial results. We reported total revenues of nearly SEK 3.2 billion in Q1. That is over $330 million, representing a 14% year-over-year pro forma increase and 12% organic growth. Pro forma growth is calculated as if all of the currently owned businesses, therefore, in this case, including Plarium, had been consolidated for the entirety of both 2026 and the comparative period in 2025, and that is on a constant currency basis. We continue to find good opportunities to invest in marketing at attractive return levels in Q1, and we, therefore, invested a total of SEK 1.2 billion in marketing in Q1. This was a 17% year-over-year increase in pro forma basis and represented 38% of total revenues. We reported just over SEK 800 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q1. That is equivalent to close to $85 million, which is a strong 25% margin. And we also generated SEK 582 million in unlevered free cash flow in Q1, which corresponds to conversion of 78% on a rolling 12 months basis.

So let's now start by double-clicking on our revenues. The great momentum from 2025 continued into the start of 2026, and Q1 '26 marked our sixth quarter in a row of a strong organic growth at 12%. And as you can see from our reports, we now have a greater focus on pro forma growth because that's reflected the fact that Plarium was consolidated from the 1st of February 2025, and we would like to include as if it was for the full year, and pro forma growth was therefore at 14% for the quarter. This pro forma growth was mainly driven by the very strong quarter for RAID: Shadow Legends as well as the continued growth in Formula One Clash in the Midcore District, but also the continued rapid scaling of PlaySimple's new casual games, in particular, Crossword Go and Tile Match in our Casual District.

Our revenues grew 24% year-over-year in reported currencies, which mainly reflected the consolidation of Plarium partway through the quarter last year, and our revenues were up 37% in constant currencies in the quarter with a negative currency impact of 13% due to the continued weakening of the U.S. dollar versus the SEK.

Let's now drill further down and look at the largest 3 games in a bit more detail, being RAID: Shadow Legends, Forge of Empires and Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus. These 3 games accounted for 53% of our total revenues in Q1 with RAID accounting for 41% and Forge of Empires and Tacticus each accounted for 6%. RAID: Shadow Legends recorded revenues of SEK 1.3 billion in the quarter with an exceptional pro forma growth of 25% year-over-year. This growth was driven by an intense schedule of strong performance events in the quarter. The team kicked off the year with an Assassin's Creed IP partnership, offered an event introducing a brand-new in-game fashion and celebrated RAID's seventh anniversary with the creator event.

The game team also continued to drive a strong pipeline of live-ops throughout the quarter. And as a result, we saw a high player engagement level and a strong increase in average revenue per daily active user in the quarter, which had a flow-through impact to profitability, as Nick will touch upon later. It's very important to note that RAID's Q1 release schedule and the pace was more intense than a typical quarter. And as our focus is on the long-term health of the game and on ensuring that we continue to balance engagement, retention and monetization, we have, therefore, planned for a lower pace of new content over the coming months before then ramping up again during the second half of the year.

Revenues in Forge of Empires were down 30% year-over-year in constant currencies to SEK 184 million. The main driver of this performance was a shortage of new content aimed for our established long-term player community. As the team was probably too focused in the quarter to test and drive early retention and conversion. This is something the team is now working to actively address, and we do expect new content aimed for our restaurant players coming through in Q3 and onwards. It's worth remembering that Forge celebrated its 14th anniversary in 2026. And as such, it is a mature game, but it also continues to deliver strong profitability and cash generation for us.

Revenues in Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus were up by 1% year-over-year in constant currencies to SEK 174 million in the quarter. The underlying performance of the game, which is largely a U.S. dollar-driven game, was strong with double-digit underlying growth. However, this was negatively impacted by exchange rate movements as it relates to Swedish krona reporting. The team continued to add factions and content and delivered on an ambitious live-ops schedule with multiple concurrent events running in game throughout the quarter. Revenues from our other games were up 25% year-over-year, mainly driven by the strong performance of PlaySimple and continued growth in Formula One Clash and the Heroes of History.

Next, let's take a look at our user acquisition dynamics and our district and financials. And for that, I will hand over to Nick.

Thank you very much, Maria, and hello, everyone. So we invested a total of SEK 1.2 billion in marketing in the first quarter, which was a 25% year-over-year increase on a reported basis, driven largely by the consolidation of Plarium from February 2025. On a pro forma basis, our UA spend was up 17% year-over-year as we continue to find opportunities to invest in marketing our games at attractive return levels. UA spend was up 3% in the Midcore District on a pro forma basis, driven by the very strong momentum in RAID that Maria just discussed as well as from a strong quarter for F1 Clash. Their Casual District scaled their UA by 48% year-on-year in constant currencies, in particular, to support the rapid scaling of our new games, Crossword Go and Tile Match. Total UA spend represented 38% of total revenues in the quarter.

Now let's take a look at our profitability. We reported a record adjusted EBITDA of SEK 802 million in Q1, which is equivalent to close to USD 85 million and represents a 30% increase year-over-year. Just like our revenues, the continued significant weakening of the U.S. dollar against the SEK has a flow-through impact on our profits, which would have been higher in constant currencies. On an LTM basis, our adjusted EBITDA has therefore now surpassed SEK 2.8 billion.

Despite our continued marketing investments that I just discussed, we delivered an adjusted EBITDA margin of 25% in the quarter. This very strong margin performance in the quarter reflects 3 main factors. First, it reflects the inherent strength and high profitability of our evergreen titles like RAID, Forge of Empires, F1 Clash and Bloons TD 6 to name a few. Second, it reflects the continued increase in DTC revenue contribution driven by our DTC strategic initiatives, which Maria will discuss in further detail shortly.

And then finally, as Maria already mentioned, RAID had an exceptional quarter, but it is worth noting that this performance was underpinned by highly successful in-game content and events that resonated with the player base, leading to an increase in ARPDAU, which therefore had a direct flow-through to impact to the bottom line within the quarter. The Casual District also delivered very healthy margins in the quarter despite continued UA investments to scale their new games. Our adjustments to reported EBITDA in the quarter amounted to SEK 49 million, and these mainly comprised SEK 38 million of M&A transaction costs, primarily from the performance-based revaluation of put call options for Snowprint.

As we now report our 2 gaming districts separately, I also want to go through the results of each district, albeit we have already touched upon the most important dynamics. So the Midcore District reported 10% pro forma growth year-over-year in Q1 with organic growth of 7%. The district generated nearly SEK 2.5 billion in revenues with an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 698 million and a 28% adjusted EBITDA margin, up from 25% in Q1 2025. Growth was primarily driven by the strong performance of RAID as well as F1 Clash and Heroes of History, which more than offset the decline in Forge of Empires and certain other games.

As mentioned, the strong margin performance reflects the strength of our midcore portfolio, but was also driven by the increase in DTC contribution to 49% of midcore revenues, up from 42% in Q4 '25 as well as the performance of the events and live-ops in RAID in Q1. And as discussed, the release schedule for key content in RAID will be a bit more measured in Q2 and Q3 before reaccelerating and therefore, that last aspect was more of an in-quarter benefit.

The Midcore District's daily active user levels were broadly flat year-over-year at 4.1 million and up slightly from 3.9 million at the end of Q4 last year. However, average revenues per daily active user were up significantly year-over-year and stable from Q4 last year, which reflected the very strong performance of RAID in particular as well as F1 Clash.

And now let's turn to the Casual District. The Casual District reported revenues of nearly SEK 700 million in Q1, up 14% in reported currencies and up 29% on an organic basis. This outstanding growth was primarily driven by the continued rapid scaling of new games, both within word games such as Crossword Go as well as the expansion into the adjacent non-word genres such as Tile Match. Growth also came from several of PlaySimple's established titles.

It's worth noting that the rapid integration of AI into PlaySimple's technology platform called Little Engine has supported time to market for new content, further enabling the successful scaling of new titles and this growth. The district reported an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 166 million in Q1, corresponding to a healthy 24% margin despite UA spend increasing by 48% in constant currencies to underpin this growth. As noted in the report, Casual District operating expenses had some one-off benefits in the quarter, driven by currency exchange gains and some of one-off cost adjustments.

Casual District daily active users were stable year-over-year at 4.8 million, but ARPDAU was up 15% year-over-year. And this dynamic reflects the evolution of PlaySimple's portfolio with the rapid scaling of new games, which have better monetization dynamics and are an increasing part of the mix. The improved monetization of our new games is empowered by Little Engine, combined with our disciplined approach to marketing.

So I'll now hand back over to Maria to talk about 2 of our key strategic growth initiatives, DTC and AI before we finish off with cash flow leverage and our 2026 outlook.

Perfect. Thank you, Nick. Increasing the mix from direct-to-consumer revenues remain one of our core group-wide strategic priorities. We are implementing DTC initiatives across our studios and continue to evolve our offering across direct user billings, web stores, alternative app for payments and the player-in-play launcher. Direct-to-consumer revenues rose to 39% of our total revenues in the quarter, up from 32% in Q4 '25 and 26% in Q3 '25, reflecting the successful rollout of these initiatives.

If we look more specifically at the Midcore District, which is the majority in-app purchase revenues, DTC revenues contributed almost half of total Midcore District revenues in Q1 at 49%, which is up from 42% in Q4 '25 and 33% in Q3 2025. This increase primarily reflects the increased DTC monetization in our key games, including but not limited to RAID, Tacticus and Formula One Clash.

Moving on then to AI. We are rapidly integrating AI across our business, and we are seeing clear and tangible evidence that MTG is benefiting and will continue to benefit from AI adaptation across game development, publishing and monetization. At the same time, we also remain convinced that AI reinforce our competitive moat and amplifies our advantages. Making a game has never been more accessible. That's been true in all fairness in platforms like Unity democratized game development many years ago. The hard thing has never really been to build a game. The hard part has been making the creative, the data, the tech infrastructure and the financial to scale, grow games profitably in highly competitive markets.

Our game lives for years and years and years, and they have a deeply engaged community, and they generate hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in lifetime revenues. That requires deep live-op expertise, proprietary data, marketing know-how and strong experienced teams with a creative player. All of these things are exactly the capabilities that MTG has and which also AI helps to further amplify. We have made impressive progress on AI adaptations across the group with significant strides made both in our Casual and Midcore District. And today, we asked Oliver Bulloss, who's the CEO of our Midcore District to share progress updates and to bring life some of the benefits that we're already seeing in the Midcore District.

But before Oliver come, I will hand back to Nick to wrap up our financial part and the full year outlook. So go ahead, Nick.

Thank you, Maria. So we delivered cash flow from operations of SEK 605 million in Q1. This comprised of income before tax adjusted for items not included in cash flow of SEK 734 million, taxes paid of SEK 18 million and negative working capital of SEK 111 million. The group's paid tax benefited from a one-off tax refund in Plarium in Q1. And as flagged last quarter, the elevated working capital levels in Q4 were primarily timing related and as expected, reversed in Q1, but with a partial offset from positive effects in accounts payable and other timing effects. Our CapEx remained low at SEK 57 million, reflecting the asset-light nature of our business and our prudent approach to how we capitalize game development.

We, therefore, generated in total unlevered free cash flow of SEK 582 million in Q1 when accounting for realized currency effects and interest paid in the quarter. And as a result, on a rolling 12 month basis, we generated SEK 2.2 billion in unlevered free cash flow, which corresponds to unlevered cash conversion of 78%. This is well above our medium-term guidance of unlevered cash conversion of over 60%. As highlighted, this reflects the very strong underlying cash generation in Plarium due to the poor performance of RAID as well as several one-off or timing-related effects.

As such, we do expect some quarter-to-quarter variation during 2026, reflecting both the natural seasonality of the business and these one-off items. However, on a full year basis, we expect unlevered cash conversion to remain materially above our medium-term guidance of being in excess of 60%. On an LTM basis, we delivered adjusted net income of SEK 1.6 billion. This translates into an adjusted EPS of SEK 13.54 and an unlevered free cash flow per share of SEK 18.5, which is more than double the LTM to Q1 2025. Our financial net debt amounted to SEK 3 billion at the end of the quarter with a financial leverage of 1.18x based on our LTM EBITDA. And our total net debt, including earn-out liabilities and put/call options, amounted to SEK 3.9 billion and corresponds to a leverage ratio of 1.52x.

So to wrap things up, if we look at our outlook. For the full year 2026, we are guiding for pro forma revenue growth of 5% to 8% with an adjusted EBITDA margin in the range of 22% to 24%. As a reminder, our pro forma growth is calculated on a like-for-like basis as if all currently owned businesses have been consolidated for the entirety of both the current and comparative periods and is on a constant currency basis. This guidance takes into account the strong start to 2026 with the results presented today as well as the seasonality in our business, the deliberate decisions around the timing and pace of key in-game events through the rest of the year, notably for RAID as discussed, and also the relative performance of the prior year quarters.

Looking beyond this year, we remain committed to deliver on the medium-term targets we presented at our Capital Markets Day. So annual gross revenue growth of 3% to 7%, adjusted EBITDA margins above 24% and unlevered steady-state cash conversion above 60%.

Thank you, and I'll hand back to Maria.

Thank you, Nick. Before we move on to the Q&A and also the AI section of this call, I would like to quickly recap where we are. MTG continues to transform and evolve, and I think that's the exciting part. We remain very focused on our ambition to deliver growth, healthy margins, strong cash flow and continued shareholder value, as we have demonstrated also in the Q1 report today.

Our pipeline of new games has exciting launches for 2026 and beyond with a couple of major new projects getting ready for 2027 and '28. We're also improving our cost base and strengthening our revenue flow-through through our continued focus on DTC revenues in all our games, and you can also see that embedded in our results. We are embracing AI as a powerful lever for our future success, and we are already widespread adaptation across our group, integrating these new tools in our daily work.

We also continue to look for exciting and value-accretive future M&A opportunities. And we are doing all of this while maintaining our wavering focus on financial discipline and efficiency, as you can see from our cash generation and conversion and also our healthy balance sheet and low leverage levels. Our current share buyback program will run out at the end of April, and we are asking the AGM in May to renew the mandate for another year.

So with that, we thank you for following our progress, and we are now ready to take your questions before we hand over the call to Oliver.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

Just starting off a bit on the guidance here. I mean pro forma growth was 14% in the quarter and 12% organic growth. Of course, you're guiding for a bit lower growth for the rest of the year. But how should we think about it phasing-wise? I mean Q3 has the toughest comps, but then you also talked about kind of the release schedule for RAID here with a bit lower activity in Q2 and Q3.

And I guess a follow-up on that on RAID is just how does the content -- even though I understand that the content pipeline will be lower sequentially, how does it look kind of year-over-year for RAID specifically?

Yes. Why don't I start with RAID and then maybe Nick can give a little bit of flavor on how the sequence of cadence comes with the quarter. But when you look at RAID and I think we said that also at the Q4 call, I mean, we are truly excited about the game. We are excited about the team's ideas for the game. And I think it's important to remember when the team behind RAID build the plan, they are not building for a quarter. They're not actually building for a year, they're building for years to come. And I think that is what's exciting for us. But that also means that we will never try to optimize the game for an isolated event. We will make sure that -- or when I say a quarter, we will actually make sure that we always build the game to create the best excitement for our players because that's going to deliver on our promise to them, and that's going to make sure that the game retain relevant and engaging for years and years to come.

So if you look at the full year 2026, yes, we are truly excited for the plans to come as well. But there is, for sure, an intensive schedule in Q1 than what we will see in Q2 and Q3, and then Q4 is normally also the seasonally important quarter. And again, you can argue that, that will create some slightly jumpy revenues, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. But if you look at it, I mean, for us, what is important is that each year, the game become better. And I think that's what the team is working on, and that's what they're delivering upon, and that's what's going to make us better.

And then on the seasonality point, yes, you're fair to point out that the 5% to 8% pro forma growth does imply that we are, therefore, expecting not to maintain our Q1 performance through each of the remaining quarters and also that we don't expect that to be linear. Completely right that Q3, even we had 15% organic growth last year, is the toughest comparable quarter.

And in particular, Q3 last year, the performance of RAID and Tacticus in particular, was stellar. And so that provides the toughest comp for a 2026 comparative. I think it's also worth calling out that whilst we do expect, therefore, the event pipeline in Q2 and early Q3 in RAID to be at a slightly lower pace, clearly, with the anniversary event taking place in March, that does have a slight kind of flow-through impact into Q2 performance and momentum that we've seen so far. So we do expect kind of the Q1 performance to move down towards the Q2 performance before then a recovery in 2024 in Q4.

Yes, very clear. Then just moving a bit to DTC. I mean, I think you guys have done a tremendous job here in the last couple of quarters, moving that up from like 26% in Q3 to now 39%. I just -- can you add some more flavor on how much is being driven by the rollout of direct payments on iPhone in the U.S. relative to these other DTC initiatives? Are you able to give any more flavor there?

I think on a positive note, I think it's one of those boring answers, all of the above. But I truly believe it is one of those answers that we're actually seeing growth both with the web store with the direct link to web and also with the alternative in-app payment model. And we also remember that we do also have our player-in-play launcher as well. So I think that is, I would say, a positive thing. And I think the other thing to call out, which is equally important is when we do this, we are, of course, making sure that we don't create any negative player experience to make sure that actually this is becoming a net-net positive for us. And I think that's what we're seeing as well.

I echo what Maria was saying, if you look at the year-on-year, it is essentially across all 3 buckets. If we look specifically at kind of the migration Q4 last year to Q1, again, it's been driven by all 3, but the most noteworthy is the direct payments and in particular, within RAID.

Great. And then just on the cost saving, I mean, you have the $20 million in annual cost saving run rate, let's say, $5 million per quarter. How much have you realized already here in Q1? Because you said you were going to hit that run rate during -- towards the end of '26, where are you at now?

Yes. So we executed on part of that through the course of the back end of last year and early through this year. We are not giving a kind of quarterly breakdown as to how we hit that run rate, but I can say that we are over 50% progress on that already despite being only 1 quarter through the year. And so that gives us conviction that we will certainly be hitting the run rate of at least $20 million by the end of the year.

Very good. And then I just have maybe a last question or second last question. Just on UA in general. I mean casual games, you're continuing to invest in UA. We saw the same thing in Q4, and it's up 8 percentage points to sales here. How should we think about it for the remainder of the year? And then I guess, also a comment on midcore. It's typically a bit more stable around, let's say, the 29% to 31% level. Just some flavor there would be nice to hear.

Yes. I can start maybe Nick has something to fill in as well. But when you look at the casual game, I think you need to look at the underlying driver. And I think we've been able to scale some new games, in particular, Crossword Go and Tile Match. And these are games that actually didn't exist in Q1 last year. So I think that is a key driver of the incremental UA spend, and that is truly exciting.

As we look forward, we will continue to scale these games as long as we see these attractive ROA levels, which we are hopeful to continue to see. And ideally, I mean, the team has several new games in the pipeline as well that they are iterating on. And if we are successful, we will hopefully also see incremental games being scaled up. So these are the levers when we look at the UA. I mean, we continue to spend on the existing games, but the incremental spend normalizes, especially on the casual side with new games.

And if we then move to the midcore, I think it's fair to say we haven't launched a new game in this quarter, which also means that the spend is actually on our existing titles. But I think on a positive note, we've actually seen that we can actually scale up spend on our largest title in the portfolio, which I think is a great testament to both actually the UA team and also the games team.

Yes. Great. And then just last question. I mean, a week ago, pretty much, you announced that the secondary will be around USD 350 million pretax. How should we just think about what are you going to do with the money, so to speak? I mean, buy buybacks, share redemptions, keeping some for M&A in the future? How do you think about it?

Yes. First of all, I'll just quickly kind of clarify 2 items then answer your question. So firstly, that approximately $350 million or the INR 31.5 billion, as noted in the release and in the DRHP, we are permitted to increase or decrease that up to the listing side. And for reference, that is a kind of 50% plus or minus down from that. And so that provides a kind of a range of potential offer outcomes. And then as you pointed out, that is also on a gross proceeds basis. We will have capital gains tax payable against a large chunk of those proceeds and then there are clearly typical IPO advisory fees and other expenses related as well. So there will be a differential between the gross proceeds and the net proceeds.

As it then relates to the actual utilization of those net proceeds, given this is a full offer for sale transaction, all those net proceeds will flow through to MTG. That is an ongoing conversation we'll have, and we will revert to the market at the appropriate point in time as we think about the potential utilization of those proceeds, but it is very much aligned with our overall capital allocation policies where we are looking at ensuring that we invest in organic and inorganic growth, but also do return excess liquidity to shareholders. And so I do anticipate that we will have a balanced approach to that.

The next question comes from Rasmus Engberg from Kepler Cheuvreux.

I'm trying to reconcile a little bit top downwards because you are, in a sense, guiding for lower growth and a lower margin going forward. And is that because you're going to have a much more pronounced growth differential between the midcore segment and the casual segment. Is that the main reason we're seeing that?

Yes. As you say so the 5% to 8% pro forma growth guidance that we are giving does imply a kind of low to mid-single-digit year-to-go pro forma growth outlook for the remaining 9 months of the year. Just to clarify on your question, we don't give individual guidance on a kind of Midcore versus Casual District basis. But as we spoke about and try to allude to, if we do think about how we have framed that guidance, it does mainly reflect the seasonality in the business inherently and also then it relates to the particularly strong performance of RAID that we saw in Q1, which impacted both the growth and the margin profile.

And then if we think about the comparatives as we've already spoken about, that is kind of primarily related to RAID and Tacticus having a strong Q3. And therefore, as you can see, it is more pronounced within the Midcore District, that growth rather than within the Casual District.

And with regards to RAID, as you say, it's been extremely strong. It does look as though it has continued at least in April. But can you talk us through a little bit about the seasonality that you expect there in sequential terms? Is it going to be significantly down from these levels? Or how do you sort of think about it in your guidance?

Yes. No, fair point. And I think I've said this in the previous quarterly results that actually the seasonality of RAID is slightly different compared to our other midcore games. Actually, Q1 is a great quarter for them because that's where they have their anniversary. And incrementally, in this isolated quarter, they also have a very successful IP collaboration and also some new factions. So I think there were many great things in the events, and it's unsustainable to have that high level of engagement throughout the year because you will risk to break the economy and create player fatigue. And as I said before, we are in it for the long-term. We want to make sure RAID is better next year and the year after that and the year after that.

So I think that's what the team is working on. And if you look at seasonality, Q1 and Q4 are the biggest quarters. And that's also why we said you should expect a sort of a slower but still, of course, an exciting engaged period during Q2 and also start of Q3, but it will definitely be slower than Q1. That also means that you should expect revenues to actually go down versus Q1 and Q2.

The next question comes from Simon Jönsson from ABG Sundal Collier.

First of all, a follow-up on the guidance here and on the margin guidance and the range, specifically on the low end of the range, 22%. I was a little bit surprised given the strong Q1. But can you maybe walk us through like the scenario for the low end of the range? I'm guessing it's about scaling of new games and stuff like that, but please elaborate a little bit more on the scenario for the low end.

Happy to do so. And as you can imagine that we have ambitions that we're able to deliver towards the top end of our guidance range. But if that is the case, then obviously, that would typically be commensurate with a higher increase in kind of UA spend. And so therefore, I think the bottom end of the margin guidance range is linked to 2 factors. One of it is if we are able to continue to find ways to spend UA either against our existing games or potentially some new games, which are launching in 2026, which would drive the growth towards the upper end of the range.

And also, we do continue to operate in an environment where there is a regulation and lack of clarity with regulation as it relates to the kind of platform fees. We have made some assumptions, and we do continue to see DTC strides there, but we also want to make sure that our guidance is suitable for in case if we are not able to continue to make strides within DTC further from the levels we are today.

All right. So is it fair to assume that your sort of base scenario is that you will be towards the high end, but you -- there could be factors driving it to the low end, but more reasonable to expect the higher end results?

I would rather characterize it as kind of the mid and the mid nicely correlate and then you can kind of decide if you believe that if we end up in the upper one, then it's more likely to be the lower of the other and vice versa.

All right. Then just another follow-up on the DTC share in midcore. And I think rate boosted a bit here in Q1, but you're also doing work on other games. But where do you see it like for the full year given how you're guiding? And longer-term or like coming 2 or 3 years, where do you think -- where do you see the DTC share going in midcore?

I think to sort of build what Nick just said, there are some uncertainties in the regulatory environment. We're still waiting for some ruling in the Google case. So that is still creating some sort of unknown for us. But in a world where we are free to choose, I mean, it goes without saying that we've done great progress on DTC. We would like to continue to enhance that and increase that share because we do believe it's good for us, and I think it's good for our players. And I think that's what guides our decisions. But we also need to wait and see this year as we will probably see some rulings coming out in the market.

All right. But if I maybe frame it differently than like if you think about potential feeling, do you see any kind of top end feeling for what you think right now, it could be as a max feeling, so to say, or anything like that?

I don't -- I wouldn't like to go into that. It always comes down to understand the player journey and making sure you make it seamless and good for the players. And as long as we can do that, I think that we can continue to push and develop that journey for them and increase our share. But again, it needs to work for the players, and it is their choice at the end of the day as well.

Yes. And I think the only other thing I'd overlay is, as Maria commented during the course of the results, whilst we've made strides in DTC across the group, we've primarily been focused on our largest franchises. And so therefore, I do think that if there is further progress to be made as it relates to group numbers, it's less about pushing the DTC materially higher within those core games is actually now increasing the DTC contribution across the entire portfolio.

The next question comes from Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken.

So a couple of follow-ups from me. On the DTC here, what levels are you striving for percentage-wise? And do you think it will stabilize at these levels? Or could we see possible 60% to 70% of the total group in 2 to 3 years here? Or what do you think?

Yes. I think, again, it's premature given the uncertainty that we've alluded to, to give specific kind of medium-term guidance as it relates to DTC. As Maria mentioned, do we believe that it can continue to move up higher? Yes. Is our guidance based on the fact that we can continue to make DTC strides? Yes. But it's not that we assume that we continue the same linear trajectory that we've experienced over the last couple of quarters. So we do see some upside quantifying exactly that upside in our guidance is not something we'll be looking to and not baking in that we assume it to be materially higher than it is currently today in Q1.

All right. And on new games for 2026 here, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that you have mentioned that you have 2 planned for this year. Do you have them in sort of early scaling here, tracking KPIs? Can you say something around that?

Yes. No, actually, I think if we include midcore and casual, we do have more than 2 games in the pipeline for 2026, which is exciting. I think on midcore, in particular, 2 that we look forward now in Q2 and Q3. They are not yet in soft launch, so I can't sort of comment on how the early scaling looks like. I think we can come back to that as we come into Q3. But then on the casual side, we also have several games. I mean, again, remember that development testing iteration is much faster. So I think they have quite a few games in the pipeline that they will test, and I'm sure they will also kill quite a few games. But hopefully, as we come to Q2, I can probably hopefully give you some more exciting updates on where we are then.

All right. Very clear. And on the USD 20 million on track in the midcore savings here, how much did you save this quarter and expect throughout the rest of the year?

As mentioned, we have now already realized over 50% of that on a run rate basis. We're not going to kind of giving guidance specifically as to how that unfolds for the rest of the year. But given we are materially over 50% already, we've got conviction of being able to hit that excess of USD 20 million by the end of the year on a run rate basis.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions, closing comments.

Thank you. So we're not going to closing comments. What we are, in fact, going to is the presentation by Oliver Bulloss, who will join us now on stage. We have no questions digital. So let's proceed to the AI section of the call.

Thank you, Anton. So I spoke to you all at the Capital Markets Day in October last year, and the space of AI within gaming has changed massively in the last 6 months. So I'm really excited today to stand here and share with you a little bit behind the curtain within the Midcore District of what's going on with AI.

And today, I'll focus really on 3 main things. Why I believe we can win in the AI age and why we're positioned to do that. Talk a little bit about the game development cycle and call out some specific areas where AI is already having a really positive impact. And then finally, show some real KPIs and some real examples of how we're already seeing changes in both the way that we work, the prices that we're spending on things and how the teams are organizing.

So -- when we think about AI and what it's going to do, as Maria said, the barrier of entry into games will continue to go down. I've been making games for a very long time now, and it's been going down every year since I began. As Maria said, the introduction of new game engines, new platforms, new payment models, new ways for players to engage, it's all made it easier for people to make games and get them out there. But what has not got easier and I think will continue to be challenging is to find successful games and then scale those games to a truly global audience and then run them for years and years and years profitably and successfully.

So I think we, within MTG are positioned in an extremely good place to win in this new AI age. We have data. We are a data-first company, and we have been and all of our studios have been for a very long time. Having that data, being able to use that data, understand what it tells us about the players is an incredible capability that we have within the business. And later on, I'll show some real examples of how we're leveraging AI with that data.

Second is the creativity and the teams that we have within MTG. AI is nothing if you don't have incredible people knowing both how to use the technology, but also have a vision for what we're trying to create. I'll show you later on some examples of what the teams are doing, and none of that would be possible if we didn't have some of the incredible game makers, engineers and technology drivers within the business. And that's not going to change. What we need to be looking at is how we can better empower and amplify the amazing teams that we have with AI. The games within our portfolio, we're always looking to build those evergreen IPs. We have in-house ones like RAID and Ninja Kiwi's Bloons, and we also partner with world-class IPs like Warhammer and Formula 1. Those will continue to be an incredibly important part of what players look for and what drives success in the gaming space.

And then finally, I think one thing that has really also changed since I spoke to you in October at the Capital Markets Day is how we think of AI. It's now not a tool in the way that we used to speak about software tools. It's now a way of working. And I'll talk about that later. It's really forcing us to ask the question, what does a game team look like in 2026 and beyond with AI being such an important part of it.

The life cycle of the game is probably not news to many of you. We start at the beginning, we make a game and then we operate the game. But I think it provides a good framework to talk about how AI is impacting not just one place on this cycle, but actually many. An important one is the very beginning of a new game. In the old days, you would have game designers, they would write these big documents, they would hand them to engineers. They would go away and build a prototype, they'd come back.

And that cycle would not only take time, but require a large team and a very, very wide range of skill sets. What we're seeing differently now is that with AI, that very beginning phase, the ideation and prototyping can be done incredibly quickly with a very small number of people. The designers can leverage AI to prototype themselves, to immediately change that prototype and see how it feels to literally get software and show it to people in hours and days rather than weeks. This is fundamentally changing how we're thinking about new game development within the business.

Another place we're seeing is when it comes to the real meaty part of game development, when you've had that idea, you know what you're building and you really get into it or you have a live game and you're trying to build a big new feature. Claude Code has really revolutionized how a lot of our teams are thinking about writing code these days. We're also using a wide range of other tools to make database and back-end management much easier. So it's not just the early prototype that you may throw away or you may not use, it's now a real code that goes into production and goes out to our players.

Testing has always been an important part of our business. In the free-to-play world, we're always fighting for users' attention. We're always making sure that players come back because we know that they have thousands of games to choose from, and it's important to us that they keep coming back to ours years after year. So when we have new features or new ideas, we're always testing them to see what does it do to our KPIs. Part of that is what should we test? How should we design the test? How should we interpret the data that comes back from that test? AI has been integrated into every single step of that in many of our studios, allowing us to make sure that the tests we build not only give us good data, but we're interpreting that data in the right way.

Marketing has fundamentally changed how it's done and how it's thought about because of AI. Even last year, 2D creatives were fairly widespread built with AI. But I think what we've really seen change in the last 6 months is video creative has taken a massive leap forward when it comes to AI and marketing. I'll show some videos in a few minutes to highlight really just the steps that we've taken over the last few months.

The other thing around marketing is when we think about the volume of marketing we can create, AI is massively increasing our capability. We have incredible creative leaders within our marketing teams who have a vision for how to sell our games, what our players are interested in. AI is allowing us to create more of that, which is also allowing us to create more targeted marketing assets. Before, maybe it wasn't financially viable or we didn't have the capacity to target all of these small subgroups. With AI, we can now very easily create marketing assets that target specific subgroups, specific geographies or specific types of players much more feasibly.

And then one more around optimization and new content. As I said, development and new feature development has already been revolutionized, particularly with code writing. The other end is when it comes to new content, think in-game events or new things for the players to collect. What we're seeing here is that by leveraging AI, the amount of content is massively increased that our teams can create. That means more events for our players, more opportunities for them to have a variety of events and a variety of content in the game, which means that the games can continue to feel fresh and interesting for even longer.

It's also changing how we're thinking about our older titles. Some of our older titles, once they reach a certain point, it didn't become worth it for us to keep big teams on them or to continue to update them very regularly. With the change in AI, it's now allowing us to keep some of our older titles going for even longer with smaller teams where the player experience, though continues to be extremely high and the quality and the volume of that content does not have to diminish even though we've reduced the team on that, which is great for our players and great for us for keeping our legacy titles going even longer.

So I'm going to deep dive now into a couple of areas. But before that, I'd like to show 2 videos, both for InnoGames, one for Forge of Empires, one for Heroes of History. And then afterwards, I'll talk a little bit about what those videos highlight.

[Presentation]

Excellent. So I showed you those 2 videos to highlight the point. The first video, the Forge of Empires video was made a few years ago, and it was made in what I would call the pre-AI way. We had a large team, animators, 2D artists, 3D artists, video editors that all spent several weeks working on it. It was a huge production. And ultimately, the end product is amazing and really exciting. But we then go to the second video, which was the Heroes of History one. And as you'll see on the screen, that was made by one person, a very talented individual in 2 weeks and cost around $1,000 in tokens.

Yes, that person have to do -- they had the vision for it. They knew what they wanted, and that was the important ingredient, but the technology that was available 2, 3 years ago simply would not have allowed one person to create what you saw there today. What we're seeing here now in the marketing side is that the variety, the quality is just increasing every single day. And for our teams, that gives them more opportunity to get out there and reach our players. The constant though is an incredibly talented team that has a vision for how we sell the games for what's important to our players and what's going to cut through the noise in the incredibly busy market that we exist within. But on the screen, you can also see some examples of how AI was further leveraged across the Heroes of History marketing campaign for their big beat.

I mentioned at the beginning that data is a huge part of what we do, and it always has been within the free-to-play space because we're constantly trying to engage users, turn them from nonpayers to payers, keep them in the game for years and years and years. But I wanted to put some numbers to what that data really looks like within the Midcore District. As you can see on the screen, we collect billions of data points on our games every single day. That is things around what are our players enjoying, what levels are they playing, what heroes or champions are they using? How are different interactions between players in the game resulting, who's winning and who's losing?

All of this is great. But what we need to do is you turn it into actionable things. Historically, that was always roles of product managers and analysts. But within a business as large as ours, that could become a bottleneck because our designers would always have more questions than an analyst could ever possibly answer. And so by leveraging AI, we're now opening up all of that data to any member of the team that has access. So within our data systems, and you'll remember from the Capital Markets Day, this is a data system that we're bringing all of the MTG midcore studios into.

We've embedded AI using Google's BigQuery and Claude to allow any member of the team to interact with all of that data, ask questions, get results. And we've also built out a whole set of agents with specialist skills like financial analysts, user journey analysts, data scientists so that anyone in the team can delve into those billions and billions and billions of data points and get their questions answered. This allows more members of the team to make good decisions and also allows us to further take advantage of this incredible amount of data that we have and the teams have built over many, many years.

The contract that we enter into with players, I always think of as they give us their time and their money and their focus, and we have to continue to give them entertainment and new content within the game. That's often delivered through live-ops and new levels and new heroes and things. So the example that I've chosen today is through our Futureplay team in Finland. And this is an event that ran in the middle of the week in Q1. And the exciting thing here is that the initial idea and the prototype and almost all of the work was generated using AI and one single individual.

This person and the team had an idea in January, somebody did some work on it using AI to build that prototype, which was 100% AI code and 100% AI art. And then at the end, the engineering team acted to make sure that the integration into the game was smooth, nothing was going to break, and it was released to the players with good performance in Q1. This is an example of where that idea to prototype to getting in the game pipeline is only increasing, powered by the vision and creativity of our teams.

New games are an area where we're really seeing some interesting discussions and changes going on when it comes to how do we think about new games in an AI age. One thing is agentic AI and the idea that you have a series of agents that have different tasks and they self-review is extremely interesting for new games because when you're beginning a new game, you have a wide open playing field of how you organize your code, how you organize your team and how you build your game. This is an area where agentic coding is really starting to be explored by the teams, and we have 5 new games begun in Q1 of this year, and they're all thinking about how this can help power these early development stages.

The size of those teams also and the makeup of those teams is something we're reassessing. In the old days, it was often the case that engineering was the bottleneck. Designers in these early days would have so many ideas is could the engineers build it quick enough, build that prototype. That is fundamentally changing. In conversation I'm having with the studios now, it's often actually that the ideas are now the thing that we're really having to make focus on because that building of those prototypes has become so quick with AI coding.

The other thing this is allowing because we have smaller teams and the agentic coding is we can be exploring more prototypes. We have incredible game makers and designers in the business, and they often have many, many ideas simultaneously that we'd like to explore. Again, in the old days, we'd have to prioritize before we'd even thought or tested anything about where we put that energy. Now we can build and explore multiple prototypes simultaneously, allowing us to really see where are those boundaries, where is that opportunity to find some new gameplay and some new growth and find that fun.

And finally, tooling. It's here in new games, but we're also seeing this in our existing titles is often a tool is needed in a game team to do a specific thing to update something to manage a certain type of content or something which is very unique to a game team. Our options historically were go out and buy something that may or may not exactly fit our needs or we'd have to modify it or we wouldn't use it or we'd have to take our game engineering team and have them build lots of tools, whereas we much prefer that game engineering team to be focused on the player-facing side of it.

Now what we're seeing with AI is tools that we can build with AI that are very specific to the needs of that team or the needs of that individual. In lots of conversations I've had with some of our teams, I hear about people building tools that are just for them, a one-person audience, but it would never have existed before. I think that's a really exciting way to think of how every individual in the team is accelerating their productivity with AI.

Sorry, there we go. So in conclusion, AI is no longer just a tool that we use. It's now in every aspect of our conversations. It's in how we organize the teams. It's in how we think about our portfolio. It's in how we build every single thing that we do. But at the heart of it is and will continue to always be incredible team members with vision, with passion and with the technical skills to execute upon that. We're also looking at how -- as AI technology evolves, how do we evolve with it. We're not in a steady state by any means. And if we just look over the last 6 months, we can only imagine what the next 6, 12, 18 months looks like. So we're continuing to be agile. We've not locked ourselves into any one ecosystem or way of working when it comes to AI, and we're continuing to partner closely with all of the different companies around the world to see really what works best for us.

And so finally, I think we're in a wonderful position to win as MTG in the AI space. The teams are excited and embracing it. And I look forward to coming back again in a few months and talking about lots more exciting things in the AI space.

I think now it's over to Q&A with Anton.

Thank you very much, Oliver. It's a pleasure to have you on the call. So we have an opportunity to ask questions on the AI topic. Please feel free to use the call before or use the digital forum if there are any questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken.

Thank you, Oliver, for that. A very interesting topic here. How do you think of AI tokens costs relative to the number of developers? Do you see any risk that you would need more AI models and more tokens per developer? So the net benefits in the costs balancing out?

I think as we look at kind of AI usage with different individuals, it is something that we track and we're aware of. What we're also though is we're using a very wide range of models and tools. I think as I showed on the presentation, we have over 50 tools. And within that, it's hundreds of models that are being used. And so it's about making sure that we're choosing the right model for the task at hand. We don't always need to be using Anthropic's bleeding-edge model for something very basic. So I think that's really, for us, the focus when it comes to model choice is the right model for the right action.

Okay. Great. And how much better have the Unity and Unreal Engine become with all the AI tools? I guess much is integrated, et cetera. But do you see any cost savings from not needing these platforms and tools instead of using, for example, Google's Project Genie or how should we view that?

I think -- when we think about kind of game engine and our choice of game engine, we don't currently use Unreal within midcore. I've used it in the past, but we're very much a Unity kind of first business within the midcore. I would say that when we think about what Google showed back then, it's a very, very different thing to a game engine. A game engine is not just what you see on screen in the visuals. It's a very, very complicated stuff that goes on underneath. It's what the team do with economies and with narrative and game experience and game play.

And so I think what Google showed was interesting. I don't think, in my opinion at the moment, though, it is something that really warrants us rethinking when it comes to engine. I think what is interesting for us when it comes to engines is how does Unity over the coming kind of few years think about AI and its integration into the engine versus AI that sits out of the engine. That's something that we're following closely, and we're in conversation with Unity about because it is our engine of choice within midcore at the moment.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions, closing comments.

Thank you. There are no written -- just one. So one question from one of our shareholders. Is it possible to give a summary. So how much time have you saved today using AI compared to 1 year ago in the total development process? And the time you're saving, how are you using that saving? Are you producing more content to enable to grow games faster? Or is it cost savings?

So to answer the second part of that question first, our focus is on making sure that we deliver more high-quality content to our players. I think, of course, we're always looking at our costs and our focus and the size of the teams. But really, the dream is to make sure that we're giving our players as much content as they could possibly want or we're building more games simultaneously so that we're growing the size of our portfolio with the same team size and energy that we have today.

So for us and within my studios, the focus is on getting more out there for our players, but we absolutely are keeping an eye on that, the cost side of it in areas where maybe we did spend in the past, but we don't spend today. I think one area that many businesses have already highlighted is localization. I think if we compare our localization spend in 2023 to 2026 or you would see a massive difference there, and that is driven by the adoption of AI. So we are looking at areas that we can reduce that, but really, the focus is on making sure we're putting more incredible content out there for our players, either in our existing titles or in new titles.

On the first question around quantifying the total, I think as you saw today, when we think about that quantification, we think of it in different areas. And that's probably because we don't have a single level of AI adoption in every single group. Marketing is very much on the front foot when it comes to it. Code is there as well. Some of our other areas, it's still very experimental, and we're still figuring out what that value add is and where AI can really drive that kind of amplification of what our teams can do.

So I wouldn't want to put a kind of a total quantitative on it. But I think as you can see from the examples today, when we have got those areas where it works, where we can repeatably find those savings either in cost or time, it's very, very meaningful savings, 80% time savings or 98% cost savings, I think, from the example videos that I showed. So it's really about finding where they are. AI is not something that we're just blindly applying everywhere and hoping it works. We're really finding where those value can be and applying it there.

Thank you. Then a follow-up question. Which of your studios have adopted AI the most -- or rather which of your studios have adopted the most when it comes to AI usage in game development phase as well as in live-ops. Is there anything you would -- what can you say on that?

So one thing actually that we're encouraging a lot with in our studios is we have an AI guild that goes across all of our studios. So when we find some great tooling or great way of working or great AI breakthrough, we're actually focused on getting it spread as quickly as we can across all of our studios. I don't want the same lessons to be learned 6 times across 6 different studios. So what we see across them is actually different studios spiking in different AI areas. To call out one example, InnoGames, very engineering focused in their AI development, whereas Plarium has been more art and creative focused in there. So what we're actually seeing is that different studios spike in different areas, and then we're trying as quickly as we can to collaborate and then spread those learnings across.

So no one studio is kind of way ahead of everybody on everything. It's very much that different studios are leaning in, in different ways and then sharing those learnings so that over time, we get to the point where everybody has the same opportunities and AI capabilities.

Thank you. It doesn't look like we have any further questions. So I would like to thank everyone joining us today on the call. I would like to thank the speakers, and we will hope to update you more in the coming weeks and months. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our Q4 and full year 2025 results. My name is Anton Gourman, and I'm the VP of Investor Relations at MTG.

Hosting this call today are our CEO, Maria Redin; and CFO, Nick Hopkins. There will be opportunities to ask questions after the presentation. Please use the online form if you want to add questions to the live stream, or follow the instructions from the operator if you're dialing in by phone.

I now hand over to Maria. So Maria, please go ahead.

Thank you, Anton, and hello, everyone. We're now closed 2025, and I'm really proud to report a great finish to what has been a great year. We're taking a big step forward to evolve our group, while delivering all-time high revenues and profits.

As I said, we truly had a transformative year, and MTG is bigger, better, and stronger today than ever before. The acquisition of Plarium has significantly boosted our scale and critical mass, and adding also a strong lineup of games, most notably RAID: Shadow Legends to our already high-quality portfolio of games.

The consolidation of Plarium's tech and tools is also enabling us to take a major step forward in our vision of creating one of the best mobile gaming groups out there, where we are becoming stronger and better together and elevating the best of both companies. The acquisition has also enabled us to build out what we call a new district model, where we have both a Midcore District and Casual District.

In our Midcore District, we are now well underway on our journey to create a state-of-the-art shared platform service where we can support and empower our game studios. And in our Casual District, we set out and we're executing on a new long-term growth strategy, and we've also conducted an IPO study for a potential listing of PlaySimple in India. On top of this, we also delivered 9.4% organic growth for the year, which is slightly higher than the top end of our 7% to 9% guided range. And we have more or less doubled our year-over-year revenues in constant currencies.

We finished the year with an 8% organic growth year-over-year in the fourth quarter, and we reported record quarterly total revenues of SEK 3.1 billion. We also reported SEK 11.6 billion in total revenues, which is equivalent to around $1.2 billion, which is also in the upper half of our full year guidance range of SEK 11.4 billion to SEK 11.7 billion, including Plarium. And this is despite the negative impact we see on FX movement, where the dollar has lost versus the Swedish krona.

We continue to invest in marketing levels and attractive returns. Our original studios increased their marketing investment by 25% year-over-year in Q4, and we also had an all-time high SEK 1.2 billion in user acquisition spend in Q4. That is equivalent to 38% of our revenues.

Despite this continuous user acquisition investment, which gives us a great momentum as we start in 2026 as well, we generate a record quarterly adjusted EBITDA of SEK 707 million in Q4. This is equivalent to a margin of 23%, both for Q4 and the full year, again, delivering in the upper half of our guided margin range of 21% to 24%.

Looking at the cash flow, we generated SEK 878 million in unleveraged free cash flow in Q4. We do have some positive working capital effects in the quarter. These will balance out in Q1, and Nick will take and talk to you about this later.

For the full year, we delivered strong unlevered cash conversion of 66%, which reflects the strength of our underlying operational cash flow generation and was well in line with our medium-term target of cash conversion over 60%.

A quick look into our total sales before we go into the franchise reporting. As a quick recap, we reported record revenues of SEK 3.1 billion in Q4 and SEK 11.6 billion for the full year of 2025. This represents an increase of 108% year-over-year in Q4 and 107% for the full year in constant currencies.

Our reported sales were up 84% and 92% year-over-year, respectively. On a like-for-like basis, we had a negative 12% currency impact, and that is roughly half of what we report as a negative currency effect of 23% in the quarter. And if you also look at our like-for-like revenues when we include our original studios and Plarium on a constant currency basis, we were up 3% for both the full year and for the quarter.

So moving forward then, let's look at the performance of our franchises and key games. Just as a reminder, before going into this, we will start for Q1 a new segmental reporting disclosure that will reflect the 2 districts that we're moving into. So Q4 report is the last time we present information in this way.

Starting then and let's look at Plarium. RAID: Shadow Legends delivered a strong Q4, and we managed to set a new record for daily revenues in December, which is an impressive achievement. The team delivered another successful IP partnership with Alien and Predator. They also executed on an ambitious pace of both in-game events and live-ops, and they were supported by a Black Friday sale. As a result, RAID delivered revenues on par with a highly successful Q4 2024, which we're really glad to see. RAID strong performance in Q4 has also continued the positive momentum going into Q1, where we also supported the game with high levels of UA, which is an encouraging start of the year.

If looking at Plarium as a whole, revenues were down by low single digits on a comparable basis year-over-year, and that reflects lower revenues from the rest of the portfolio that is offsetting the positive performance we're seeing in RAID.

Our Word Games franchise delivered another quarter of outstanding growth. Franchise revenues were up 23% year-over-year in constant currencies and by 17% for the full year. This performance was largely driven by the rapid scaling of our 4 new games, Crossword Go, Tile Match, Word Tour and Cryptogram. And this is indeed encouraging as we look into 2026 and onwards that we have so many new games that we can successfully market and scale.

The growth for the full year also benefited from the geographic expansion and localization of our established Word Games, which primarily then took part during the first half of the year, but we've been scaling them successful thereafter as well. And what I find really exciting as we look towards the end of the year is that PlaySimple continued to drive growth, both in its core Word Games, but equally exciting to see that they're moving into the adjacent Puzzle category, which opens new addressable markets for them.

Moving into our strategy and simulations. The segments were down 10% year-over-year in Q4, but it was up 3% for the full year in constant currencies. Revenues in Forge of Empires were down year-over-year despite several in-game events for Q4. We should remember that Forge is turning 40 years old, which is an amazing achievement. It is one of our longest-standing evergreen games, and we are firmly committed to that it will continue to be a cornerstone of our portfolio for many years to come. So -- and we know that speaking to the team, they have an engaging discussion on how to optimize the games for many years to come.

Heroes of History, which is now just over 1 year old, grew significantly year-over-year as it continues to scale. Remember, this is also a sequel to Forge of Empires. The game team maintained a high pace of new content in Q4, with multiple in-game seasons, events and a new set of players to explore.

Moving to Snowprint, and Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus had a fantastic year, and the team has delivered strong double-digit growth for the full year basis. The game continued to scale significantly during the year and the cadence with new contents and events has been driving the performance. And besides this, the team has also been focused on improving the game's direct-to-consumer monetization capabilities, but is something that is also a priority for us as a group and enhancing also the offering in its webstore.

Tacticus revenues were down in Q4, and this comes from a mix of significantly weakened dollar versus SEK. It had challenging comps from last year, but we're really happy to see that the team has one of the most exciting game lines that we're looking into next year, and it also strongly finished the year with all-time high revenues and strong performance in December. We remain very actively excited when we look at the pipeline as we look forward.

Moving to our Racing franchise. Revenues were up 43% year-over-year in Q4 and by 19% for the full year in constant currencies. It's been great to see the franchise coming back to growth, and the team has done a great job delivering the season reset of Formula 1 Clash earlier this year in May. We maintained excellent momentum in Formula 1 during the year, and we also had a strong finish as the season racing came to a conclusion in the beginning of December. Top Drives also grew year-over-year in Q4, supporting the overall Racing franchise performance.

Last but not least, the Tower Defense franchise revenues were up 4% year-over-year in Q4, but down 8% for the full year in constant currencies. The active player base in Bloons TD 6 has continued to decline even though player engagement remains high, and we had an active content release schedule in the game.

I'll now hand over to Nick, and will talk about more operational performance and the overall financial performance.

Thank you very much, Maria. So as discussed in previous quarters, the consolidation of Plarium shifted our overall revenue mix towards a higher proportion of in-app purchases in 2025 relative to 2024. And in Q4, 74% of our revenues were from in-app purchases.

We had a slight uptick in contribution of revenues from in-app advertising in the quarter, up from 20% in Q3 to 22% in Q4, and this was driven by the outstanding growth of our Word Games franchise that Maria just spoke about.

Direct-to-consumer, or D2C, as we call it, remains a core strategic focus for us as a group. In Q4, we generated 32% of our revenues from D2C, and this compares to 26% in the third quarter of 2025, and 19% in the fourth quarter of 2024, which was the last quarter before we consolidated Plarium. The approximate 600 basis point sequential growth from Q3 into Q4 was primarily driven by the introduction of direct payments in RAID: Shadow Legends, as well as other D2C initiatives such as Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus webstore.

We had 9.4 million daily active users in Q4, up from 8.9 million in Q3. And again, this reflects the very strong performance of our Word Games as we continue to scale new titles. ARPDAU or average revenue per daily user was broadly stable quarter-on-quarter. This reflected higher ARPDAU in our Strategy & Simulation and Tower Defense franchises being offset by the mix impact from the growing contribution of our slightly lower ARPDAU Word Games.

Now if we turn and have a look at user acquisition. As Maria said, Q4 was a quarter of many records, one of which being UA spend. We invested a record SEK 1.2 billion in user acquisition in the quarter, bringing our total marketing spend to SEK 4.3 billion for the full year.

Our total group UA spend has broadly doubled, up 98% year-on-year in constant currencies in Q4 and up by 109% for the full year, again, in constant currencies. We have continued to invest in UA to underpin both near-term and medium-term growth at attractive return levels. We have continued to do so with a very disciplined and holistic approach, prioritizing both the allocation of spend, where we see the highest levels of return, and into scaling new games.

UA spend in our original studios was therefore up by 25% year-on-year in the quarter in constant currencies. We also continued to scale investment behind RAID in the quarter to capitalize on the game's positive momentum, which has continued into 2026, which is very encouraging to see. UA spend, therefore, represented 38% of group revenues in Q4 and 37% for the full year basis.

So now let's look at our profitability. We reported a record SEK 717 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q4 and SEK 2.6 billion for the full year, equivalent to around $280 million. This represents a 58% increase year-on-year in Q4 and a 59% increase for the full year.

As per revenue, the significant weakening of the U.S. dollar against the SEK has a flow-through effect on our profits. And it's worth noting that our adjusted EBITDA growth in the quarter would have been closer to around 80% on an FX-neutral basis. And on a full year basis, our adjusted -- total adjusted EBITDA would have been in excess of SEK 2.8 billion in constant currencies. This increase in the adjusted EBITDA reflects both the flow-through impact from our organic revenue growth as well as the consolidation of Plarium with -- from the start of February.

Despite our record levels of UA investment that I spoke to on the prior slide, we delivered adjusted EBITDA margins of 23% for both Q4 and for the full year 2025, which, as Maria mentioned earlier, this is in the upper half of our guided full year range of 21% to 24%. So we're incredibly proud to have delivered on this achievement, in particular, in the context of our total revenue also being in the upper half of our guided range. This really demonstrates our ability to deliver on both growth and on margins through disciplined UA investments and our portfolio management.

Our adjustments to reported EBITDA in the quarter amounted to SEK 114 million. These included SEK 82 million of M&A transaction costs related to the performance-based revaluation of put/call options for Snowprint; SEK 25 million in restructuring costs related to the Midcore transformation program; and finally, SEK 6 million in adjustments for nonrecurring bonus structures for a multiyear employee share options program in PlaySimple.

I'd like to finish by looking at our cash flow and at our leverage. We delivered cash flow from operations of SEK 840 million in Q4. This was comprised of income before tax adjusted for items not included in cash flow of SEK 668 million, taxes paid of SEK 75 million and positive working capital contribution of SEK 240 million.

Our cash flow from operations in Q4 was boosted by elevated working capital levels, which are primarily timing related and expected to reverse in Q1 2026. Our CapEx remained low at SEK 52 million, reflecting both the asset-light nature of our business and our prudent approach to how we capitalize our game development. We had SEK 20 million of realized currency effects, and we paid SEK 70 million in interest in the quarter, therefore, generating unlevered free cash flow of SEK 878 million in Q4.

On a full year basis, we generated SEK 1.7 billion in unlevered cash flow, which is equivalent to around $180 million. And this corresponds to a 66% unlevered cash conversion rate for the full year, which is in line with our medium-term guidance that we presented at our Capital Markets Day of achieving cash conversion in excess of 60%.

Whilst our unlevered cash conversion was slightly higher in the quarter due to the working capital movements that I've already mentioned, excluding those one-off timing effects, we still would have also delivered unlevered cash conversion in Q4 of excess of 60%. Whilst we reported net income of negative SEK 62 million for the full year, if we look at the underlying adjusted figure where we exclude noncash items and amortization related to PPA from our M&A activities, we delivered SEK 1.4 billion in adjusted net income for 2025 on a full year basis. We, therefore, delivered an adjusted EPS of SEK 11.33 for the full year and unlevered cash flow per share of SEK 14.16.

Our financial net debt amounted to SEK 2.5 billion at the end of the year, which comprised external financing of SEK 3.5 billion and lease liabilities of SEK 253 million against SEK 1.2 billion in cash and cash equivalents. So our financial leverage ratio, therefore, amounted to 1.02x based on our full year EBITDA, including Plarium.

If we then look at our total net debt at the end of the year, this amounted to SEK 3.9 billion. This comprised our financial net debt as well as earn-out liabilities of SEK 1.1 billion and put/call options of SEK 250 million. And so therefore, our leverage ratio amounted to 1.58x our full year EBITDA, again, including Plarium.

So with that, thank you, and I'll hand back over to Maria to conclude.

Thank you, Nick. And before we go into Q&A, I just want to take a moment to summarize our year and where we stand as we now head into full steam in 2026.

Looking back to 2025, it has been highly transformative for us, and I'm really proud of everything we have accomplished during the year. The acquisition of Plarium was a major catalyst for us, an enabler of the creation of a new district model, where we are combining and elevating the tech tools and the people we have across the group and truly making us stronger together.

The newly established executive leadership teams across both Midcore and Casual Districts are executing upon clear strategies to drive sustainable, profitable growth in the years to come ahead.

We have also concluded our IPO readiness study that we talked about at the Capital Markets Day, and we proceeded to appoint advisers to prepare for a potential listing of PlaySimple in India in 2026. We do believe that this presents a very exciting opportunity for PlaySimple and for MTG and has the potential to accelerate our M&A ambitions in the casual gaming market.

I think what is really amazing as well is we've done all of this whilst also delivering operationally and financially and setting new records and delivering on our guidance. This underscores the strength and the dedication of our teams and the quality of our portfolio and games within. I truly believe we're in a fantastic position to continue to deliver growth and value to our shareholders in 2026 and beyond.

With that, I want to thank you for your interest, and we are ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Simon Jonsson from ABG Sundal Collier.

So my first question, I know that you're not guiding for '26 right now. But I think it would be helpful to -- for you to share your sort of near-term ambitions for Plarium. It's the largest unit recently acquired, of course, very important for organic growth. Sales has been declining a little bit here, but rate is relatively flat.

So looking ahead, will you aim to keep RAID flat and sort of let the rest fade away a bit? Or will you aim to invest more to get RAID up to positive growth? So yes, if you can elaborate a bit on that.

Yes. No, thanks for your question. I think we are really excited when we look at Plarium and RAID in particular. I think the game has had a strong 2025. So I think we're actually quite pleased to see the performance. And I think what we -- in particular, the second half of the year, we may not have talked about it enough in the report is that together with the team, we have been -- I mean, they've clearly been working and presenting their road map and also you had us presenting at our Capital Markets Day on how they work with RAID.

So RAID do have a truly exciting pipeline, not just in '26, but '27 and they're also already working on '28. And on back of that, we've also been scaling up UA during the second half of the year. So the momentum that we see in that game, I think, is really exciting, and we've been seeing good trajection. So our ambition is that RAID should grow in the coming years, and that's what we're going to work with the team to deliver. And I think that's exciting.

RAID is today the bigger part of Plarium. We said that from the beginning. I think we said when we acquired it, that RAID is approximately 70% of Plarium. I think if you actually look in Q4 and the strong performance of RAID and then also to be fair, the slightly weaker performance of some of the legacy games, that is almost close to 80%. So that just shows the quality of that game, and that is something we want to continue to invest in.

I think just one other thing that I'll briefly add is if you do look at RAID's performance, whilst in Q4, as we spoke about, it did have a tough comparison to Q4 last year on a full year basis. On a constant currency basis, it is delivering low single-digit growth. So it is already in growth mode.

All right. And I think you wrote that end of Q4 was very strong. I think you mentioned very strong in the report, you also said start of '26 has also been very strong. So I mean, compared to the H2 '25 levels, where you were scaling up, do you think sort of building on that trajectory into the start of this year that you have seen incrementally positive momentum recently? Or how should we view that with your comment on early '26 strong start?

No, I think you're reading it in a good way. I think we -- last Q4 2024, we did not own them, but they had a very, very good quarter. So they had tough comps in Q4 to Nick's point, but they still reached all-time high in December, which is great. And I think the momentum we go into in January, where they had an exciting IP collaboration as well is very good. So that just shows that it's a 6-year-old game, but it's at the same time, only a 6-year-old game. We have Forge of Empire that is celebrating the 14-year-old sort of game now.

So we are very excited that when we are looking at RAID and its potential going forward. Of course, you shouldn't expect sort of double-digit growth for such a huge game because it has an already significant scale. But the talent behind the game and the creativity that they have for that game is impressive, and also that we can scale up marketing and increase investment with strong ROAS is a positive sign.

Also on the D2C revenues, which were quite strong here in Q4. You mentioned RAID as one of the drivers for that. So is that part of the good momentum also that you have seen good momentum in that channel? Or was that on the D2C revenue growth, was RAID sort of the main reason for the higher D2C sales? Or you also mentioned Tacticus, but was the increase more digital towards RAID, or was it evenly between RAID or Tacticus you would say? Or how is that?

Yes. I think that across the D2C initiatives that we're implementing in the group, which as we spoke about at our Capital Markets Day, that is, for example, direct channels such as Plarium and Plarium webstores, and then it is also direct payments. We've seen -- continue to see increasing contribution from all channels, specifically in the Q4 versus Q3 comparator and that step-up from the 26% to 32%, that has been more skewed towards the RAID direct payments introduction. But overall, we are seeing kind of overall growth in D2C contribution from all the different growth vectors.

When we were speaking, just to clarify on kind of RAID's overall strong performance, we are speaking about that kind of if we do look at on a gross basis before we are looking at any platform fees or also on a net basis as well.

All right. And when you do that sort of mix shift transferring the revenues into other channels, do you see some kind of organic drop that you give out discount or something for the direct payments? Or do you think you can maintain -- have you seen that you can maintain sort of the volumes?

Yes. But I think that is a truly important part that as you are moving into different payment channels, you need to make sure you keep your conversion. And whilst we can sort of give slightly alternative offers, you need to make sure that it still provides a net positive for us as a company, still giving a good offering to your customers. So I think that is something we are closely tracking and also A/B testing to make sure we strike that fine balance.

So far, I think that we have balanced that in a good way. And we do see D2C being a great opportunity for us going forward as well. And then it's, of course, up to us to choose that incremental margin, how do we best benefit of that, what should we invest into further user acquisition in a good way versus what do we take down to the bottom line profitability.

All right. And the last one on the D2C increase here in Q4. Do you think that we should view that as a step-up that will -- you will continue to build from? Or do you think there's some kind of one-off effects in the high share in Q4? Or how should we view that into the next couple of quarters?

Yes. No, I don't think that I'd characterize it as kind of any one-off effects. And so, this is a kind of rebase, which we continue to build momentum from thereafter. I think the only one caveat that I'd say to that is as we have alluded to, obviously, RAID did have a very strong Q4 and in particular, December. And given that the step-up was also driven by direct payments in RAID, there is a slight mix impact within that. But essentially, no, there are no one-off impacts. This is a new basis from which we see further contribution growing from here.

All right. Interesting. Just one last from me on India listing. I think you -- if I remember correctly, you stated your intention to keep a majority ownership of PlaySimple. But would you say you're open to other alternatives as well, i.e., where you're not the majority owner?

I think as a part of that filing, you need to state your intention and our intention is to remain a majority owner. We think PlaySimple is an amazing company, and I think the future potential of that -- if we can also add the right selective M&A next to PlaySimple -- is truly exciting. So that's why we would like to remain a majority owner of PlaySimple as we move forward. Of course, from time to time, you will need to reassess that, but that's our intention where we are today.

All right. That's the intention, but it sounds like you're open to other alternatives then.

Well, that's our intention today.

The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

I think that Simon asked a bunch of my questions already, but just a couple of ones to kind of follow up. Just on the specifics within Plarium, the legacy games, as you call them, have been declining year-over-year for a couple of quarters since integration. But how are those games kind of developing on a sequential basis? I mean, are we getting to a point where they're starting to kind of level out? Or is it still in a kind of a declining mode sequentially in constant currencies?

Yes. No, thanks for the question. Again, we don't break down the individual games. But if you would look at it more holistically, you can argue that they did have a rather steeper decline in the beginning of the year. And I think as we come into the end of the year and we look at plans into 2026, you could argue that they have both coming from a smaller base, but the aim is, of course, that we should stabilize at least the core of the games, which you can argue both Mech Arena and Merge Gardens are still sizable game for us and relevant games. And I think the teams behind both games do have good plans on how they should stabilize the performance within that. And that's, of course, what we will support as well as we go into 2026.

Great. And just the second question, I mean, obviously, the racing genre driven by F1 has been really strong this year. What are your plans kind of to, I guess, bridge that into the season reset in '26? I mean, I guess it's a very hard question to answer for you guys, but do you have anything to comment there?

Yes. I mean, first of all, I think it's fair to say to your point that we are really excited about the season reset this year and the focus the team has had to turn the trends around. I think that's a massive undertaking and I think a great testament to the team. We did get a little bit of support also from the Formula 1 excitement for the movie and so forth. I think what is exciting as we look forward, I mean, yes, we bring the learnings from the previous season resets into it, but then the overall Formula 1 is going to have a major overhaul.

So hopefully, that will bring even more excitement into the category, and that could hopefully also benefit us. And of course, our focus lies in making yet another really strong season reset also in '26.

I think the only other thing I'd add on as well is if you look at also the performance of the game kind of post the conclusion of the season and some of the events that are post-season events and the continued momentum the game has been able to carry between the seasons gives us a high level of encouragement as we then do start the new season.

Great. Just another one, a specific question on Tacticus. I mean now it's declined a bit in Q4. Is that mainly just the element of the comps here? I mean there was a lot of content out in the market on the Warhammer IP last year. Is that the main effect would you say that -- I mean, you are setting the comps; just to kind of understand the underlying dynamics.

Yes. I mean, we're still really excited about the potential of the game. And hopefully, that was clear also as we presented. But you're fair to say there are two drivers last year that sort of boosted.

I mean, you had year-over-year, the dollar has come down significantly, and that is predominantly dollar-denominated game when you look at the customer base. And then second of all, the hype around Warhammer as in sort of IP was huge last year. So that did impact and then also a little bit to the timing on when we actually did have our major events that was skewed a little bit more to Q3 this year. So it's a combination of those things.

Looking forward, I mean, the team has an active pipeline, and they're really excited about the game and so are we.

Cool. Just a last housekeeping question on my end. I mean CapEx is not at a very high level, but it's coming up a bit sequentially. Is that just an element of us getting a bit further into the development cycle? And I don't know, I think Plarium has a quite interesting pipeline down the line. Is that how we should read it? Or is it just phasing effect? Or is this kind of a run rate to expect? Or should it come up a bit heading into '26?

Yes. No, I think you've characterized it quite well. As we spoke about at the Capital Markets Day, as we look at our kind of new games pipeline for the years ahead, we do have a combination of kind of smaller games, which are kind of lower risk but lower reward, but then also some slightly bigger games. And therefore, as that mix does include some of those bigger games, there has been that slight increase in CapEx, but still not a material amount.

The next question comes from Rasmus Engberg from Kepler.

Just two questions from my side on RAID. Firstly, can you shed some light on the Assassin's Creed takeover? I think it looks to me like one of the bigger ones I've ever seen in RAID.

Yes. No, it was an amazing integration, and I think the team did actually excellent to bring it into the game and really get the best out of that IP. So in that sense, yes, it was good. I don't -- I wouldn't know -- I'm not sure if I would carry the biggest one. I think they are -- in every IP collaboration they do, they become better on understanding how do you actually get the different IPs to marry in the best of sort of worlds and also bring the player the best experience. So I think that is a journey for the team, and that's where we're getting better and also then on our side, also making sure we get the best value out of those IP collaborations as well. I don't know if you have anything, Mr. Hopkins.

Yes. No, I think one of the other -- clearly, IP integration has been a hugely successful growth driver for RAID and it will continue to be a core part of the RAID strategy going forward. And one of the exciting things has been that if we look back at the major IP integrations over the last 12 to 18 months, the team have tested with slightly different ways to actually monetize those IP integrations as well. And so we're really able to kind of continue to optimize those going forward as we look at the slate of future IP integrations, because they are not all monetized in the same way.

I noticed that your -- that the RAID now is pushing an app that is basically outside of Google's Play Store. Has that been any part of increasing the D2C payments, or is it something else that pushes this?

Yes. So essentially, there is the kind of player -- play launcher, and then there has been the separate direct payments, which is kind of outside of the [ iOS eco-sphere ], which has been the 2 largest drivers of the increased D2C contribution within RAID specifically.

Okay. And are you going to come back in Q1 and give us a full year guidance? Is that a fair assumption?

Yes. No, I think normally, we give an outlook more in Q1 versus Q4. I mean, I think recently, we gave an updated sort of midterm guidance, which is rather fresh. So you should expect us in Q1 to give a little bit more clarity on the 2026 in isolation.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

Thank you very much. So we only have one question on the digital Q&A. And rephrasing it slightly. So we have had a declining equity per share for a while. So when will the growth that we're seeing be converted into bottom line profitability? And how should we think about that?

Well, I think it's worth noting that, obviously, we do have kind of elevated levels of PPA due to some of the M&A transactions that we've done and also as we do look at some of the financial net and noncash items, and that's why we do very much focus on our adjusted net income rather than kind of underlying reported net income. But as we do look forward as to if you take our medium-term growth guidance and if you do translate our growth, our margin and our cash conversion, then that does take us to a kind of path to, as you call it, kind of underlying net profitability.

Then moving on to the comments made about PlaySimple. Is there anything else that you can add about the timing within this year?

No. I think that it's fair to say though as always, we would like to progress as soon as we can. So we always have an urgency in the execution. But at the same time, you need to make sure you follow the regulatory routes and the different milestones. So I think it's probably fair to expect there will be more towards the second half of the year than the first half of the year. But we'll come back as we have more information, and we'll make sure we do it in a correct but expedient manner.

Then continuing on the PlaySimple topic, is there anything we can add about how the potential proceeds will be prioritized? Would they primarily be used for further M&A within the casual district? Or would we see a special dividend or accelerated share buybacks for MTG shareholders? Or maybe all 3 alternatives are on the table?

Yes. I was going to say, I think a couple of things. One is that from a regulatory and other purposes, it's premature for us to provide any commentary around kind of the actual proceeds that we'd be planning on realizing or the use of those proceeds. So I hope you can appreciate at this point in time, there's limited that we can say. But as part of the preparedness study, we have been evaluating both actually what the actual offer structure at the IPO could be; and should there be any direct proceeds from a secondary sale, what could be a potential utilization of those proceeds. So we are evaluating all options and have a view, but it's premature at this stage to give any further color.

Then moving over to MTG's net debt. What is your target net debt-to-EBITDA ratio for the end of 2026? What do you think about that?

So whilst we don't give explicit kind of leverage guidance, as we communicated at the Capital Markets Day, we are very much focused on making sure that we do maintain an efficient balance sheet, which does mean that we do have a levered balance sheet. But that needs to be taken into the context as we continue to evaluate how we can deploy capital against not only organic growth initiatives, but also inorganic growth initiatives. And then per the prior question, potentially any overlay from a potential PlaySimple IPO as well.

So therefore, whilst at this stage, we were not going to be giving specific 2026 leverage guidance, we would make sure that we want to end up the year in a levered position. But exactly what levered position does look like depends upon the PlaySimple potential IPO and/or any M&A we take through the course of the year.

Thank you very much. We have no further questions at this stage. Therefore, I want to thank our speakers. I want to thank our guests, and we hope to see you again at the next opportunity. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our results for Q3 and the first 9 months of 2025. My name is Anton Gourman, and I'm the VP of Communications and Investor Relations at MTG. With me and hosting this call are CEO, Maria Redin; and CFO, Nick Hopkins.

There will be an opportunity to ask questions after the presentation. If you are dialing in, please instructions from the operator when the time is right. Otherwise, please use the online form for your questions and I will read them up as always.

Thank you. I now hand over to Maria. Maria, please go ahead.

Thank you, Anton, and hello, everyone. I'm incredibly pleased to deliver an exceptionally strong Q3, driven by a higher-than-usual pace of in-game content, live ops and successful IP integration into our games as well as the continued strong performance of some of our new and scale new games. MTG's organic revenues were up 15% year-over-year in Q3 and 10% for the first 9 months of the year. That is reflecting the outstanding quality and focus of execution in our studios. It is also great to see the magnitude of different growth drivers across the business within our casual studios and portfolio, several of our new games are now scaling rapidly with great momentum after multiple quarters of iterations in soft love on the games.

The geographic expansion that we launched several quarters ago is also now continued to contribute to our growth as we're entering new territories. Performance was equally strong within our mid-core studios. This was primarily driven by the continued scaling of the Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus and Heroes of History as well as the continuous momentum in Formula 1 Clash following the highly successful season reset in Q2 that we saw. Bringing all these growth drivers together, we now deliver strong and accelerated organic growth for 4 quarters in a row, which reinforces our confidence in our recently raised full year organic growth outlook of 7% to 9% organic growth year-over-year.

In addition to this exceptional organic growth that we're seeing, our total sales was up 126% year-over-year in constant currencies, and it was up 108% in reported numbers. This growth reflected not only the consolidation of Plarium, but also the fact that Plarium's revenues were up year-over-year on a constant currency basis, and that was strong -- that was due thanks to a very strong Q3 for RAID: Shadow Legends. We, therefore, report as a group SEK 3 billion in the quarter of total net revenues. As I said, growth was again underpinned by both product content as well as zero investment.

We continue to maintain our proven discipline when it comes to profitable and efficient marketing. And therefore, we also report an adjusted EBITDA margin of 23% in Q3 as well as year-to-date, with Q3 adjusted EBITDA of SEK 675 million. That also means that not only on revenues, but we're also firmly on track to deliver our recently reiterated margin objective for 2025 of 21% to 24% EBITDA margin. We generated SEK 404 million in cash flow from operations in Q3 with an unlevered cash conversion of 60% for the quarter and 46% for the rolling 12-month period. That is the 46% is a bit higher on a normalized basis, but that is also something Nick will run you through as he goes through the financials in more details.

Moving towards the net sales part. As I mentioned, we reported total net sales of SEK 3 billion in Q3. This represents more than a doubling of our revenues year-over-year in reported terms and 126% increase in constant FX. Just as a reminder on the currency, our total reported currency impact is minus 19% in Q3, and that relates to the absolute impact of FX movements year-over-year on our total Q3 2025 revenues. But remember, that also includes all reported Q3 revenues relative to our reported revenues in Q3 2024, which do not include Plarium. So if you actually look at the average Q3 rates for the dollar versus SEK in the quarter, the underlying FX was down around 9% year-over-year in the quarter.

Total sales were also up 7% quarter-on-quarter in constant currency, and that is what we're not used to seeing from a seasonality point of view. Q3 is not as strong as you've seen in this quarter, but it does reflect the performance this quarter, the busy and successful event schedule that I previously spoke about.

Moving on to the franchises and take a little bit more detailed look here and our key games. As you probably heard at our Capital Markets Day, we will change our reporting disclosure as a part of the new divisional structure, but that will not come until 2026, which means that we will continue to report as we do now for both Q3 and Q4 2025. So as I just said, our studios delivered an exceptional level of successful in-game content and LiveOps activity in Q3, and we can clearly see the outcomes of these activities and the success and engagement we're seeing from our customers in our results. And we're also really excited that we continue to see successful growth in some of our newer games that we've been bringing to the market.

So if we start with the largest segment, which is Plarium and Plarium with RAID: Shadow Legends had a very strong quarter, driven by highly successful IP integration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as well as several events and continued high pace of LiveOps in the game. As a result, game revenues were up high single digits year-over-year in Q3 in constant currencies. And I think this is a great showcase of the power of combining great IP with a great team and a great execution, and that's what we've seen in the quarter.

We are really proud of the evergreen strength of RAID and the quality of the game team behind it. The team further, which you also heard at our CMD, have a very exciting project pipeline for RAID going forward, including also future IP integrations, which continue to be an important part of RAID's long-term strategy. Revenues as a whole for Plarium were up by low single digits in Q3 year-over-year in constant currencies as the growth in RAID was offset by a decline in other games.

Our word game franchise delivered another strong quarter with franchise revenues up 21% year-over-year in constant currencies. This very strong performance and growth momentum reflects the strategic decision and initiatives implemented by the PlaySimple team over the last 18 months. If we break this performance down, there are really 2 key drivers. The first one is the strong growth that we see from the new casual titles like Crossword Go, Tile Match, Word Tour and Cryptogram. It's been really exciting to see these games now in Q3 come out with a soft launch and finally being able to scale on a much greater impact level.

The second driver is the growth that we're seeing from the geographic expansion of keyboard games. As you may recall, PlaySimple spent the first half of 2024, rapidly localizing some of our biggest world titles into local languages, and we started to see a good traction towards the end of Q3 last year and been scaling these titles ever since.

Strategy & Simulation franchise revenues were up an impressive 11% year-over-year in constant currencies in Q3. The largest contributor to growth was 40K Tacticus, which again delivered strong double-digit growth on back of its successful 3-year anniversary together with expanded in-game content such as Mythic rarity. For the first time, Tacticus was also our second largest game in terms of revenues for the quarter. And I'd say this is truly an impressive achievement by the Snowprint team.

Another new game, Heroes of History, celebrated its 1-year anniversary in Q3 and also continues to deliver strong double-digit growth year-over-year. Another in-game title with Forge of Empire revenues that unfortunately declined in the quarter, which was reflecting both the lower user base, but also that we, in this quarter, had lower-than-expected performance from in-game events, which we have seen from time to time. And of course, the team is working hard to make sure we continue to drive engagement to our customers going forward.

Our Racing franchise had another very strong quarter in Q3, and franchise revenues were up 30% year-over-year in constant currencies. The positive momentum in Formula 1 Clash continues after the highly successful season reset in Q2 this year as well as a positive engagement in the Formula 1 season and the release of F1, the movie. The Hutch team delivered the highest DAU levels in the quarter that we've seen in F1 Clash outside the last 3 years season reset. That is truly exciting to see and again, showcase the longevity of the IP. Also, our second largest racing game, Top Drives, continued to perform well in Q3 on back of the addition of new cars and a successful summer event.

Last but not least, moving to our Tower Defense franchise revenues. They were down 18% year-over-year in Q3 in constant currencies. The performance reflected the continued decline in Bloons TD 6 as some of the content we deployed were not as successful as we would like to reactivate the player base. But having said that, we still feel strong that Bloons TD 6 is a great strong leading game with an amazing IP, and we continue to work hard to make sure we have an active pipeline for our customers going forward. Our top 3 games in this quarter were RAID, Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus and Forge of Empires. And taking these together, they represent 51% of our revenues.

Moving then on to our KPIs and for the first -- third quarter. As we talked about before, the consolidation of Plarium in February somehow rebalanced our revenue mix and our KPI mix. The result was a material impact in our in-app purchases given the scale of the in-app purchase-driven Wade RAID: Shadow Legends and also a step-up increase in our DAU. Our revenue mix has since remained somewhat stable. In the quarter, we generated 78% of our revenues from in-app purchases with 20% of the revenues coming from in-app advertising and 2% from third-party platforms.

There is "1 percentage" point shift in the app advertising, and that is reflecting the very strong year-over-year performance growth from PlaySimple. 69% of the revenues came from mobile in the quarter and 26% from direct-to-consumer sources and 5% from other platforms like Stream, Apple Arcade and the like.

And looking at a broader lens, almost all our studios are now very focused on accelerating various direct-to-consumer initiatives today. As you see, we are growing the proportion. And we're also very closely watching the regulatory changes that we are seeing, in particular in the U.S., which we, for the mid- to long term, deem very positive for publishers and developers such as us.

Looking then into our DAU levels, they have remained stable in Q3 with 8.9 million daily active users at the end of the quarter. And finally, then on ARPDAU, that was up 3% sequentially quarter-on-quarter, and that was primarily supported by the strong performance from Snowprint.

Now I'd like to hand over to Nick that will talk about our UA profitability, cash generation and balance sheet.

Thank you, Maria. So hello, everyone. We invested a total of SEK 1.1 billion in marketing in the third quarter, bringing the total to SEK 3.1 billion for the first 9 months of the year. This reflected the combined user acquisition investments in MTG's existing studios and in playroom and total group UA spend was therefore up 103% on a reported basis and up 120% year-over-year in constant currencies in Q3 as we continue to invest in a disciplined manner in our growth. Our Q3 marketing spend corresponded to 37% of our total revenues, which was relatively stable when compared to 36% in Q2 and was also 37% on an LTM basis versus 36% last year.

Our original studios increased their marketing spend by 37% year-over-year in constant currencies, and this was mainly driven by increased user acquisition spending to scale our new casual games, continued scaling of Heroes of History and our continued investment behind our Racing franchises, as Maria just talked through earlier. UA spend on RAID was also materially up sequentially in the quarter, albeit broadly flat on a year-on-year basis.

We reported SEK 675 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q3, a 73% increase year-on-year with a strong adjusted EBITDA margin of 23%. The year-on-year increase in adjusted EBITDA reflects the flow-through impact from revenue growth from the consolidation of Plarium, the high single-digit growth in RAID and our 15% organic growth, offset somewhat by the increased user acquisition investments to underpin our sustainable near-term growth. We reported SEK 1.9 billion in adjusted EBITDA for the first 9 months of the year, which also corresponds to a 23% operating margin.

This Q3 and 9 months performance puts us well on track to deliver on our reaffirmed full year operating margin guidance of 21% to 24%. Our adjustments to reported EBITDA in the quarter amounted to SEK 86 million, and these were 2 factors. These included M&A transaction costs of SEK 48 million, reflecting performance-based revaluation of put/call options related to the acquisition of Snowprint and adjustments for nonrecurring bonus structures of SEK 30 million, reflecting higher costs for a multiyear employee share options program in PlaySimple.

Next, let's take a look at our cash flow and our leverage. We generated SEK 550 million in income before tax adjusted for items not included in cash flow. We paid SEK 170 million in tax in the quarter and had broadly neutral working capital. And so our cash flow from operations was, therefore, SEK 382 million. Capital expenditure, which, as a reminder, primarily relates to capitalized development costs for games and platforms was SEK 51 million, which is broadly stable quarter-on-quarter. Then after negating for realized FX effects and before interest costs of SEK 88 million, we delivered just over SEK 400 million of unlevered free cash flow in the quarter. This equates to unlevered cash conversion in Q3 of 60%, as Maria said earlier.

On a last 12-month basis, our reported unlevered cash conversion was 46%. However, as we've discussed previously, we had a number of one-off items in our last 12 months such as M&A-related costs, withholding tax payments in both Q2 and Q1. And if we normalize for those effects, our last 12-month unlevered cash conversion would have been much closer to 60% as well. And as you may recall from our Capital Markets Day, we said that we are aiming for over 60% steady-state unlevered cash conversion in the medium term. So we are in a great position today to deliver on that ambition.

Also to call out in the quarter, total cash flow from investing activities amounted to SEK 244 million as we had a SEK 192 million payment in relation to the put/call option for Snowprint. We reported total net income of SEK 39 million in Q3. But when we look at the underlying number without noncash items and amortization related to PPA from our M&A activities, we delivered SEK 361 million in adjusted net income in the quarter. And if we look at it on a rolling 12-month period, our adjusted net income was SEK 1.2 billion, and our adjusted EPS was SEK 9.88, which highlights the fundamental financial strength of the business.

As we look at the balance sheet, our financial net debt at the end of the period amounted to SEK 3.1 billion, which comprised external financing of SEK 4.1 billion, lease liabilities of SEK 0.3 billion and then less SEK 1.2 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Our external financing was down slightly quarter-on-quarter, given we had the first quarter of amortization of external loans amounting to SEK 94 million, whilst cash and cash equivalents was broadly flat sequentially. Our financial leverage ratio, therefore, amounted to 1.15x based on EBITDA for the rolling 12 months period ending 30 Sep 2025. Our total net debt amounted to SEK 4.4 billion, reflecting our financial net debt, coupled with earn-out liabilities of SEK 1.1 billion and put/call options of SEK 0.2 billion. Our leverage ratio, therefore, amounted to 1.64x based on the 12-month period to the end of Q3.

During our Capital Markets Day last month, we raised our outlook for 2025 organic growth from 3% to 7% to 7% to 9%. We also provided outlook for full year 2025 reported revenues to be within the range of SEK 11.4 billion to SEK 11.7 billion. Given the organic growth we have delivered in the first 9 months of the year of 10%, but whilst also taking into account the strong performance we had in Q4 last year, we are confident in our ability to deliver on our provided organic growth range of 7% to 9% Further, if we layer on top the very strong growth we see in RAID in Q3, we are also confident in our total reported revenue outlook for the full year.

Despite the strong level of marketing investments we have deployed for the first 9 months of this year, we have maintained our strong margins as well as our full year margin outlook. Whilst the exact level of our UA spend and therefore, Q4 margins will, as always, depend on our ability to continue investing in UA at the right returns levels, in particular during the key end of year season, we continue to expect our total adjusted EBITDA margin to be within our guidance range of 21% to 24% for the full year. This, of course, as a reminder, includes both our original studios and Plarium.

And so with that, I believe we've concluded the financial part of the presentation. And so I'll say thank you and pass back over to Maria for some concluding remarks.

Thank you. So I would like to finish by summarizing where we are as we head into also the year-end period and a very busy Q4 and also 2026. I firmly believe that we delivered exceptionally strong organic growth in Q3, which was driven by the rapidly scaling new games as well as growth in key established titles across both the casual and the mid-core part of our portfolio. This growth, as Nick just said, was also further enhanced by rate, which had a strong quarter of high single-digit growth year-over-year at constant currencies. All of this has been underpinned by quality execution across product, content and user acquisition, which makes me very proud.

We, therefore, also reported 23% operating margin in Q3 with a 60% unlevered cash conversion. And as Nick just mentioned, we are fully confident in our ability to deliver on our guidance for 2025. Following our announcement also before our Capital Markets Day on the 9th of October, we are focused on the ongoing transformation of our Midcore District. Our goal is to build an even more successful, ambitious and resilient organization that can together with our studios thrive our games and grow in a challenging and fast changing market. Doing this also means that we are in the driving seat to shape our future so that we can continue to deliver the amazing performance that our studios are and also hit the ground running in 2026 to continue growing our games and refining our services and platforms as we move forward.

On the casual side, we are proceeding with the IPO preparedness study for PlaySimple, and we will share more information with you when the time is right and we have news to update. We now look forward to the end of the year. Q4 is always busy and December is the biggest month. So we're excited about that.

But to start with, I want to thank you for following our progress, and we are now ready to go for questions.

[Operator Instructions]

The next question comes from Simon Jönsson from ABG Sundal Collier.

I have 3. And first, just before the call started, I'm sure you saw, but Reuters had a story out on your potential Indian listing. I wonder if you have a comment on that, first of all. What you said is that it's planned for first half of next year and you expect to raise USD 450 million from sale of shares. So first off, any comment on that -- on those rumors?

No. I think as you finished off saying, I mean, there is a lot of rumors in the market, and that is usually the case when you do these things. That's why we proactively want to say we do the preparedness study. And as a part of the preparedness study, you also need to look at, a, company readiness, market attractiveness and also what could the time line be and what could a potential primary securing be. So of course, we're looking at all those things. But again, as I just said, I mean, when we have more concrete sort of decisions taken and facts on how and if we will proceed, I mean, we will come back to you. So until then, it will be rumors.

Okay. Got it. Then I have a quite technical question. So I apologize for that in advance. But on the selling expenses, excluding user acquisition costs, it was a substantial decrease from last quarter. So I wonder if you please can clarify what this should be going forward because it has been, for me, at least much harder to model that than the user acquisition cost basically. And before Plarium, it was like SEK 15 million, SEK 20 million per quarter, I think, and then it increased to SEK 170 million last quarter as Plarium was fully integrated, but now it was down to SEK 80 million. So very big swings.

So what's behind those swings? And what should we expect going forward for those non-UA marketing selling costs?

Yes, just to make sure that we're all looking at the same set of numbers that we come back to you separately offline on that one, and we can double-click on some of the granularity there.

Yes. So sorry, can you repeat?

I was just saying I was suggesting that we come back to you separately offline after this given -- to make sure that we're all looking at the same level of numbers and the granularity therein.

Okay. But can you say anything about what's included in non-UA acquisition selling expenses?

Yes. There's going to be other marketing costs in relation to, for example, using what we have on the screen at the moment, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IP, there is always going to be an IP collaboration costs and there are other marketing investments outside of UA. But -- and so that there will be some volatility in a quarter-on-quarter basis given that whilst UA is a steady state, our other marketing activities are more volatile, in particular as it relates to IP integrations, but we can go into further detail.

All right. Got it. And then secondly, on the organic increase in UA remains high. And I'm just wondering what we should think into Q4 as Q4 last year was substantially higher than Q3 was last year? So any comments on that?

Yes. Again, it little bit depends on the market as well. That's why it's always difficult to say exactly. I think last year, we saw a great opportunity to continue to scale even though normally prices goes up quite significantly in Q4, we were actually able to scale still last year. This year, I think what makes us excited is that we have 2 new games in PlaySimple, both Crossword Go and Tile Match, which are new games that we haven't had before and that are seeing strong ROA numbers, which means that I think if you would have asked me sort of in Q1, Q2, we probably would have thought that we would be a little bit more modest on the UA scaling.

Now we actually have new games that we can actually deploy more UA on. And if we see the right returns, we'll continue to do that. So I think a little bit depends on what we're seeing in the market numbers, but you're not going to see sort of probably as big of a slowdown as we maybe in the beginning of the year would have anticipated for Q4.

The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

Just getting back, I appreciate that we can take this offline again, but could there have been some shifts between admin and COGS? Because this quarter, it feels like COGS were a bit higher, so lower gross margin, but lower admin expenses on the OpEx line. So maybe there's just some definition question here between what's put in COGS and what's in admin expenses. Just getting back to the question that we just had from Simon.

Yes. I think that there's no kind of reallocation of costs between the items. So it will just be that there will be some intra-quarter activities, in particular as we spoke about in other marketing activities, but that's not kind of a change in between what we include within the COGS and the admin lines.

Okay. Okay. Second question, just on -- you talked a bit about it in the report, but obviously, we've had quite a lot of news flow here recently with regards to app distribution fees between Google and Epic and also there was, I think, lawsuit in the U.K. on the Apple side. It feels going back to the CMD a bit more than a month ago that the D2C kind of element in the bridge towards above 24% adjusted EBITDA margins didn't have a very big element of DTC or lower app distribution fees. So would you say that down the line, if this materializes a couple of years ahead, that could be an upside in that bridge, if you understand my question?

Yes. No, I think your question is very clear. And I think that's also why I think when we talked about the KPIs for the business, I mean, we also call out DTC. We do see that as a priority initiative for us as a group. And that is -- we see very positive on the news coming out. It's still to be really understood where does the Google and Epic sort of settlement actually land and for the rest of us as well. But I think in the mid- to long term, I think that is truly positive for the market. I mean, with the iOS changes, with the Google changes, and we -- similar, like many of our sort of competitor in the market is actually working with our own DTC channels, which I think is great for the customers as well, which is important at the end of the day.

And that will allow us to also reinvest more in marketing and some will go down to the bottom line. So you're absolutely right. I think the question is how fast we can actually roll it out and also how fast the U.S. changes, Epic and sort of Google change will take place so that you can actually roll it out also on a global scale.

Great And then just one question on the margin guidance because we're 9 months in now to the year and you're almost at 23% adjusted EBITDA margins. But you still leave a quite big span here for the full year, given that you've reiterated the guidance here. Is that just heading into the important months here end of November and into December, is that just that you don't know the kind of robust potential to deploy your way right now? Just getting back, I guess, again to Simon's question a bit. But -- so just -- yes, the question is just on the big spend given that we just have 1 quarter left.

Yes. I think that you're fair to say that the range of 21% to 24% is still relatively broad. And that in part is because, as Maria has already said, Q4 is a critical quarter for us, both from a top line perspective, but also as we think about UA deployment heading into the key seasonal year-end where CPIs do go up, but also we want to make sure we have the right starting base for 2026 as well. That being said, we do have conviction that where we are currently trading for the 9 months of the year gives a good indication of direction for the full year.

Okay. Good. Last question from my side. Do you have -- can you add any flavor on how Plarium as a whole delivered in Q4 of last year? And anything to be aware of from the comp side of things, given that we don't really have figures on that?

Yes. No, absolutely. They had an excellent Q4 last year, to be fair. And I think I softly called that out when we actually did close the transaction because the cash balance was actually slightly higher than what we had envisaged when we actually took over the company. So yes, Plarium in its own is going to have tough comps, especially then on back of RAID in Q4. Having said that, I think as hopefully, those of you who are listening to the CMD, I mean, we do have an exciting road map for RAID. I think the performance of RAID in Q3 were excellent.

I mean, running a game with that size and still 6-year old and delivering high single-digit organic growth is impressive. So of course, we're excited about the road map going into Q4 and the performance, but the comps year-over-year will be quite tough. In general, when it comes to seasonality, I think I've said this before as well, a little bit different from our other studios. Q1 is a quite important quarter for Plarium and RAID because they have their anniversary in Q1. But second to that, it is Q4 that for general for midcore companies is a very good quarter and December being the biggest month. So...

The next question comes from Martin Arnell from DNB Carnegie.

I have -- my first question is on the organic growth performance and the guidance. The midpoint of your guidance is now signaling quite a big slowdown in Q4 compared to Q3. And is that something you see so far in Q4?

Well, I think we have to remember when we talk about slowdown, we grew 15% organic growth in Q3, which I think is quite exceptional in a market that is growing low single digits. So yes, you're right that I don't expect another acceleration Q3 into Q4. I still expect a good Q4 for us. I think we started the quarter well. If you look at the guidance, yes, that implies that you will have a slowdown, but I also believe that based on the performance in Q3 and start of Q4, I think that we will come in the upper end of the guidance rather than the lower end, and that could probably give you an indication of performance in Q4 as well.

Perfect. Thank you, Maria, for that. And if we move on a follow-up question on Plarium and RAID. It looks like RAID was -- I think you said high single digits in the quarter, which, I guess, raises the question of the remaining assets in Plarium. Can you comment a little bit on the performance there and what you're doing to improve?

Yes. absolutely. And first, let's just also remember and put into perspective, RAID is roughly 70% of the revenues in Plarium. So it is the key asset and the people, of course, that we bought. We would love to see the other games stabilize that goes without saying, and that is something the teams are working on. But we don't see the other games being growth games, which means that our work lies dedicated on continue to drive the strong performance in RAID, which the teams are working really hard on and doing an excellent job at it. It is to make sure we continue to work on the new games pipeline. They have exciting games in their pipeline that they are working on.

And then second -- and thirdly, it is, of course, to stabilize and improve the performance on it, but I don't think we should expect that the other older legacy games will come back to growth. That will not happen. It's about making sure that we optimize the performance and also find the right balance between harvest and investment.

Okay. So you expect the new games and continued performance of RAID to offset the older games there. Is that the way to look at it?

I mean we don't guide for Plarium in isolation. But if you ask me how I see the performance of Plarium, yes, I do expect continued strong performance from RAID. The plans that the teams have are great. The customers like the game. I have no doubt that they will continue to like the game and be engaged with the game. And I'm excited about the new games. But then we all know that, that you can never take as a guarantee, but I think the pipeline looks exciting. And I think in 2026, we hope we can also bring some games and test it on the market.

Perfect. And my final question would be on ARPDAU. I think we saw a strong performance in the quarter. I think you mentioned Snowprint as a main contributor there. Do you see continued potential to grow ARPDAU going forward?

I mean there are 2 drivers of our ARPDAU, and they are sort of contradicting each other. I think what you saw in Q3 was an underlying extremely strong performance by Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus, which was great that drove the overall ARPDAU, but you also saw slightly lower DAUs in PlaySimple, and they come with very low ARPDAU. So that means also the mix between our casual Studio DAUs and midcore Studio DAUs is actually, of course, having a significant impact on our combined group reported DAU. And also that is going to be, of course, sort of more transparent as we move into the new reporting.

I think what we are aiming to do is to make sure that we optimize each individual studio, but how the combined ARPDAU will develop will also be a little mix between how we balance subscriber growth in our respective district.

The next question comes from Rasmus Engberg from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Just -- I know you clarified a little bit on Q4, but are there any other things in this year's or last year's Q4 that we should be aware of such as platform deals or nonrecurring investments or anything beyond UA that will sort of impact the EBITDA in particular?

Well, I think it's more the thing to take into consideration is the year-over-year comps. If you remember last year, when we reported Q3, we were quite clear to say there were some revenues that actually got slipped into Q4 versus Q3. We ended up having the last event for InnoGames in Q4. So there was actually one extra event last year, Q4 for InnoGames and Forge of Empires. And there was also some platform deal that actually instead of materializing in Q3, actually slipped into Q4 because that's when they finalize. So yes, you do have some type of comps and also some high-margin revenues in last year performance that you're not going to see this year.

Right. And the other question more philosophically maybe. What is the impact on RAID's margins from a collaboration like this, which has been quite significant with TMNT?

Yes. I would say each game and each collaboration with IP is unique. Some -- they also come with different sort of structures on the cost side. But I think what is important is to look at in the totality point to say, what can I actually drive, what does it generate in new customer intake? What does it generate also then from organic intake? How does it improve both our paid sort of [indiscernible], but then also how does it impact our user engagement. So taking those 3 factors into account, you do the business case.

And as always, I mean, we want to make sure our game is exciting for our customers and that they thrive with it, but also that it makes sense from a financial point from us as a company. And I think we can clearly go back and say that the ones we've done have been very successful. And that's why we believe we want to continue to do so because it works for us as a sort of owner, but also equally works for our customers. And I think that is what is ultimately most important because we want to make sure that we continue to drive engagement with our users and make sure that RAID continues to be as relevant this year, next year and sort of several years to come.

But this one drew sales more than EBITDA, it looks like or...

No. I think it actually drove both.

The next question comes from Raymond from Nordea.

A couple of questions from me. First, regarding potentially IPOing PlaySimple. I mean, if you were to proceed with an IPO, I believe you said that the capital will be directed towards accelerating M&A. Could you talk a bit more about the type of targets you would like to add to your casual portfolio, maybe both in terms of geography and type of games that you see complementing your casual portfolio well?

Yes. I mean, normally, it is quite difficult to go into specific when you look at M&A targets. I think we are excellent in the Word category. We are now moving outside of that Word category into puzzles. Are there more interesting categories that are nearby where you can clearly find synergies in cross-promotion and so forth? Of course, there is. So I think that's with that lens that we're looking at how do we find exciting growth companies in adjacent categories and genres with still an affinity to PlaySimple to make sure we can double down on the tech and tools that we're having. And I think that is what is exciting. And I think for us, a potential listing in India is also then an accelerating enabler to execute on that strategy, and that's also why we're excited about the potential listing in India.

Yes, I hear you. And you are currently conducting a market preparedness study. When do you expect that to conclude sort of -- is it even feasible to execute on a potential IPO already in H1 at all?

It's a little bit too early to go into timing. But I think as we said in the CMD and which we're fully convinced still is to say, if we come to the conclusion we would like to proceed, I think a listing in 2026 is absolutely feasible. I think Q1 sounds a little bit ambitious, but I think Q1 is absolutely doable -- I'm sorry 2026 is absolutely doable. Now I'm getting very generous.

All right. And just one final one. At your CMD, you showed out sort of AI tools can be used to reduce your sales and marketing which could translate either into more sales for similar cost structure or similar sales for lower spend. But so far, at least on the outside, it's hard to conclusively say that your cost structure has markedly shifted. How do you see your UA spend and its relation to sales going forward and the sort of pace at which we should expect to see an impact, if any?

Yes. No, I can start and then you can chime in. I think that when you look at the marketing spend level, I do believe that we will stay at the same levels. I think where we are seeing AI as a great tool for us to use is to accelerate the things we're doing, improve the content and the quality and the quantity of what we're producing. So basically, we can do more with the same people. And I think we have a faster time to market in some areas. I think those are the exciting parts, and those are things we are already leveraging.

And I think by us collaborating even more on what are the tech and tools that are working when it comes to AI because it's evolving so fast, I think we can be even better at that. So I don't think you should expect short-term massive cost savings from AI. It's actually to produce more things, better -- both quality and quantity to our customers and faster to market.

The next question comes from Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken.

A lot of good questions already taken here. But just a follow-up on the Epic, Google deal here with Google opening up for global alternative payments here. But do you think this is -- of course, it's net positive for you moving from a 30% fee. But as I understand it, they could still take some 9% to 20% fee that is still above the roughly 5% DTC platform fee. Is this in line with what you have been expecting before? Or how much of a net positive is this for you, you think?

Yes. No, I think we're seeing what you're seeing. So I don't think our initial analysis is anything different. Would we have liked it to be a little bit closer to what the iOS setup is in the U.S.? Yes, we would have. Is this the last sort of version of it? I don't know. I think there will continue to be an evolution. So I think we are waiting to see what's happening. I think any change is a good change, and I think that will continue to be pressure on driving change.

I think we are actively working, and it's not the only DTC channel that we're having, and I think that is also important to stress. We do have our own sort of stores as well and launcher, but also to have the Apple Store fees being changed, I think, is key going forward, and I think it's a positive for us and it's a positive for the industry.

Right. Do you have any color on -- if you look at your DAU, how many that are on iOS versus Google?

I can -- I mean we don't display it completely. But as you know, we have roughly sort of direct-to-consumer is roughly, I think, 26%. I mean the rest is largely, I would say, then on the mobile side, and we have slightly more on the Apple side than the Google side, but we don't break it out exactly, but that gives you a ballpark.

Okay. That's fair. And just the last question. We have seen some take place being impacted from ad revenues. That is said to be a result from an algorithm change from one of the larger partners. So have you noted any shifts in this, for example, in PlaySimple similar to what you saw last year? Or is it more stable for you?

No. I think when we look at the eCPMs, I think they've been stable. I mean now we're coming into the seasonally most important time of the year. So far, we're happy with what we're seeing. But again, we still need to end the quarter as well. So I think the big change happened sort of Q1 '24. I think we changed our strategy and reset our growth drivers. And so let's focus on what we can control. And I think the team has done an excellent job on that and have been driving growth thereafter.

[Operator Instructions]

There are no more phone questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

Thank you very much. At this stage, there are no written questions. So this concludes the video and conference call for the third quarter. Thank you very much for attending. Thank you to the speakers, and we look forward to sharing more news as and when the time is right. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to MTG's Capital Markets Day 25. It's a pleasure to have you with us. Please take your seats, we are now ready to begin.

Thank you. Well that is probably the coolest intro I've ever had in my life. So thank you for that, and thank you for the iconic music that we've also got to this show today.

So welcome, everyone. This is our first Capital Markets Day for 3 years. And I think it's fair to say that there has happened a lot of things during these 3 years. And if you're asking us at least, we are extremely proud of the journey that we have had over the last 3 years. But what we're even more so excited about is, of course, what we're going to talk about today. Hopefully, all of you have read our press release this morning. So you know there's a lot of exciting things to talk about today. But we'll do a recap during the day today about the past, and that should give you even more excited about the future we have ahead of us.

But before we go into that, I actually want to bring you on the inside of our Gaming Village to make you feel what it is that we are experiencing on a daily basis.

[Presentation]

Cool. So that is actually what we're all about. That's what we're passionate about. We're passionate about bringing great games, game makers and people together and [ inspire ] great things together. And that is really what we'll focus on today as well. I mean, to the headline here, who is MTG and who we are and what do we believe in? Well, I've been with the company for over 20 years, which tells you also I'm getting older. But if there's one thing that we've always believed in, it's about being relevant in entertainment. That has guided sort of my 20-plus years within MTG. And sure enough, we have, for sure, looked different throughout the year.

And I think we look more exciting than ever where we are today because gaming, whether you want to contest it or not, there are 3 billion gamers out there, and our job is to make sure we provide great entertainment through them. And the way we do that is by building our Gaming Village, which is a journey we've been on for several years. And in this journey, it's about collecting some of the best game makers, the most talented people and put them in the same room and actually make us better together.

So the theme that we're having today is all about MTG. As you saw in the movie, MTG can be about Made To Grow, [ Made The Game ]. And today, we're actually going to focus about MTG as being one of the most market-leading gaming companies out there, about how we are transforming as a company and how we also aim to grow. So that is the journey of the day. That's how we divide the presentations today. So I think we should get started.

MTG has always been around a buy-and-build strategy. In any company, the true value creation sits in driving organic growth, having great businesses that deliver over time, value creation through higher revenues and bottom line. That is quite simple. The way that we wanted to do that is by finding companies, which you can clearly see here around the world that are unified by 3 key metrics, and that is what's been guiding our mantra as we've been acquiring them. Finding companies which first and foremost has amazing game. We call that evergreen game, and that is something you will hear a lot about today from me, from Arnd, from Yoav, from Oliver, from Nick. All of us will touch on this concept.

The second one is about the people. We want to make sure we find people that shares our vision, shares our vision about building a Gaming Village, shares our vision about continuously our job to strive to make better games for our customers and that wants to be part of our journey.

And the last part, which is equally important, it's about finding companies also with a strong financial profile that helps us become better together. And that's what we've done. That's how we found 6 of these companies that gives us today a true global footprint. It gives us over 90 live games that helps us entertain over 9 million users on a daily basis. And that also gives us the opportunity to report over SEK 1 billion as revenues on an annualized basis.

So how do we do this? How do we entertain the 9 million people? Well, I've said it, and I will say it many times during this presentation, it is all about the games. Here, you can see the biggest franchises of our top -- or the biggest IPs of our top studios. And I think what we have always -- when we looked at the companies that we discussed to buy and that we then onboard to our companies, as I said, it is about the opportunity either that they're already having or that they will have a game that turns into an evergreen IP.

And as you clearly can see here, in all our studios, all the games that we're having are category-leading games in its respective franchise. And you may ask yourselves why is that so important? Well, it comes back again to relevance. We are competing with streaming platforms, with movie theaters, with sports events. People only have so much excess time to provide entertainment and enjoy entertainment and we need to deserve it. And with these games as clear category leaders, we clearly deserve it, which means that customers are coming back to our games over and over again, which also allows us to continue to invest in the game.

And what that means is that we're having big teams behind these games that continue to extend the customer journey, continue to add exciting content and events, tournaments that continue to extend the lifetime journey for the players. And the second of all, it also allows us to continue to invest in marketing, which also increase the reach of this game, which onboard new customers into the game. And that is the foundation and the bread and butter of our organic growth.

Taking these 6 games then that I show you on the screen, these actually constitute 60% of our revenues as a group to just also explain the magnitude and the importance of these games. And I think equally important to also discuss the longevity around the games, and we will come back to this topic several times during the day, it is important to call out, for example, Snowprint and Warhammer 40K, which was one recent acquisition. They're quite early on the game. We still see it as an iconic IP, but it's only a 3-year-old game, which means that has a very long time ahead of themselves to entertain the customers.

On the other side, when you take the Bloons IP and the franchise, that's a franchise that's been around soon for 20 years, and that is becoming what we actually would call generational. And again, that tells you that if you have games that are relevant, they also live for a very long time, and they also allow you to continue to invest in them and drive organic growth and value creation.

As I said, we are a buy-and-build story, but we're a very disciplined buy-and-build story. We have selectively added companies to the portfolio, and we've been on this journey now since 2017. Sure enough, we accelerated the last couple of years, but the journey actually started back in '17, us acquiring InnoGames. And I think we do pride ourselves on this journey. As I said in the beginning, we are extremely proud about the story and the company that we're building.

And I think one of it comes back to, as I said, as we're buying a company, yes, M&A is an important accelerator to everything we do, but the foundation is to have companies that can deliver a strong financial performance of their own metrics as well. And what you can clearly see on this slide is, sure enough, the market has had its ups and the market has had its downs, but we have consistently performed over this period of time regardless of what the market is having for us. And that is something I'm very excited about, and that also shows the strength of the companies that we acquired and how we're coming together as a village.

And to just put into context, which is actually a fun stat I looked up, when we actually reported for the first time InnoGames in Q2 2017, that is 8 years ago, we actually reported just short of $30 million or SEK 300 million. Fast forward 8 years, Q2 2025, we were actually north of $300 million or SEK 3 billion, which is actually a tenfold increase over the last 8 years. And we had a very similar performance also on the bottom line profitability. Again, coming back to the credibility of our execution power and also our disciplined M&A approach.

And I think it's fair to ask, I mean, and again, I've been in the company for over 20 years, what drives this transformation and what gets us excited about what we want to build? I think it is a passion for us, and I think it is a DNA that we have always had in MTG and that I'm very proud of. It is our passion to always try to be a little bit better tomorrow. It's our passion to make sure we are relevant. And it's also a disciplined approach to understand, are we a good owner or are we not a good owner. So yes, we have, over the time, changed shape and form quite a lot of times. I've seen many versions of MTG during my period here, but we've always been extremely disciplined in what we want to achieve.

And I want to call out 2 main transformation points that also sits in the area sort of during my leadership and our team that we currently have. And I think the first one to call out is ESL transaction, and that sure enough was quite some time ago, but it is an important testament to how we think about when we operate our businesses. I mean, we love and we're still very good friends with ESL people, and it's an amazing business. But it wasn't -- we were not a good owner of that business. We could not support the growth journey that they wanted to have. And equally, we managed then to find them a better home, and we managed to crystallize value for our shareholders. And I think that is a very good way to look at how we operate our business.

And also with that transaction, we also managed not only did we distribute money to our shareholders, we also kept to do the second transformative acquisition that we will speak later about today as well, and that was the acquisition of Plarium. Plarium doubles us in size for most financial metrics, whether it's top line, bottom line and cash flow. So yes, it's indeed transformative in so many ways, and it also puts us on the map where we always strive to be one of the leading mobile gaming companies.

And with that notion of change -- I'm not sure how patient and observant you were when you came in today. So I'm hoping you noticed something new, maybe. Well, with change, I've talked a lot about change internally. And trust me, since the acquisition, it is about transform and elevate the way we work. But I don't think it's enough to just talk about it. We also want to live it. And that's why we also created this movie on back of our new brand image.

[Presentation]

So hopefully, you have noted that we both changed the color a little bit, and we have made a new logo. And why do we do that? Well, it is also about making sure that not only are we walking the talk, we also live and breathe and we actually look the way that we feel. And I think that MTG, in a good way, we are keeping what has kept us and brought us to here, which means the color and the name, but we are also evolving what the MTG can stand for.

And I think what is also interesting and fun, which I want to call out is also the way we actually did it. We actually launched an internal competition to make sure we also engaged all our people to also ask them to say, if you actually could provide inspiration to us, how would you actually change and evolve the logo? And what does MTG actually mean to you? And based on the feedback we got from them, yes, sure enough, we worked an external studio, but that's actually what ended up both MTG and also what ended up being Made to Grow, [ Make The Game ] and so forth. So I'm really happy that it is not something we're just sitting and thinking about the [ trips from ], it is actually something we did together with our team, and that's how we like to operate.

So moving then a little bit to the future. I want to just call out a few things. I mean, I've been asked during many of the meetings in the last 6 months, like what excited you about Plarium. What does that give you? And how do you become better? And I think that is all very fair questions. And you can argue Plarium to some degree, is a little bit of a different acquisition for us, what we've done in the past, and it's definitely bigger. But it still ticks all the same boxes that we've been extremely disciplined about, which comes down to the IP.

You will hear Arnd and Stas later talk about RAID. I mean RAID is an iconic evergreen IP that we admired from sort of the side before, and now we actually bring that within our family. That is amazing. And what is equally exciting is, of course, to bring the talent of RAID in with also the opportunities that, that team or other teams that worked with them are also working on new games. So that is the number 1, 2, 3 items in all fairness.

But then second of all, you heard us speak many times and also in the videos here about the Gaming Village. We are big believers that we are stronger together, that we want to build a village, a home where game makers can thrive, where we build shared tech and tools and services that can accelerate everything that we've done. But we haven't got the full tech suite. And what we're now getting also as a part of the Plarium acquisition is really best-in-class proprietary tech that is also built to service third party, which we can now start to roll out across our midcore district.

And last but not least, and again, scale is important, but it's not just scale for getting bigger. I mean, we've done many M&As, but we've never done it because just getting big. You need to have the relevant scale, which means that it fits into what we are building, what we aspire to do and the pieces that we have and the buildings we have in our Village. And that is truly where Plarium gives us relevant sales and gives us the ability to do more going forward.

And that is also why we provide an announcement the other week about us still in one Gaming Village, but we're moving to 2 different divisions. And I want to call out a little bit sort of what we worked on and why we worked on it. Since the acquisition of Plarium, you can argue putting almost 2 equal sized companies next to each other. And you're also putting 2 companies from different cultures, different ways of working and you have excellence in different areas. So what we spend a lot of time on doing is really to elevate what I usually say, the best of both worlds. This is a great opportunity for us to actually revisit and challenge ourselves, where do we do bad, where do we do good? How do we elevate the things that we do well and how do we put the pieces together.

And I think one of the things -- I wouldn't say that we haven't sort of failed on it, but we haven't been able to fully execute it is our Flow Platform. We've always spoken to you about we want to build out the Flow Platform, but we were never scaled enough. Now we're actually getting the scale. And second of all, I think one of the lesson learned, we also had when we looked at our Flow Platform in the old MTG Village is that the 2 biggest companies we had was InnoGames on one side and then PlaySimple on the other side. There are a lot of soft synergies and learnings that we can share between and where we can challenge each other, but the real value drivers of the true synergies looks different on the casual side versus the midcore side. And that is also why we're now moving into 2 districts to make sure that we can actually unleash the value in both of the districts.

And that also means that -- that doesn't stop there. We also, at the headquarter, will change and evolve the way we're working. I think that goes to, call it, into the same mantra. Our job is always to push ourselves to sort of ask the question, where are we best? Where do we add the most value? How do we structure ourselves? And I've always said in the past that we will never do game at [ Chepsbur ], and I don't think we should start now either. But we will even more power the divisions to actually run and do the operations together with the studios and build that synergy flywheel around the platform and empower the studios where they are the best, making the game, keeping that culture, and that's also extremely important.

And I think rather at the headquarter, we will focus together, of course, will be the architects of the district of the villages. We will be focused on capital allocation and value creation, M&A and public market, which means that we will evolve together with the district. Over time, of course, you'll see as we shaded here, we would love to be able to introduce also future districts in the Village. That's what we've always done in MTG. We always pushed ourselves to try to look around the corner what can be there, but also to manage expectation. That's not going to happen tomorrow. I mean we're quite busy building what we're supposed to do in the casual and midcore, but we are going to start to look at that. And that is hopefully something over time, we can come back to you around.

And then to go a little bit further into the details, why does it then make sense to have different districts because we're building up different leadership team working across the spectrum. And you can argue on one end, the value drivers on the organic side, they pretty much look the same across casual and midcore. It starts with the core games that we're having. It's about making sure we continuously update them, make them more exciting for the customers. That is our bread and butter. It's about the new games pipeline, how can we make sure that through the combined talent we have in the group, combined data, combined creativity that we have around the group, how can we make sure we get more shots at the goal, we get a higher accuracy in the track record of creating the winners, and we're also going to fail faster. Those are all things that we want to aspire both on the casual and the midcore. And we want to build a platform approach, which is something both Yoav and Oliver will speak about later, but the how's differs in casual and midcore. The drivers are different on how do we create that flywheel on an organic basis.

And I would say on the inorganic value drivers, the levers are even more distinct, and that is why we would like to also empower the leaders of the casual and the midcore district to own their own units. If you look and start on the mid-core, you can argue that is the biggest part of our business today. That is 80% of our revenues. That is already a scale player where we can start now post the Plarium acquisition and the rollout of the proprietary tech. That's when we can start to build an integrated operating unit and with that, create more agile, faster, more efficient organization and hopefully also getting better shots at the goal. And as an outcome of that, which we also announced this morning, was a $20 million cost saving efficiency program that we expect to have sort of rolled out during next year and also reach that retime value by the end of the year.

That is one part of creating the new operating model. Yes, we want to create more agile, efficient organization. But the second part, which goes for the midcore unit is also about making sure we create an even better home for new game makers. I used to say we would love to find more smaller Snowprints of the world where we're finding younger companies, smaller, fast-growing companies with an amazing opportunity to scale that do not have the tech and tool platform that we can actually offer for them as a plug and play. As we all know, the barriers to entry in the gaming is getting lower and lower. But having the tool set to scale and having the funds to scale, I would argue that is almost an indirect barrier to entry that we're starting to see in gaming.

If you then look on the casual side, where we have PlaySimple, which is an amazing foundation and PlaySimple also built an amazing platform, Little Engine, which is their flywheel. The challenge with casual segment, it's a party of one. And we would like to build the same journey on the casual side as we've done in the midcore side, which means that we would like to find more relevant-sized M&A to come in on the casual side. In order to do so, we also need an M&A currency. And we also would like to make sure that we leverage on the amazing growth story that we're having on PlaySimple in India. And that is also why we're on a value creation lever on the casual side are exploring a potential IPO of PlaySimple in India.

And why do we then do that? And I think it's important to call out. As we explore that and we undertake that study, we want to remain majority owner of PlaySimple because we truly believe in the casual consolidation opportunity, but we equally believe in that there is a very exciting opportunity where we could realize both shareholder value through secondary with the listing in India and also equally exciting for the future, it could be an accelerator to drive the consolidation on the casual side, the same way we've done on the midcore side. And that is also why we believe that 2 districts and maybe over time, 3 districts makes sense because we keep all the good things about being a village. We collaborate, we share, we work together, but we also make sure that we enable the distinct value levers that each district has.

To wrap it all up, last time when we presented to you, we presented a bold ambition that we were going to double the company. Some of you may believe us, some of you may not. We are actually doing the same today. And I think based on my presentation and what you will hear later on today, I am a firm believer that based on where we are today, with the organic growth drivers that I just called out and you will hear later on today, with the synergy potential as we build out the platform play, both on the revenue side and the cost side that can then be reinvested into growth on top of that accretive value creation M&A, we do have all the opportunities, and we have the full toolbox to actually over mid- to long-term, double the size again. And that is what keeps me excited about today and the future. And that is also what you will hear from my colleagues during the rest of the day, which they will talk more about.

So with that, I'm coming back again to today's agenda, and we've been very creative. So we're focusing it about MTG, market leadership, transformation and growth. And I will start to hand over to my colleague, Arnd, who will take you through our market leader position.

Hello and [Foreign Language] to everyone. Welcome to our cozy Gaming Village. And let me reassure you, you made the right decision today to be here and spend the afternoon with us. It will be full of valuable insights, fact and some entertainment. But let's think for a moment about this. So every culture -- every generation had the cultural revolution. So the '70s had walk. I don't know who have experienced that revolution. The '80s have cinema. The 2000s streaming. And this decade belongs to gaming. So show me your hands, who has played the game the last 4 weeks? Wow, that's much, much stronger than 3 years ago. And I would say, congrats, you're part of the biggest entertainment audience in the world. And here's the truth. Gaming is by far the biggest entertainment form on the planet. It's bigger than movies, bigger than streaming and bigger than music. And MTG is at the heart of this massive shift.

So today, I want to show you how we have turned a bold ambition back in '22 into reality and why we are now perfectly positioned to double again in size. So there are billions of gamers out there, 3 billion. They dive every day into new worlds. They build empires. They compete with strangers who become friends. And the average gamer is not just stereotype teenager in the base. Man, it's actually this audience, average age 31, and half of the players are women. And also half of this market happens here on this device. This tiny screen is the biggest stage, entertainment stage in the world. And we're entertaining them with our portfolio.

And the good news is when you look at the history of gaming, it is a story of innovation, constant innovation from arcade to PC, console, mobile and now AI-driven gameplay. The next wave will be fueled by 3 things: generative AI and probably in 3 years at our next Capital Market Day, there's a better AI agent than myself. So that's why I enjoy this Capital Market Day. There's direct-to-consumer models we're going to see driving the growth and rewarded play. And we are well equipped to serve this wave and benefit from it.

And also good news is that the market momentum is back. After the COVID boom, where we've seen sure great peaks and the correction afterwards, which gave the market a bit of depression. Now we are back in mobile gaming at the COVID peak and the market is growing single digit. The players are spending more time, more money than ever on mobile games. And our portfolio is right at the center of that momentum.

But now let's look back for a second what we promised you and told you at our last Capital Markets Day 3 years ago. We set clear goals. We wanted to double revenue and EBITDA. And now fast forward to today, we can say mission accomplished. We did what we said, and we do -- and we did even more. I mean we achieved this through 3 things: organic growth, value-accretive M&A and operational synergies. And the best thing is we did all of this without any shareholder dilution. That's what we're most proud of, how we did it.

So as Maria mentioned, I think the best deal ever and everyone was happy back in '22 when we handed over our friends from ESL and DreamHack to the [ PF ], and we generated SEK 8 billion in exit proceeds from this. And also over the years, we generated SEK 3 billion in free cash flow. We got some SEK 3 billion as debt from the bank, and that enabled us to invest SEK 10 billion in high-quality game studios and driven entrepreneurs who joined the Gaming Village. And at the same time, we also returned SEK 4 billion to our shareholder.

And that's what I would call capital recycling at its best. It's growth driven by discipline. And this disciplined buy-and-build strategy leveraged by utilizing the best platforms in the world has put us on the map. We became a true contender in global gaming. We are a top 10 game publisher in the Western world. We are #1 listed mobile-first gaming company in Europe. We're #2 in the West. And this is not just scale. This is a strategic position to further drive consolidation. That's a pole position. And our superpower is our diversification in revenues, in game genres.

Our portfolio is highly diversified and balanced. We manage evergreen titles like Forge of Empires, RAID, and also rapidly growing new titles like Tacticus and Heroes of History. So 70% of the revenues is generated from this established evergreen titles and the rest fuels new launches and development. So that balance gives us predictability and stability. And on top, we have a huge upside. And by far, the biggest flagship brand is RAID, this very sympathic gentleman. RAID is one of the most recognized brands in gaming, is one of the most monetized brands. And if you ask any random gamer, what mobile game they know, I'm pretty sure there are high chances that they want -- they would come up with RAID. RAID isn't just a game. It's really a cultural icon. And you're going to hear more about RAID from one of the makers, Stas, and I sit down for an interview in a few seconds with him.

So let me sum it up. What brought us here today. We are a scaled, diversified player. We have the right people. We have the platforms and capabilities to win in gaming. And our ambition is still the same. We want to double over the next years. And the best part is we're just getting started.

So I don't know who has ever played RAID here in the room. Rasmus, I count on you. Thank you. Okay. So then you're familiar with the deep game play, but I think it's important to bring this to life to live and breathe RAID And to give you a bit of an insight, a little video.

[Presentation]

Cool video. Stas, welcome on stage.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So Stas, We all have the same challenge that we want our parents to understand what we're doing for a living. I have totally failed. She still has no clue what I'm doing here. But how do you explain your mother, how you ended up in gaming?

Well, my mother loves our videos a lot. So she's like you're doing something cool. But my father, he was the whole his life in dermatological business. He still, I guess, doesn't believe that I have a real job, to be honest.

So what did you bring to Plarium, to this cool company and to RAID?

Well, I've started -- overall, I have a degree of international economy. And I've started my career as a project manager in IT and outsourcing in Kharkif. But I've been playing games for the whole life, like since I was 9 years old when it was requirement for me like you have -- you end the year with all A's and we will buy you the PC. And it was like challenge accepted, I will do it. So yes, I've been playing games for the whole life.

And then when Plarium appeared in Kharkif and started very diverse campaign of getting people into the company, I decided to start. And that's how I went to Plarium in 2014 as a project manager on strategy games on mobile games. And then at some point, my position changed to games and producer. And then in 2020, when we realized that the whole focus should be on RAID because after the COVID, it was running better and better. So that's when I became the associate Gaming Director first, and now I'm working as a Game Director of the RAID.

So more than 5 years now. And this is actually the web [indiscernible] when you meet the passionate game makers from player, most of them are 10 years and more of the company. And you might wonder why we have the swords here, not only to wake you up, but also just to talk about the game and why sword and digital items are important. So can you explain us in a simple word, how RAID works? Why is this game so special?

Well, if talking about how RAID works, it's quite a simple model, yes, you get in the champions. You get in hero champions, we cover it in a different way. And then you go to beat the content, beat the bosses, beat the challenges. When you beat it, your champions get experience, you level in them up, you're getting the better gear for them and you go to beat harder bosses. And more and more and more. And it's not enough to get one champion, you have to get a roster of them because you should to play with a combination of them. So that's the whole -- as we call it game loop, yes, getting champion, fight, get some better gear, fight again and get more champions. That's how it works.

Sounds very simple. And how much time are people spending in the game like session per day?

That could be a very huge number. The most engaged players can play like the whole day, it's like running in the background, but you play the whole day. Specifically, I'm playing the RAID for the whole day or every day because I love the game because I work on it, it's how it works. But yes, they're very engaged. Players play a lot. It varies. Mobile sessions are not so long, but on PC, they play just enormous.

And our longest average session, like play session?

Well, again, it depends on the cohort. We always speak about the cohorts of the players, but it could be around 1 hour per day.

1 hour per day.

Yes, it could be. It could be, yes.

And just to give you an idea, the average revenue per paying player per month is, roughly the ballpark?

Well, I guess for last -- like I will refer to last 6 months because we are like online for 7 years, it could vary from $140 to $160 per month as PPU for players.

Yes. So speaking of dollars, how do you monetize in a free-to-play game these paying players. So how you make them pay?

To be honest, again, we are game developers. We are building games, first of all. Yes. It's not -- when you build the game, it's aimed on monetization, players are not full. They feel it. They feel that you should respect them, you should respect their time. So we are not building the game specifically to monetize. Of course, it's a business, and we remember about it. But first of all, we have to build the universe and the world and the value for players for them to understand that it is enough, that it's worth it to invest, first of all, their time, the time to be in the community, the time to create the content about the game, et cetera, et cetera. And then it goes to monetization because some players want to -- just to support the developer of the amazing game. Some players want to progress faster. Some players want to be the best from everywhere, and they want to beat everyone on PVP. So it depends. But first of all, we are about creating the great game.

And the game is now, I mean, 5, 6 years old. I mean, it's fairly young. What attracted us is we believe this is a powerful evergreen title. So how do you see the future? How do you keep players engaged for the next 5, 10 years?

Yes. Just 5 years ago, I had a conversation with Head of Product. And we discussed the future. And my assumption was like, well, obviously, we want this game to perform 5 more years. And he was just casually corrected me 10. It's 10. And I was like, oh, okay, okay, 10. And now after the 5 years, I can say, I guess it's 5 years more is not limit because in these 5 years of development, what we've seen, we've seen how passionate our players are. We've seen how engaged our team is.

And when we release new features and we release new content, for example, a couple of weeks ago, we've teased the new faction that will come in March 2026. And of course, we get reviews like somebody likes, it was a greek-themed faction. Somebody likes somebody not. But the main take out from it was a lot of players suggested, "Oh, it's the last faction. Would you guys do more?" And we're like -- and they started to suggest more and more factions they want to see in the game. And we are like, oh, so 16 factions is not enough. They want more. And this gives us the understanding that players actually await more and more challenge from the game. They want to see more. They want to keep playing it, they enjoy it. That's what will make me very optimistic about the future.

And RAID is known for this fantastic graphics and the polished design and everything. But when we just saw the Ninja Turtle integration. So how does it work these IP integrations? And that's a combination with LiveOps, which is the magic sauce and how you grow game, keep the players engaged. But what's the strategy behind these IP integrations?

Well, with IP, overall, all the idea of IP is a perfect fit for RAID with specific reasons, but like the first one is that when the RAID was designed, it was designed not just like another dark fantasy game. It's obviously a dark fantasy game. But what we want from it and how all the champions designed, you will see a lot of references to popular culture in RAID on every aspect of our world. So we see it as a part of the popular culture. We see it as a part of gaming culture. And then when you have the IP like Ninja Turtles, what you've seen, it's a great opportunity for us to show how we see these characters in our setting, how we can create the Ninja Turtles with this video that you showed, we had a lot of comments like that's how I want to see the Michael Bay movie, the next one because our design is different.

So yes, it is a good fit for us. We want to express ourselves, to show how it could be. It's good for our players because it's characters from -- maybe from their childhood. Maybe it's just the characters that they like, that they love. And they are very happy to have the opportunity to see the character you love in the game you love and to play it. So this is the first part.

And the second part, you mentioned LiveOps. What we want to have is RAID, like, again, we are an entertainment business. RAID competes not only with other games in mobile. We compete with PC games. We compete with streaming platforms. We compete with live sports. So yes, what we are aiming is to bring to our players events, not like do Dragon 20 times. We want to bring them emotions. We want to bring some big events. And therefore, IPs helps us a lot.

And you have super close contact and listen to community, and I heard there are already RAID babies and couples.

There's a lot -- I see I'm watching all the videos about the community because we have a bunch of content creators. And our community is very diverse. Reddit is one part of the community. Content creators on YouTube is a different one. Discord is a separate one. And yes, with the community, we have all the stories when people met playing RAID, they have their families established playing RAID, et cetera, et cetera. That's a great story, and we like it because it's a part of a great community, is always a part of the great game because it means that you can create something that connects people, and that's very important.

That's cool. So who's spending more than EUR 50 at RAID so far? No one. [indiscernible] cheap here. Okay, Oli, you need to...

Thank you, Oli.

Any question from the audience to Stas? Good. So when are we going to see the RAID movie coming?

The RAID movie. Well, I'm more about the game. And if you ask me about the game and its future, I can say to you that we have a full pipeline for 2026.

How long do you play in advance? So IP integrations, events?

Well, 2026 is like not in a matter of discussion anymore. We know everything we're going to do in 2026. We are finalizing our understanding of 2027, all the IPs of 2027 and all the features of '27. The game design team is actually works right now. And we have the shape of 2028 as well. So it's 2 to 3 years. So I guess movie, it's not to me.

Let's see.

I'm fully booked.

Thank you, Stas.

Thank you very much for having me.

And I hand over to our birthday kid, Oliver.

Just a quick introduction. Those of you who don't know me, I'm Anton. I do Investor Relations for MTG. We've come to the first opportunity to ask some questions. So I would like to welcome back Maria and Arnd on stage. [Operator Instructions]

So we have our first question, Martin, go ahead.

Martin Arnell with DNB Carnegie. So looking at this Plarium acquisition, and you mentioned some savings today in this morning's release. Can you give some more color on the specific synergies?

Yes. No, absolutely. And I think that it will come a little bit from Oliver in his speech about the midcore and also from Nick on the last side. But to give you a little bit of context, yes, it is savings, but it's a part of change in the way we operate. And I think that is actually the more important theme. Buying Plarium enables us to elevate the way we work. I mean you've heard me, you heard Arnd talking many times about building a Gaming Village, building it around shared taken tools, proprietary platform that can actually both accelerate the flywheel, but it also means that we don't need to duplicate the ways we work in each and every studio. We still want the studio to be empowered to do what they do today, make the great games, keep the unique culture. I think that is what has driven a large degree of our success to date. But I'm also convinced that we can do things even smarter and more agile.

So it will be a combination of, yes, there will be headcount reductions, but there are also a change in the ways of working, which means that you can change the way you actually source agreements, the way you actually work with outsourcing partners and you can actually find a more agile approach to that. So it is a combination of different drivers. But the most important part is it's not a cost-cutting exercise. It's an evolution on the way we operate, building a more agile future-proof organization that can also afford to invest more into new games ideas because we are only going to be as good in the future as our games are, and I think that is really important.

And second question on RAID. What do you think will be the most important part to make it return to growth year-on-year?

In all fairness, RAID was growing in Q2. So I think the team and you heard does, they're doing an amazing job on the LiveOps. And I think what is I spent 2 days in Warsaw listening to both the new game, which I'm not allowed to call out and also the RAID workshop. And the way they think about LiveOps, the way they actually plan the calendar, '26 already set, '27 well underway, starting to think about '28, I couldn't ask for more.

I think where we can do even better is to figure out how do we, from a capital allocation point of view, sort of make sure we find a way to optimize our marketing spend. Can we actually invest even more on back of the amazing performance that the team is doing? Can we get those incremental sort of users in on healthy ROAS. I think there is an exciting opportunity. But what the team is doing, I think it's amazing. And if they are then saying we have more ideas that we can even build more things, but we need a few more headcounts. I think that is a conversation to be had, and that's also why the transformation program is so important because we want to create space to also invest more where it makes sense.

All right. We have a question over there.

Jacob Edler from Danske Bank. Just one question. You talked about doubling revenues once again in the midterm. And in that bridge, revenue synergies was one part of it. Could you give some maybe concrete examples of what you think could contribute the most to revenue synergies over time outside of the cost synergies we talked about?

Yes. One thing is, I mean, you can imagine the share experience that RAID is having and also Forge are having, having a 6-year-old and a 10-year-old game with a LiveOps experience, adding that into some of our new games that can accelerate the way we actually push out LiveOps and new updates to the teams, making sure we collaborate on marketing, making sure that we can actually through rollout on one marketing platform, we can also spend more efficiently, which means that we can also allow ourselves to reinvest more to drive revenue growth. We have direct-to-consumer as an amazing opportunity where we have, for example, Play and Play that has their own launcher. I mean we have just now started to test to put Heroes of History onto that platform. There are many more games that we could add.

So I would say there's quite a wide variety. It's fair to say that we haven't called out a number on that on the press release, but I think it's also fair to say that most people discount that quite heavily and they look at the cost synergies. So that's why we actually focused on that in the press release, but that doesn't mean that as a part of building the operating midcore cluster, of course, we would like to make the most of our games. That goes without saying.

Plus we have built now a valuable audience network on the midcore side, where we can cross promote and keep the player in our game portfolio.

Perfect. And then the second question, if I may. I mean, you've given a revenue guidance of 3% to 7% growth. Would you say Plarium also could be able to grow in that range? And if so, what is the most important? Because if we look at the last quarters, you've had low single-digit growth in RAID, but the other 30% of the portfolio has been declining. So to kind of get into that range, do we need to see an acceleration of RAID, fix the other 30%? Or is it more about the new games that you might talk about later today?

Yes. I mean we never break out the guidance per studio, and we're not starting today either. But I think it's fair to say that, that is a blended average, which means that everyone is contributing. And if you ask me, do I believe there's more potential in RAID? Yes, I do. But I think in order to RAID to get to the next elevated growth levels because they also have some legacy games that is not growing, we also need to get the new games to the market. So I think that is exciting.

So again, the 3% to 7% is a blended average between sort of you can argue the old MTG Studios plus Plarium. And I think when we bought initially Plarium, we said that this is an amazing valuable company with an amazing growth optionality. And in order to unleash that growth optionality, yes, we need the new games to come to the market. But the foundation we have in RAID, hopefully, you all felt the excitement when Stas talked about it because I'm so impressed by how the team is working, and I think there's much more potential in the game.

Simon Jonsson from ABG. Maria, you talked a bit about potentially adding another platform or district. Could you maybe talk a little bit more how that could look like? Would it be like a different game genre or something completely different? Or what's your feeling? And yes.

So we have the casual district where it's much more potential and growth ambition. But if you take all the tools and tech, how we do user acquisition, BI analytics, our LTV prediction model, this is such a sophisticated superior way to manage, develop products and acquire user. Imagine if we apply all this to other playable app segments, if it's meditation, music, others, where monetization is based on subscription, ad revenues or even IP. If you look at Duolingo, they went through the roof and they added gamified features like leaderboards and others.

So this is more a mid- long-term idea to also expand into other adjacent playable apps areas where you can leverage our platform from gaming, including cross-promotion and everything else. It's a huge opportunity because I don't know any other digital industry or which is so sophisticated how they leverage data and developing products, engaging users and monetizing them. And that's -- it's a huge opportunity for us.

Rasmus Engberg with Kepler Cheuvreux. I was thinking about launching new games. You have this cycle of where a game is. How many successes do you need? Do you need one per year? Or how do you think about that? And how many shots do you think you need per success?

The last one is a million-dollar question. How many shots do you need to win and score. But I think that is what we also believe now, Bill, in the midcore and the casual cluster that we can improve the hit rate because it is -- that is when people are saying gaming is a hit-driven business, I tend to disagree to the vast majority that actually when you get a game to scale, there is a lot of processes and KPIs that drives the performance and predictability in the cohort. But there is, of course, in the creative part to make a game work, there is a hit-driven element. And yes, we want to improve that accuracy, and I can't tell you how many sort of shots we need in order to actually hit the one game.

But what I can tell you to put into context, I mean, we know, for example, when PlaySimple launched Word Search and how that scale up, how that massively impacted sort of our total revenue growth as a company. And the same as we acquired PlaySimple -- sorry, Snowprint and we saw this rapid growth from Warhammer 40K: Tacticus, equally, that was positively contributing to our top line performance, which means that, yes, we want more than one game per year that goes without saying, we want to have as high accuracy as we possibly can. But to be able to have one game coming out does make a difference. We aim to strive higher than that. But we all know that the one thing we cannot predict is when we will have that one. But our job is to make sure we improve the accuracy as much as we can.

All right. I think thank you very much.

Thank you.

That concludes our first block. All right. So now we're going to take a short break, bathroom and coffee break, and we'll see you back here in about maximum 10 minutes. So 10 past, we will start again.

[Break]

We'll just give a few -- the few people just a moment to get in, and then we will close the doors and continue.

All right. For our next segment, I would like to welcome Oliver up to the stage. He is the CEO of the Midcore District, and you will introduce yourself.

Thank you, Anton. There we go. So good afternoon, everybody. As Anton said, my name is Oliver. I'm the CEO of the newly formed Midcore District. My background is in game making. So I've spent over 15 years making games in some incredible places like Zynga, King, Rovio. And before that, I spent many years living in China where free-to-play was kind of born. So I know the experience of being a game developer, a studio lead and an executive. And in this new role, we're going to see what we can do as a group of studios as the Midcore District. So I'm going to spend the next 40 minutes going into more detail around that Midcore District, what is it, what do we hope to achieve as a district and why it is an incredibly exciting journey that we're about to go on with the studios.

So the Midcore District consists of 5 incredible studios, but at the heart of it is always the games. So we have 66 live games out there today being made by over 1,900 of the world's best game makers spread across more than 10 different locations and always striving to make the very best games for our players. As Arnd and Maria said earlier, the Midcore District makes up about 80% of MTG's revenue today.

The other thing you'll see here is the incredible diversity of the games within the Midcore District. So Midcore here doesn't just mean games like RAID, which are incredibly complex with years and years and years' worth of content and systems. It's also things like Bloons TD 6, which appeals to a quite different audience to RAID. And this variety is one of our strengths as a Midcore District because it means that as games and genres become popular, player interest shift, we're always there to have something to offer the players.

I want to highlight 5 of the key games in the Midcore District and talk a little bit about them. So RAID: Shadow Legends there with $2.6 billion in lifetime revenue. That puts it into a group of games, a very, very exclusive group. There are very few who have reached such heights. And what's also incredibly exciting, as you heard from Stas, is that, that journey for RAID is far from over. I'll show later a little bit some of the excitement we have and why we believe that RAID has many, many, many years ahead of it.

Forge of Empires is also in the billion club, $1.4 billion in lifetime revenue, launched in 2012. So that game has been around now for over 13 years. And what it proves is that when you have a game made by an amazing team with consistent delivery and execution, incredible live ops, you can build games that last over a decade. And our belief and our hope as a Midcore District is that we want games that last over a decade that players will continue to love, continue to play for many, many years.

Warhammer: Tacticus from the amazing team at Snowprint highlights another opportunity. And that's where you work with an IP that exists outside of video games. So Warhammer born in the U.K. from tabletop gaming, today, there's TV shows, there's books, there's games outside of just Tacticus. It's an IP that exists in entertainment. And by using that IP to make an amazing mobile game, we're able to become part of that world. And that means that the Warhammer fans around the world, when they come to the store, they look for a Warhammer game, we're right there. And they know what Warhammer means. It means quality, it means incredible characters and it means collection. So we're able to leverage work done by others in their IP and bring it to our games.

F1. Another IP in many ways. It's not ours, unfortunately. We didn't invent F1. But what we did do is say, what would F1 look like if you brought it to mobile. And when you take something like a sport and you bring it to mobile or to gaming, you get all of the benefits of a sport. You get the seasonality. Every single year, there's a new season in F1, and we reflect that in the game. Every single year, we have a reset. We bring in the new drivers, the new locations, the new teams, the new personalities. So we're able to say, you've watched it on TV, you've seen your drivers that you like or dislike, now come and experience it in the game just the same.

And then finally, here, Bloons TD 6, a franchise that I remember playing as a child on PC is still around and relevant today. It attracts a slightly different audience, but it's the same core fundamentals, games with years and years and years of content that is always updated and is available in many different locations. Bloons TD 6, I think I've almost lost count of how many platforms it's on. It's on Apple, it's on Google, it's on PlayStation. It's on Xbox, it's on Steam, it's on Epic, many, many places. And that shows that when you have a game that works, you should go where the players are, and that's what we always strive to do.

So we'll take a minute and see some of our games in action.

[Presentation]

Video made by our incredible in-house video team as well. So we've talked a lot and Arnd and Maria talked about midcore and casual, but what does that really mean? In your minds, you might have certain definitions. But when we talk about midcore and casual, here's what we're really talking about.

So in midcore and midcore games, it's all about incredibly deep progression and the ability for players to make progress, make choices and make investments in the game for years and years and years. So what that means is not just that we add more levels or we add a few more characters, is that we add new systems to the game, entirely new experiences and ways to use those characters and progress year after year. People don't come back to Forge or RAID to do more of the same. They come back to see what's new, what's exciting? How can I take what I gained yesterday in an event and use it in this new system.

We also look at in-app purchases as our primary revenue driver. This is where players make a conscious choice that they want to spend some real-world money to buy something in a game. What that means is different in different games. Sometimes it's a hero, sometimes it's to accelerate some progression. Sometimes it's to unlock new content, but the player is making that conscious choice of trading cash for something in the game.

We do have ads in a number of the games in the midcore section, but that's usually generally a secondary monetization avenue. In-app purchase is always the primary.

And finally, experienced gamers and games which are more complex. So while casual and Yoav will speak about that soon, generally is incredibly wide and brings in many, many people, midcore games tend to bring in those who have some prior experience in gaming or have an interest in engaging with the game, not just a bit, but for a long time and for it to become almost a hobby for them. So we are able to take some of the systems, some of the learnings from PC and console games and bring them to mobile because a lot of our players will know what they are, how they work and what the experience could be like.

In the Midcore Districts, 3 key things will help drive our success. Evergreen titles. Maria referenced these earlier as well. These are the games that have 5-, 10-, 15-year life cycles. The investment in midcore games tends to be higher than is needed to make casual games. They're bigger, there's more artwork, there's more systems. So we need to make sure that we're always aspiring for very, very long life cycles.

Secondary is the proprietary platform. I'll speak more about this later. But the idea here is that as a Midcore District, we're able to make sure that all of our studios, all of our teams have incredible services to accelerate the building of the game, maximize the potentials of their game and keep their teams lean and agile.

And finally, that capital discipline. When we think about games and when we think about growing games, there's that creative initial moment where we have new ideas. But once the game is out, once we've seen the KPIs, then it is about saying where should we invest in marketing? Where should we grow a team? Where should we acquire an IP or partner with an IP to accelerate this game. So it's about saying we want to make informed choices of where we put our capital, but that is informed by data and KPIs that we see.

The growth journey follows a similar strategy. The evergreen games are the engine that powers our business. It allows us to fuel our rising stars, and then we can make more new games with that. The growth journey, it feeds itself, and it's what we call the gaming flywheel. So let's take a look at some examples of that and what it really means.

So we think about our games in 3 key phases. The first is new games. This is where we take the risks. This is where we're always trying something new, and we're trying to see where is there a market for a game or an IP or a particular type of game play. So over here, I'll call out a couple of our examples, Matchcreek Motors from the team at Hutch in London. This is a match-3 game. There are many match-3 games out there. But what the team at Hutch wanted to do is say, we have a match-3 game. What happens if we add a meta game, a game around it of car collection and car upgrading, something which appeals to a different audience to, say, a Candy Crush type of game. So they have real-world licensed cars, incredible 3D graphics and a core match-3 game. That's one of our new games that's launched, and we're really excited about its performance.

We know that not all new games will graduate to being rising stars. We live in the world of media and not all media goes the way that we hope it would. But when we see potential in a new game, it becomes one of our rising stars. These are games where the players have come in, we've seen real data. We've seen that marketing can work. There is an audience for these games. And most importantly, the team are able to deliver on new events and new content for the game. So when we have rising stars like Warhammer: Tacticus, we know, great, it's time to invest. It's time to turn the engine and get this out to as many people as possible. You'll hear later from Alex, the CEO of Snowprint, the team behind Warhammer about what it is to make new games and what you can do to increase your chance of becoming a rising star.

Finally, the best of the best games and the ones that really find their audience, they become established titles. These are those titles, as I said, that last years and years and years and generate the meaningful revenue and provide that stable cash flow to allow us to go back to making more new games. We know as a business that making games is our core, it's our hearts. And the more we do of that, the more chance we have of finding those rising stars and creating those established titles.

We talked a lot about time and KPIs and things, but I think it's worth just referencing 2 here of our established titles. Forge of Empires along the bottom, RAID along the top and the axis here is months since launch. So what you can see in Forge of Empires here is that the game is 13 years old, but it still has an incredible player base. It still has a really meaningful contribution to the business. And a little fact, over 50% of the players who are playing Forge of Empires today started more than 4 years ago. So the audience there is incredibly sticky. They come in, they play and they stay around. That's what makes games established. We're not looking for ones that have amazing spikes and then disappear. That's not what we're about as a Midcore District, and it's not what we're about as MTG.

On the top here, you'll see RAID: Shadow Legends. And what gives me a lot of excitement, a lot of confidence is that, that journey can go on for many, many, many years. The journey we've seen Forge go through and continue to go through, I'm very excited about seeing RAID go through the same one for another 5 years or as Stas said, at least another 10 years. It's also worth noting that in RAID, the engagement is incredibly high. Stas mentioned earlier, players play for many, many hours over a week and over a month. And I think one way that I like to think about it is players in RAID on average spend about as much time in RAID every day as you would spend watching a movie. And that is about them making a choice of how they spend their entertainment hours, and that's very exciting for us.

New games. So we have our established titles and then we take that revenue, that stability, that cash flow, and we funnel it into new games. So today, across the Midcore District, we are building in active development over 10 different games. That's spread across all of the studios. It's not concentrated in any one. It's also about saying what types of games are we building? We don't want to be a group that builds just one type of game or puts all of our eggs in one basket. We're here when we think about merge games, we have Merge Gardens out of Futureplay in Finland, but we believe there's more juice in the merge genre. We believe that we can do even better. So maybe we double down there and say, how can we dominate even more in the merged genre.

But there's also areas that we don't have games in today, such as shooters and card collection. Those are places where we know there's a big market. We know there's an audience. So how do we go grab some of that audience? How do we become a player's go-to shooter or go-to card collection game. So we're doubling down sometimes, and we're taking risks and experiments in others.

What is also important to consider is these games are all made by the teams that have seen success. We're able to say a team that has had success in RAID or Tacticus or Forge of Empires or Formula 1, let's take some of that team and form the new teams and try and get that success again. What it all adds up to is over the next few years, I think through the Midcore District, we'll be launching between 2 and 4 new games into soft launch every year in '26, '27 and '28.

So we've talked about established games. We've talked about new games. Let's talk about a rising star. So Tacticus, Snowprint joined the MTG Group in 2024. And the journey they've been on since then is incredible, as you can see in this graph. And I want to call out 2 particular things that are of note in this journey. The first here highlighted in kind of blue at the bottom is around events and LiveOps. When players come into a game, they don't want to just do the same thing every day, every week and every month. They want new challenges. They want to know that as game developers, we're keeping it alive. It's a living game. It's not been abandoned.

Well, the way we do that is with events and live operations. And what we also often do is connect those into real-world things. So players now expect Christmas events in game. They expect Black Friday sales. They expect something around Halloween. And it's our job as game makers to deliver on that for players' expectations and make sure that they are incredible events.

What that means is just looking at only Q2 in one game, we made over 240 events and LiveOps for our players. Now you can take that number and extrapolate it across all of our games over a year. We're doing thousands and thousands of events for our players every single year to make sure that our games are worth their entertainment time.

The second thing I want to call out here is the big spike as we went into late 2024. Warhammer exists -- sorry, Tacticus exists in the Warhammer universe. And in 2024, as some of you may know, there was another smash hit game on PC and console from Warhammer called Space Marine 2. It's a narrative game, a shooter. So a very different game to Tacticus, but it existed within Warhammer and the hype and excitement around that game was very, very high. It was a critical success, a commercial success. And what it did was generate general interest in Warhammer. People that hadn't played Warhammer for years heard about the console game and thought, "Oh, I'll go and check that out."

And what we were able to do because we are part of that Warhammer universe was take advantage. We were able to, in fact, bring the lead character from that console game and put it into Tacticus as an event for the players. We were able to run ad campaigns and UA with that character. We were also able to run events in the game that connected into the events of the console. So take advantage of that halo effect of interest in the IP that was happening at the time that brought down user acquisition costs, increased player engagement and overall increased the performance for Tacticus.

When we think about the Midcore Division, I think that there are 4 key pillars that it's built on, and I'll go into some of these in more detail in a moment. But unified shared services. As I said before, it's about making sure that all of our studios are able to have incredible services, incredible support to accelerate new game development, take advantage when they have a rising star and keep lean and agile on a studio level. I don't want the studios to replicate a marketing team 6 times. I don't want them to have 6 different research teams. I think it's inefficient, and I think ultimately, it will slow us down. If we can have some of those services centralized and supporting all of the studios, we concentrate that expertise, we concentrate the size of the team in a single central team while still giving the studios what they need when they need it to an incredibly high quality.

What that means then is that studios can stay lean and they can invest more into the core of game development. They can have more people working on more ideas and having a higher chance of success.

Third one, preserving that creativity. Maria spoke about it earlier as well. It's incredibly important that the studios themselves own the games. They own the path of the games. They feel that, that creative control sits at the studio. While I'm a game maker myself, and I'd love to go and have my ideas about all their games, that's not a good way to do it. We need the people on the ground every day living the game to have that creative control.

And finally, by being efficient, by keeping the teams at the right size and by making sure the services are great, we're able to fuel reinvestment into new titles.

To drill down a little bit on the services and the platform side of it. When we acquired Plarium, we didn't just acquire 1,300 of the world's best game makers. We acquired a whole suite of software and processes and other services. That forms the foundation of what will be the midcore shared service platform. It comes in many different guises as well. So data and analytics, we're going to, over the next few quarters, move all of the games in the Midcore District onto a single analytics suite.

What that means is when the data comes in from a game, we can very easily compare it to that data in another game. If we see increases in player engagement in a certain country, we can see if that is specific to the game or if it's a general increase in activity we see across the portfolio. It also means that when we want to launch new games, we're able to very easily compare the performance of those new games with the performance of existing games. Is this showing strong early KPIs? If you don't have anything to reference it to, it's very difficult to tell. By getting all of our games onto a single analytics system, we're very quickly able to tell whether games have potential or not.

Next is tech and tools, which could be many things. But at its core, it's the ability to say one studio has built a system, an incredible chat system, an amazing guild system. How can we take that and make it available to our other studios or somebody builds an amazing HR system, can we make that available to our other studios? What that means is that we're not replicating efforts again and again and again to reinvent the wheel. It keeps us efficient. It also means when one studio is larger and has more resources to build tech that the smaller studios can take advantage of that. And they get all of the benefits of being part of the group.

Marketing. I'll talk a bit more about this in a moment, but like data and analytics, we're also going to move on to a single marketing suite, which means that all of our games will be marketed and controlled through a single piece of software. I'll dig into that in a second.

Then things like product support, player support and game services, these are all of the bits that help make a game run. It's the community management, it's the customer service and things like that.

On the right, though, and I'm saying it again because it's so important, the games have to be owned, the creativity has to be owned and the day-to-day running of them has to be owned at a studio level. That's how we get success.

So I said I'd talk about marketing. So here it is. There's a piece of software that was developed by the Plarium team over many, many years. It's called GoGame. It's an incredibly complex and sophisticated and diverse piece of software for running marketing campaigns, evaluating the performance of those marketing campaigns, looking at player behavior and doing predictive modeling on how those players will be in the future.

We want to make this available to all of the studios in the Midcore District. We're currently implementing it at 2 of the studios, and soon, it will be across all of them. But we're not just going to take GoGame as it is today. We want to combine it with some of the amazing marketing technology that was built at InnoGames over the years. So we're taking the best of the different studios, combining them together, and I think we'll call it something like GoGame Plus, which is then across the entire district.

At the moment, we spend about $300 million a year in marketing across the midcore games. All of that will run through GoGame, allowing us to have a unified platform, unified data and also skills and talent from people that we can move between games. So if you have an incredible marketing person working on RAID: Shadow Legends, for example, and you think that their skills could be better applied somewhere else, well, they'll still be working in the same piece of software, the same data structures, the same systems, and they can very quickly get up to speed and add value in another game.

Direct-to-consumer. So Arnd mentioned it here as one of the drivers of the next generation of growth in gaming, and we believe that very, very firmly in the Midcore District. So direct-to-consumer is about saying players today, when they buy something on an iPhone or an Android, it goes through the App Store, the Apple App Store or the Google Play. Google or Apple takes 30% of that and then the remaining 70% is delivered to us as the developers. Direct-to-consumer allows us to not give that 30% to Apple and Google and keep more of it for ourselves to reinvest in our business.

When a player makes a purchase directly with us through direct-to-consumer, on average, we pay 3% or 4% and all of that goes to the merchant, the credit card company or PayPal or whoever it might be. Direct-to-consumer also allows more players to pay in more different ways. We have players all around the world. And in some locations, different payment methods are preferable and direct-to-consumer allows us to let the player choose how they want to pay.

Direct-to-consumer isn't just one thing. It's actually 3 individual pillars. I'm going to start on the right with direct payments. I'm sure anyone who follows the news will be aware of some of the court cases that have gone on in the U.S. over the last few months. In the U.S. now, on iOS, we're able to offer the user a choice. When they choose to buy something in a game, we're able to show them, here's how much it costs to buy through Apple and then the 30% goes to Apple. Here's how much it costs to buy directly from us. And we can put them, as you can see in the image, right next to each other and then the user gets to make a choice.

Interestingly here, we can give a discount if they buy directly from us or we can add more value, keep the price the same, but give them some bonus, extra equipment, extra coins, extra points in some way. So it's about there offering the user a choice. I think there's an expectation and my belief that this direct payments that we see today on iOS in the U.S. will become more widespread in the coming weeks, months and years. So while today, it's only in the U.S. and iOS, I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver the same experience of choice to more players on more platforms.

The middle is a web store. A web store essentially allows the player to browse a catalog of things that they could buy. They can browse it on their phone, they could browse it on a computer, but it's connected to the game. So when you buy something on the web store, you get that thing in the game. So in this example, we're looking at something from Tacticus. If I was to buy the back-in-action bundle on the web store, it would be a direct purchase from us as the developers, but it would appear in my game completely seamlessly. Today, we have web stores in a number of our games. Formula 1 has it, for example, so does Tacticus, so does Forge of Empires. Going forward, we will roll this out in more of our games. And this is a place where we think there's a chance for the technology to be more unified across the district.

And on the far left is Plarium Play. Plarium Play is on PC and Mac and is essentially a game store where players can go in, download games and then it's there. They have a social network. They can play with their friends. It has features like calendars. But importantly, it's our platform. So Plarium Play is direct-to-consumer. And as we mentioned earlier as well, we recently put Heroes of History on there from InnoGames. So it's no longer just a Plarium Games platform. It's now across the Midcore District, and there'll be more in the future.

And why is it important to have something like Plarium Play? What do we get out of it? Because it requires a lot of work to have a platform, maintain a platform and have all of the systems in place. Well, it's about owning the distribution. When a player comes in, they create an account within Plarium Play, and that's something that we then can look at their behaviors. We can look at what games they play, what games they don't play. And importantly, we can offer them more. We can offer them the ability to plan ahead, see what events are coming up. We can offer them the ability to play other games seamlessly on a single account. So when we see a player is engaging with one game, but hey, maybe their engagement is dropping, maybe we think that they're bored of that game now. We have the opportunity to show them another one of our games and keep them within our ecosystem. If a player is going to leave one of our games, I would much rather they go to another one of our games than leave altogether.

I'm going to speak about AI more later this afternoon. There is an AI breakout session, but I'll speak on it for a couple of minutes now. AI is already here. It's already a part of our industry and many industries around the world. And it's not just about making cool artwork, it's actually impacting every single part of the game development process. So in engineering, we know that it can speed up co-development. On the corporate side, how can our finance teams, our HR teams, our data, how can it be better used by using AI.

Art, we've talked about on the product side, 240 LiveOps are made every quarter in Tacticus. If we can use AI to reduce that workload so that the teams can make 300 LiveOps or 400 LiveOps or they make 240 LiveOps and then have time to work on other things, that's where on the product side, AI can really have an impact. And across a number of studios today, we're already starting to experiment with events that are built not only with AI, but with AI that's been trained on our historical events, so it knows what works for what players.

On the data side, we collect billions of pieces of data about our players every week. That includes what games they're playing, what characters they like, what levels they like, what levels they pass, what levels they fail and hundreds of other things about the game. Far too much for any human or any team to be able to understand all of. So by using AI on our large data, hopefully, we can discover trends, we can discover opportunities and patterns in player behavior to make sure we can keep the games relevant and exciting in the future.

And sound and language, I don't know if any of you heard any of the AI music. Some of it is pretty good, but actually, you'd be surprised how many sound effects today are already made using AI. So you need the sound of an explosion, a car hitting something, a character getting injured. Already today, AI can do an incredible job of making those little sound effects that either you would have to pay a third party for or you'd have to spend a lot of time generating yourself.

And on the language side, Yoav will speak later about the impact that AI around language and localization has had on PlaySimple. But in general, localization today is not just putting some words into Google Translate and hoping, it's about using AI to get the tone right. Is it a friendly translation? Is it an aggressive character? What word do you really mean there? Because in English and in many languages, one word can have many meanings. So using AI for language is allowing us not just to put games into your language, but to make the meaning translate into your language to keep the tone and the character in it as well. But as I said, later on, I'll be going deeper on AI and also showing some real examples and some real data on exactly how much we think AI will be impacting our business.

So when we're doing all of this work, we're building this incredible platform. We're having all of these teams and this technology. What does it mean for groups or studios who join the mid-core district? Well, what it means is that they'll join a district that has plug and play. They can come in and they can have GoGame as a marketing platform. They come in and they can have the data platform and all of those comparisons. They can come in and have access to AI, which will drive innovation and speed up production. It's about making sure that joining the district doesn't mean the same, it means you accelerate, you get better and you get more opportunities.

We've used the phrase a few times. We're looking for our next Snowprint. Alex is the CEO over there. There's only one of him, unfortunately, but we believe out there, we can find more. And these are studios who have incredible teams. They have incredible ideas. They've started to build a game. It could be an IP-based game. It could be their own IP, but joining the district, that's the rocket. That's the accelerator. That's what takes them from either new game or rising star to an established title that lasts for years and years and years. So that's the dream of the Midcore District for M&A.

As was talked about earlier as well, we think there's efficiencies and savings to be found by moving into this district structure as well. So between now and the end of 2026, the goal is over $20 million in savings and efficiencies on a run rate basis. This will come from a combination of different areas. So of course, the technology I talked about today, we should make sure we're getting the best price for that technology. How can we do group deals? How can we make sure that the learnings about what's good and bad is transferred across.

So no money is wasted when we're buying technology and services. It's about vendors and partners. If we're using third parties to help us with something, how do we do a deal where everybody gets access to that third party and people aren't hunting out their own partners where they probably won't get the best deal. And it's about as well headcount. How do we make sure that we have the right people in the right place doing the right thing. If we have teams that are too large for our needs, then we will reduce that team size. But it's not about overall reduction. It's about saying, are the right people in the right place. We need to make more new games, and we need to make sure that those new games have the ability to become established.

So to close out, the key takeaways from today, our top games are evergreen. 5-year, 10-year, that is the norm. That is what we should be looking for, for our big titles. We then reinvest that capital that comes from those games into making more new games. Some of those will work, some of them won't, but those that do become the rising stars, the next Tacticus, the next Heroes of History. And those the district has the machine, the technology, the tools and the people to really make the most of and turn into established titles of the future, the next billion-dollar games like Forge of Empires and RAID. The platform is that flywheel.

And finally, as I said, we'll unlock those savings between now and the end of 2026 to make sure that as a group, we're lean, we're efficient, and we're focused on making the very best games we can for 3 billion gamers around the world. Thank you very much. Over to Yoav.

Hello, everyone. So my name is Yoav. I've been in this industry for quite a long time. I've recently joined MTG, and it's been a real pleasure joining MTG, which has an amazing name in the industry as being a very bold organization. It was not afraid from taking tough decisions and taking very brave moves. So when I got the offer to join MTG, I was super excited. I've worked in big publishers in the past and companies like Playtika, Crazy Labs. In my previous position, I was the Managing Director of Product Madness, where I took the company within 4 years from about $0.5 billion revenues to about $1 billion revenues per year with the highest EBITDA ever. My focus usually as a leader is to build strong cultures because I believe that a strong culture beats any type of strategy. I'm very much focused on results, on nurturing talent and eventually building also systems that you can actually scale across the board and that you can create a sustainable machine that can actually continue to grow.

When you're talking about Casual, Oli spoke about how does it look in Midcore, but Casual is actually when I think when Arnd asked how many people are playing your games and the majority of you raised their hands, I would assume that most of you are probably playing what we call casual games, okay? Casual is a very simple mechanics, okay? You don't have to go very deep into the mechanics. You can learn it very quickly. I always like to say it's like eating a McDonald's, okay? It's not like a commitment you're going to a Michelin star restaurant where you're now sitting for 3 hours and you have to eat first course, second course, dessert and so forth. I have 5 minutes when I'm waiting for the dentist or I'm in the tube. I can just play it. If something -- I don't know, connection is stopping and I have -- my level I lost in the middle, nothing happens, okay? I'm not emotionally engaged into that.

The other part is the monetization. Casual is characterized by a mix type of monetization. Some of it is in-app, like Oli said, when you buy coins, you buy gems. But also, there's a lot of ad monetization with this annoying ads when you play the game and you're seeing that, oh, should I have to see the 30 seconds of ads? Yes, this is how we make our money, okay? But this enables actually to monetize the majority of the players, okay? This is how we make the money. And this is by itself a very big discipline of how do you manage it in a way that on one hand, it's not too intrusive. But on the other hand, you don't let the players play for free because otherwise, it's fun for the players, but less fun for our bank account.

And the third bit is that it's very hard to create strong IPs in the world of casual. There are very few cases of games that manage to build their own IPs. But if you look at the 99% of the games, they don't have IPs. And then when you can't create an IP where you need in order to be able to be the leader in your category or to be able to excel, that's where operational excellence really comes into place. And this is how PlaySimple was designed. So here's a short movie about us.

[Presentation]

So Casual District, we heard about it all day. So PlaySimple is going to be the cornerstone of that district. As Maria said, we're currently a party of one, okay? I like to look at it almost like a blank canvas. We have now the opportunity to draw our dreams there, okay? We can focus on how we want to go and where we want to go. PlaySimple for the people who are less are familiar, we are the #1 in the world in terms of word games. There are a lot of subchannels in the word games like crosswords and cross puzzles and so forth.

If you look at the number of players that are playing our games, think about Sweden for a second. I think you guys have about 10 million people in Sweden. Half of the population of Sweden is playing our games on a daily basis. That's what it means, 5 million DAU, daily active users. Think about it, every second person around this table here is playing our games. That's the massive amount of players we have on a daily basis that are playing -- just playing word games. And that's done not by 1 game and not by 2 games, but actually by a combination of multiple franchises and games that we have had for a long time because usually, when you think about simple games and casual games, you're saying, oh, okay, it goes up and down and disappears. We have games that we have players who have been playing it for over 8 years, constantly challenging themselves. And when you read the comments in the App Store, and they are saying some of them that keeps my brain sharp, that helps me work to be together with my kids, and there's a lot of very positive things you're hearing from the players.

Now it's also been designed in a way that it's not a gaming company. It's actually more of a platform company, okay? Because you know to be able to successfully scale and do these things over and over and over. You can't do it with just hoping to be creative and to do things with hoping it will be lucky. It's very systematic, almost, I would say, on the edge of being very scientific. And this is how the company has been designed.

Sorry, I forgot also to mention, we are based out of India with about 400 employees, which means also that our OpEx costs are very cost efficient. You can compare the cost of India versus the rest of the world, and it's extremely like -- you understood what I meant.

Franchises. So we've got 5 big studios. Each one is managing a set of franchises, which are everlasting. And just to mention a few, we've got Word Search, which is our top growing game, which has been the #1 in the search category. It's been launched about 4 years ago. We've got DTC, what we call, not the DTC that Oli mentioned, okay, direct-to-consumer, but daily themed puzzles that we are actually always asking -- the players is constantly getting different crosswords, and that has been the #1 in its category as well. And we've got the anagram games, which is the typical world games where you think you see a circle. And there we have -- we are quite a big one. We launched it back in 2017, and we've got players still playing it over and over.

And of course, we've got many other titles, including not only world games. We've got also successful green shoots in adjacent vectors to what we are playing today, like in tile matches games and jigsaw and other genres as well that we are seeing quite a very good growth there, which I think all of this is just a testimony for the platform that is inside PlaySimple that enables us to actually generate and churn out a lot of new games and do it in a very successful way.

If you think about the growth PlaySimple had, it's an amazing growth. And especially when you look at it since MTG has acquired the company back in '21, the company grew about 60%, okay, which on average, it's about 15% a year. When you compare it to the growth of the market, of the world market, we outpaced it substantially. And I think that's the strength of PlaySimple at whatever the pace of the industry, given our platform, our technology, our know-how, how to do good, fast follow strategy, we can grow faster than the market itself.

And what's beautiful about it that it's been done purely organically. There was no M&A involved, just utilizing our technology, the LiveOps we had, the analytics and a very, very disciplined user acquisition. So we've actually proven that we can grow in a very profitable way and not just scale for the sake of scaling, but do it in a very disciplined way, which also drives top line together with a strong bottom line.

When you look at our strategy, we are a fast follower. And to do fast follow, you need to be able to have operational excellence. And you can't do in the world of games operational excellency without having a strong platform, a strong technical platform. And that's the core, and this is the heart of PlaySimple. We call this platform Little Engine. And we've got -- and it's touching almost all the life stages of the game. Starting with marketing because in the world of mobile games, I don't know how many of you know, but it's a true science. When we acquire a player, we know exactly how much we paid. We know how much we're going to get at every single point at the customer's life cycle. I know what's going to be the return in a week, in a month, in a year, in 2 and 3 years from today. So therefore, I know that the cohort that I just acquired yesterday, is it a profitable one? If yes, I want to double down on it. If not, we'll reduce the spend and try to do something else.

To do that, we need also, of course, analytics. Without analytics, I cannot know what's happening there. I cannot understand what's driving the engagement of our players and how can I do it much better. To do that, we also need to understand that we have -- the amount of data that we have. It's not done in megabytes, not gigabytes, not terabytes in petabytes. That's the size of data we are processing almost on a daily basis. And out of that, trying to get very quick insights and making sure that we are really focused on -- laser-focused on what we need. And what happens is that once you launch new titles, you're getting more data. And just like Oli said, the fact that we have this data, we can now start learning more things. So it's almost like a perpetuous machine that constantly feeds itself more and become stronger and faster and much, much, much more quicker.

Now what we're also trying to do is that when we develop the platform is to try to it in a way that we can have horizontal scalability that whatever feature that is being developed inside this platform, we drive that across all the different studios. And if a specific studios needs something very specific to their needs, they develop it by themselves. That's exactly how we are doing it. So on one hand, we've got a heavy machine running forward. And if you need customization, each game team does it for themselves, and that keeps the agility together with the ability to scale it for the long run.

Now this platform is also designed in a way that it supports both existing games and new games together because there was a question earlier about is the growth coming from new games. Yes, the majority of our future growth will probably come from the driving of new games, successfully launching more and more new games. Of course, we should never forget the existing games because they are the bread and butter, and we need to make sure they continue to grow above market. But if we want to see the higher growth, it needs to come from new games. And this is exactly how this platform has been structured and it is built.

And if you think about the circle again, we have data and this data drives more insights. With these insights, we can develop better features because we understand what drives the players, what irritates the players. We can understand if the players that we acquired are good players or bad players. That in return drives higher engagement, which in return drives higher revenues, which we can later on invest back in UA, get back more data. and so forth, okay? That's the magic circle of our platform. And that actually helps us to do it in a very structured way to make sure that we are constantly focusing on our margins and are able to also continue to grow.

Now for us, also AI, it's not a question of if we should be there, how we should. It's a must, okay? We don't see any opportunity not to be there. And we need to make sure we are using it in the best way there is in the industry. And it's not a side project. It's embedded very deeply into almost everything we are doing. Of course, there is always much more to do and especially given the pace of how AI is evolving and problems that 2 months ago was super hard to solve.

Today, there is a new software that actually solve that and it's constantly rapidly changing things. And just to share with you a couple of examples here, and if we spoke about user acquisition, which is typically mobile games, that the lion's share of the spend, okay? The way we usually do it, it depends, you need the media buyer who says, hey, I'm taking this $1 or $2 or $10 and spend that in Facebook or Google or any ad network. But when he says, this is where I'm bidding and spending this money. You also need a video, okay? That's the commercial you usually see on the phone.

And there's -- very roughly, there is typically 3 types of commercials, that is what we call the static ones, which is just an image. There is a video, and there is what we call playables. Playables are the fun ones that also encourage you to try and play like a demi-game over the ad itself.

These things are usually quite labor intensive. It takes a lot of time to do it. Sometimes it's quite expensive also to do them. And think about the scale of a company like our size. We have a couple of thousands every month of these assets that we need to produce in order to optimize our UA because if you've got a very good ad, it can actually bring down the cost of -- cost per install, what we call the CPIs. And that, of course, improves the profitability.

So we need to constantly test out new things and different things because something that worked in the last 2 weeks will stop working because players will get bored from it, and we need to find something new. What we've done with AI, we've managed actually to increase substantially the amount of output that we are getting from these teams with the same amount of people just by using smarter tools.

And if you take the playables, which are usually the more converting type of ads, but they are the more complicated one because you do need -- you need an engineer behind the scenes to program the software itself, we'll be able to use AI and actually start churning out very quickly a lot of playables.

Another element is the game assets, Oli spoke about LiveOps, the importance that when a player comes into the game, that the game won't feel boring. Think about the TV when you're coming and you're watching the same TV show again and again and again, you'll probably switch to another channel. But we want you to stay on our channel, so we need to make sure the game is constantly alive and new things are happening.

So if you think about game assets, like making sure when you enter you're seeing a different type of graphics, it used to take on average about a week work or 4.5 days. Using AI, we managed to bring it to 1 hour. Okay? And I'm sure this is just because we are not efficient enough, we can even bring it even more to that. So this basically enables us to do things much, much, much faster and drive much, much better capabilities and effectiveness.

What I want to share here, you're seeing the video here is another 2 examples of how AI is actually being used in our studio. The first one, we are talking about how you can -- using all the data that we have usually, typically, you need an analyst to be able to bring you some insights and provide the information. So here, you can use just text to SQL, what you call you call to write in a natural language, you're writing the query what you want. I want to understand why did the last 2 cohorts, the retention of day 1 dropped by 50%. You're writing it.

And then what happens in a miraculous way, there's an SQL written behind it, which you can execute. And then you're getting the results behind it, okay, which this actually unlocks a lot of insights, which in the past you had to pass a query from a data scientist or an analyst to do that, which could have taken days. Here, the product manager can just write a query by himself, get the result and just start acting on it in a much, much, much faster way.

The other example is looking at videos, okay? And if we wanted to create high-quality videos like the one you've seen or the Grandpa that you saw in our movie in the beginning, I said this is the best video in my life. These are what we call -- used to call CGI movies, okay? Computer-generated imagery.

In my past positions when we wanted to do ads based on that, it would cost between $50,000 to $100,000 to create one single ad like this, that could be 30 to 60 seconds. Today, with AI it cost us just the subscriptions of the AI to do that. And what's more interesting is that in the past, you had like this content creator, which was the creative guy says, let's do this and this. It would pass the idea to a video editor and this video editor will work on it for about 1 week or 2 weeks and create it. Here, we can do it now just like content creator, just comes with this idea, type it on, moves it between a few tools, and boom you're getting the video out. You can push it to UA, that can test if it's worthy or not. And within like couple of hours, we can decide if you want to spend more money on this creative or move on to the next one.

So bottom line, it actually drives much more speed, innovation and helps us to expand the margins because we don't need so many people to drive much more output there.

When we're looking at our growth, we've got like 3 axises, okay The first axis is how we grow with our existing titles to new geos, or what we call localization. And especially in the genre, that PlaySimple today operates, which is words, becomes super critical, okay? We cannot just expand just by using Google Translate.

The second thing is launching new titles in the core markets where we are operating. And the third part is expanding to other genres inside the casual category.

And what we are currently doing, we are executing all these 3 altogether because we believe given the platform we have, there is no limitation, and we don't have to decide one or the other. We can actually do all 3 in parallel.

So the first axis is the growing by localization. And think about the word about each word can mean different things in different languages. And if we're trying to do to translate it and using Google Translate, we probably would have been get stuck, if I think about the Crossword when you've got a question, and I'm putting the answer, and it's not really the answer because I'm not a native speaker. It creates a lot of frustration, players won't play our game.

So given AI, it actually helped us a lot to be able to translate it in the right context and be able to do things in much, much more effective way. Doing that, we are seeing that we can actually achieve being the #1 in the top geos that we wanted to be, like in Germany, in Brazil, in France and others. And just to understand the impact on that for us, if about -- I gave the example before about Sweden, about every second person in Sweden is playing our game. Now what's happening, 70% of the growth we had last year in our DAU came because of localization. So today about third, about 40% of our DAU comes from non-English-speaking category. So for us, it's about like adding give or take Stockholm, the population of Stockholm to our DAU because we unlock different languages, actually 28 different languages that we could have done that.

The second axis is launching new games. And when you launch a new game and when you -- we're going to have a panel about it later, there's a lot of challenges, okay? How do you know if the game is going to be successful? How do know it's going to be hit? Are we investing enough money? Are we not investing enough money? Is it going to be a traction or not? And what we've seen, given the platform that PlaySimple has, given that what I said that we are a fast follower, and we have the operational excellence, we're able to scale games quite quickly, quite strongly and actually achieve good revenues given our platform because we are getting the right signals at the right time, telling us it's worth to continue with that or we should stop and use our capital to do something a different game and stop this game.

What we're also seeing is that on the scaling new games, it's another challenge, okay? Because we are -- if I take all these examples, I said, okay, you've got the green shoots. Now you want to see the rising stars. This is where, I would say, the big boys are separated from the men, okay? This is where you're starting to see in reality where the big companies who knows how to manage games at scale, knows how to do the proper LiveOps, how to manage the monetization in the right way. This is where you're seeing the differences between one lucky company that has one title versus a company that does that on a sustainable and consistent way.

In PlaySimple just 2 examples here, there was a game that we were at in the word search, we were about 2 years late to the party, okay? But given the way that we are operating, we are able to execute things. We managed to get quite quickly within 3 years to become 70% of the market in that category, and we were fighting against quite strong competitors, okay? It's not like small studios, but big studios, strong studios. But because we have the know-how and the right platform. And then in that capabilities, we managed to do that.

Our latest release, we managed to get like within 6 months to get 30% of the category. And if you look at the chart on the right, you'll see that there was another competitor that was launching roughly at the same time we were. And we managed to get about 3x more market share because of -- as compared to him because we have the right platform, the know-how and this nice flywheel inside our platform that helped us achieve these things.

So when you're looking at the casual space, you can say, okay, our competitors or the word games, adjustment vectors. But we are saying we need to look at it much wider. And you hear it from Maria, you heard it from Oli. You heard that our competitors in reality is the time of the player, okay? We are very generous on the time. I want to make sure that when a player has the time to use -- when he's raising his phone, I want to get a big chunk of that time playing one of our games or one of our apps, okay? And when you look at it on a wider scale, we're saying, why limit ourself just to casual games. We can look at the casual apps, okay? Because of the platform we have, it doesn't matter if I'm marketing a game or marketing an app.

If I want to monetize the game and I think Arnd said it very nicely about Duolingo, okay? The minute they started putting some gamification in it. That's when they started to grow. And we are expert at gamification. And we have the tools and we have the know-how to do that. Now part of this growth will be done organically by us developing things and continue to expand. Some of it will be done inorganically, okay? By doing M&As and driving that M&A, okay? In this M&A, will have two accesses. One, the content, either apps or games, and another access would be complementing our platform. If we're seeing a technology which is superior to us or closes gaps that we currently have, that's what we're going to do, okay? Because the heart of PlaySimple is the platform that helps us drive that in a sustainable way.

Now what we want to do is to lead in the casual entertainment world, okay? And to do that, we need to look at that market. And the casual market is a very fragmented market, okay? It's a market that hasn't gone through massive consolidation yet, which gives us a lot of opportunities and a lot of targets that we can actually find and we can actually complement ourselves.

And what we want to do is to take these targets and bolt them on to our platform and make sure that we can create these synergies, both efficiencies, but also business-wise and operationally-wise, okay? That can help us drive the classic one plus one equals three.

So I'm very excited to say, as Maria said that we are evaluating a potential IPO in the Indian market, which will help us to actually unlock M&A currency that we can use to accelerate our plans going forward to start to becoming the #1 Casual District in the world.

So just to summarize this presentation. I have about 4 more minutes, so I'll -- I won't take that, so don't worry. One, we have a very sustainable business. We've proved over and over and over that we can grow and it's not luck, okay? It's systematic. It's done based on data. It's almost, I would say, a science of how to do it. We've got a very scalable platform, which is based on technology and AI together that help us actually build up in a very strong and robust way, which is almost agnostic, I would say, to what we are doing.

We've got also a very strong pipeline of new games, which is the future growth of our company, okay? And that also, given our fast follow-up approach enables us to turn around if we're seeing a good opportunity, we can seize it very quickly, and get out to the market. And given our platform, we can capture a very strong market share. And we've built a very strong foundation, okay? But now we want to accelerate that and double down on that and make sure that we can actually become the #1 in the world, and we're going to do it via more AI and much more M&As. And I believe this was set ourselves as a Casual District to become this next power -- sorry, next to be -- to become the next growth engine for MTG. So thank you very much.

Thank you very much. No, Yoav please stay on stage. We're going to keep you on stage for a little bit longer. So this is an opportunity just for a short Q&A with Oliver and Yoav. So you guys are in the middle as usual. Anyone who wants to ask questions, just raise your hand and the mics will come out, and we are open to questions from the chat as well.

Yes. Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken. So I'm just curious around the platform integration, what kind of risk and hurdles do you see a potential time plan there?

So on the Midcore side, we're already executing it. So GoGame, the marketing technology and PDP, which is the data and analytics technology. We're already implementing into Hutch in London and Snowprint here in Stockholm. So from an execution point of view, it's the same as any software, make sure that it fits with your old data, make sure the engineers and the team know how to use it, make sure that you find any bugs and fix it. So from an execution point of view, so far, so good, I would say.

Time line, we don't want to do it all at once because we want to make sure that we do the integration, we test it, and we see the expected uplift. So I'd say, again, by the end of 2026, we expect to make those cost savings, I would put a similar kind of time line on a lot of the integrations. But as I say, we're already underway with many of them.

Simon from ABG again. I have a question regarding the Midcore District. And it looks like you are moving over some of the costs centrally. So naturally, this has an impact on the studios, of course. So my question is how do you plan to have the incentive structure and the financial responsibilities for the studios?

Yes. So for us, it's about making sure that we're all on the same kind of incentives. What we don't want is a central team to be incentivized and measured on something wildly different from the studios. So it's about making sure that provide really high-quality services to the studios, but ultimately, the success of the game is the measure of our success. And that's what we need to make sure that the service teams are also a part of creating and are measured on.

As far as costs and things, we will have a central district services and those costs will be passed on to the studios. So the studios will pay for whatever those are, which means that there is that expectation of quality as well. And if the studio doesn't feel they're getting it, then we need to solve for that, but it will be provided to the studios at a price.

All right. A follow-up on that. Can you mention any kind of metrics you want to evaluate our benchmark the studios on?

Around the games or the services.

In general, for the studios, how you incentivize them for salaries, bonuses, stuff like that.

So when we think about the studios, I don't think the future is particularly different to the way that we think about success today. It is, are you able to scale marketing to a high level for your games? Are you able to have a positive return on that ad investment over a time period of 1 year, 1.5 years or 2 years.

Are you able to make sure that the revenue per player goes up over time. So I don't think the future-looking KPIs are really for the studios that much different from the historical ones.

Jacob from Danske Bank. Just one question on the direct-to-consumer. That was 35 -- no, 31% of sales right now. How much is direct payments currently? And what type of potential do you see there in the long term?

Yes. So because at the moment, it's only on iOS, only in the U.S.A., only in some of our games, it's still a relatively small percentage, I would say, the overall direct-to-consumer is mostly driven by PC, so Forge of Empires and RAID in the PC. Long term, I think the direct payments have a lot of potential because the user experience is smoother, you don't have to go to a web store, you don't have to go to a different platform. It's right there within the app. And when you click buy, it's one click away using Apple Payment or whatever.

So I think we probably see the most potential for growth in that direct payment. But obviously, we are somewhat hampered at the moment by legislation and the rules. And so we wish we could accelerate more, but until we can offer it to more platforms and more locations, that will be the limitation on the potential, not what we can do. But once those are gone, which I believe they will be, then I expect to see a really meaningful increase in those.

Martin Arnell, DNB Carnegie. My first question is to Yoav. How do you view the competitive landscape in casual and word games? And how do you expect it to progress in the coming years? Could consolidation? How will that impact you?

So we're starting to see consolidation in the market. But what we are saying is, again, I believe that we are suited in the best way because of the platform we have because you need to drive the operational excellence because one if you look at the one of our competitors, Tripledot, for example, they acquired now quite a big portfolio. They are very much focused currently, I would say, internally. They are seeing the integration takes a lot of effort. And it's very easily in a market like ours, if you're not laser-focused, you can drop talk the ball.

So for us, I see it actually as an opportunity to even capture more market share given the fact that they are currently much more focused internally. And while until they'll be able to look back and look outside in a much better way, we'll be already 1 or 2 steps ahead of them.

And do you expect word games to grow share in mobile games market?

I think they're going to grow currently, we're talking about 5% growth. The market is -- the world market is growing, okay? We believe we can outgrow this market just on the word category. And the rest of the growth that we'll provide probably will come with new games coming from new categories, from adjustment categories.

And I have one question on Midcore as well. It seems that there is, of course, an element of luck here when you show the charts here on the games and all of a sudden, Space Marines impacted positively. And do you see any special events going into next year that could impact any of your largest games in either a positive or negative direction?

I don't think I can speak to what Warhammer's plans over the next couple of years. That's not really our business. But I think Formula 1 is a really interesting use case. And I'll speak historically but I think you can project that forward. When a Formula 1 season has one driver completely dominate or a single team completely dominate, the overall interest in the sport goes down. Social media views, TV views, and that is then reflected for us in the game. So a good season in Formula 1 will absolutely have an impact on how we see the game and how performance and interest in the game goes.

So I won't point to anything specific, but I will say that it does have an impact on us, and I look forward to a good Formula 1 season every year. This season for those that follow has been very, very exciting, and we are seeing that reflected in the game's performance as well.

I have two questions for you, Yoav. Firstly, how long have you been involved with PlaySimple?

I officially took over in beginning of September. I started my onboarding in beginning of August.

And how dependent are you on the listing to drive consolidation? Or do you think it can happen anyway?

I think we can do it. I think that's more of question for Maria. But what my understanding is that it will help us, but it won't stop us. Even if we don't get listed, we can still get our plans. The question is the timing, how fast are we being able to do it? Maybe Maria is better equipped to answer that.

As you as an insider, is the company in a shape to be listed?

Yes.

All right. It looks like -- thank you very much. It looks like we have no additional questions. So for our next segment, we are going to welcome Maria, who will host a panel on new games. Maria?

Fantastic. Good to be back on stage, and we sort of anticipated that we would get some questions on new games. We already addressed some of them, but I would like to bring some of our talented leaders in the group on stage help me talk to you about how will we make sure that we drive continuous successful games to the market? And how do we think about it? And how can we also leverage us becoming a big group.

So welcome on stage. I will not introduce each of you individually because I think you do that better justice on your own. Some faces have been familiar with you. You already heard them and then also some phases are new for the day today.

So Alex, I thought we'll start with you. And before you answer my question, I think you can just give a few words about your background. But we have spoken about your game today, Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus. And even when we bought it, I think even the market was looking at us a little bit why do you buy such a small game. And we said, well, we met the team. We spent a lot of time with them. It's an amazing team, and we do believe that this is going to be highly accretive to our growth it will be short-term margin dilutive, but growth accretive. And I think that's exactly what we've seen, which makes me super happy.

But sort of it wasn't your first game. So can you elaborate a little bit sort of what makes Warhammer 40,000 a success? And what did you learn also from the previous games?

Yes, for sure. And just start off, Alexander, CEO and Co-Founder of Snowprint. I've been in the games industry a bit more than 20 years. I've exited twice. The previous exit was to King, where I helped build the Mobile Business Unit and Candy Crush mobile. And then shifted over to focus on more midcore type of games with Snowprint Studios.

And to get to your question about kind of the development process for Tacticus and relying that back to new game development. There's, of course, many different ways that games can be developed. For us, it's at the core of our identity that we believe that if you want to be the best in the world at something, you benefit from keep practicing at it. So maybe that's an uncontroversial belief, but that's what shapes us and what forms us.

So our strategy is built on continuous iteration and continuous learning. So we've been -- we can break that down into maybe -- roughly there are three focus areas for us. The first one is focus; the other one is the iterative process; and then we have what we call creativity within constraints.

So for the focus side, making games is incredibly hard. So we are looking for every edge that we can get, which means that we are building on top of all the strengths that we have over the years when we are looking to the next game to have benefits on actual -- on our focus, on our reiteration speeds, and also on knowledge base around the users that are playing our games.

And then when we get to kind of the iterative process, what that means that the most tangible example for us is that every game that we've created and we have forked from our previous games, which means that we are starting with a fully featured game that we can start iterating on, prototyping in, testing, rip out the parts that we don't need at the moment. And then put them back in when we need them, add new things or improve on them.

Which brings us then to the final part of that creativity within constraints because then we are looking at what puzzle pieces are we adding back? How can we make them the best puzzle pieces that we do put back in? And just kind of continue to evolve within our genre and continue to make each the game better than the previous one.

Fantastic. Well, you've done an amazing job, sir, that we're very hopeful and happy about. And then again, that's what we thought as well when we bought you.

Looking at the other side, on Helen, I mean, first of all, we're so happy to have the Plarium team here today and also have you joining our village. You've done a lot of work in different roles within your 10-year with Plarium, and happy for you to give a few words later on it. But also in your new role now, you're going to be responsible with shared services. So I think you would be very interested to hear from you sort of as you have sort of telling the game developers, bringing exciting new games to the market. So how can we having by shared services actually help accelerate both the scaling up and also maybe how we actually iterate new games development by leveraging shared services.

Yes. Yes, I will say a few words about self. My name is Helen. Currently, I am a General Manager of Plarium Ukraine. This is the largest game development studio within Plarium. The studio that is actually behind the RAID game and many other games and also the foundation of the shared services that will become the part of the district and will elaborate and leverage other studios with its resources is actually many of these teams have also been born and built within Plarium Ukraine.

As Maria said, I already have been with the company forever, like for more than 13 years now. And I have gone together with the company through all the transformations. And I think in all my roles within this transformation, some of these transformations I was leading, some of these transformations I was supporting, some of his transformation that was supporting other leaders to go through. So yes, it's been an interesting journey.

And in the new Midcore District, I am going to be -- my domain will also be with the shared services that we really want to elaborate and leverage the game development studios, which are the part of the district.

And I actually was really excited to hear what Alex was saying and when I was listening to Yoav, I was also thinking that, well, if I had to answer that question, I would use the same keywords like evolve, learning, learn from the mistakes, constant development because that's the same what is at the core of our games and at the core of our success.

We, in Plarium have always seen the games as the long evolving like service, long evolving projects, game as services. We also say that we play an infinite game, if you know what I'm talking about. So it's not only about the product. It's also our business philosophy. We think long term and we plan the games to stay long and to become evergreen and to support them.

And one of the things that we believe in is the people, the team and our teams are growing together with the projects. And when we start the new project, the core people that have learned hard lessons of scaling, hard lessons of failing, hard lessons of success of the live games, they become the core for the new games development and their successors, the team that has grown within the live game, they continue keeping the momentum for the live games. So it's the whole like circle of learning taking the successes learning from mistakes and moving on with the next game with this acquired experience from the previous projects. So this is also what we believe in.

Another thing, I think the second is, not secret, but again, part of our philosophy is that game development, we see it as art, it's creativity, it's the creation, it's the ambition to create something new. The game development teams are always in the search of new ideas, are always in the search of okay, what else can we do? What are the other things that we can bring into this -- into the world that we're building.

But what we have also learned and I think Alex was also talking about it, and I think Stas will say about it is that we want to find the right balance between art and science between ambition and discipline. That is why everything that we do, whether it is a live game that we need to keep the momentum or the new games want to prove it and we want to support it with the data as soon as possible as big as possible. That is why the data-driven approach, the analytic culture, let's call it, this is also the part of everything that we do, whether it's a live game when we have lots of data from existing users from the market. We know everything, as Yoav was saying, we are also very much data-driven. We know everything about our players from the moment that they start playing our game, and we can use this data in order to build and to continue the game to be live as long as possible.

And also when we developed the new game, we try -- again, we have built in Plarium, the green-light process that helps the new games to have very clear milestones and to have a very clear criteria of success based on the KPIs based on the play tests, based on the market research as soon as possible. Because, again, the ambition and the creativity of the game development teams has to be supported by data because on the one hand, it is a very creative hit-driven business because we want to have hits. We want to excite people. We want to create this amazing experience. But on the other hand, it is business, and we understand that, and we want to find the balance between the ambition and the discipline.

And another thing that we have been developing in Plarium, that's exactly what we are going to elaborate and to use and to develop as a part of the new structure of the Midcore District. Oliver was saying a lot about it, is the shared services, the teams that have grown their expertise that they have grown their professionalism in this team working with the big mature games, like RAID, for example, or the other games that we have had. And this team are able to provide the services and they are able to support the games at the different stages of their development from other different studios.

I will repeat what Oliver said, which means that probably the team will not be -- will not need to build their own analytics data platform from the very beginning because it's complicated, it's cost efficient. It's highly like engineering and technologically demanding project, but we can already provide the data platform, the analytic culture, the team of analytics that will work with that.

And this -- you have seen in the presentation, there are quite a lot of different functions that we see as a shared one. And our main ambition within the district is to create the ecosystem, create the environment that will support and that will enable the game studios to be successful, to create more successful games to build them better, to build them faster. When they rely on already very professional services and very professional tools and very professional platforms that have already been tested with the large mature games and that already ready to operate.

I think it took quite a lot of time. Sorry about that...

Very comprehensive. But on that note, just a follow up then with you, Stas, because you mentioned a little bit bringing sort of talent from what your learnings from what you've done in the past, what works, what doesn't work. I mean, from your point, Stas, I mean, we heard you talking about RAID and every time I hear you speaking about RAID and your team, I mean, I always get so excited because it's amazing the depth of experience.

But how does it work then work on such a big game, can you actually leverage some of that skill set also by inspiring and bringing that into making new games because it is fundamentally different, having a small startup versus very big established game like RAID.

Yes, sure. Well, of course, it's based -- every time is based on the talent -- talented people. But outside of this, talented people help you to create something big. And -- but there is a lot of other stuff that will help you to do it in an efficient way. It's very important because, for example, if you building the game, at some point, you want to scale and you will want to make much more releases than you do.

And at that moment, in your company, there is a culture kind of development culture that already -- and you know that some development teams or maybe project managers, so many other people already done that, you can ask for help. You can ask for just to be a consultant.

But what Helen mentioned, if this core team has already seen it, for example, on RAID and then the core team is working on another product, it won't be a surprise for them that now you have the parallel releases. No, we've already done it, and it's like the past they've already went. And at the same time, it's still a lot of people with their expertise who can help with this process. And while -- after you build the process in an appropriate way, and it's about everything. It's not about only the development. It could be support, it could be community. How you -- even the game design, how you do the game design is very important because it's creation, generation of the ideas, but it still should be like Helen mentioned, in a kind of a disciplined way. It's very important.

So if you have this culture and this culture is established by the people, it's much more efficient and easier to share this with other teams and to -- I would like to say to export this to another products to the new products you are trying to launch. That's how it works, I guess, from our side.

Fantastic. And moving then, I mean, you can argue the at the bottom end of that section, you'd represent more core of our midcore games. And then let's move to the very more causal with you, Yoav, as you said, you're fast follower. And I think someone in the audience also said, it's a highly competitive market, which for sure it is. So how do you make sure to keep the iteration, getting games to the market fast and also now you're moving outside of the word category?

So I think the first thing is to understand the market size of the opportunity of the game, okay? Because the effort of developing a game is the same, okay, in our business. So we need to make sure the size of the price is big enough. So if someone pitches, let's say, a game which the market size is $10 million, it's not interesting, okay? We need to make sure we're looking at $200 million, $300 million opportunity, so that when we are gaining market share, there is enough meat on the bones there.

The second thing is once we launch it, we want to make sure that we are following very clear KPIs because we do know what a good game looks like, okay? And we also know that if a game doesn't get out of the gate, we want to scale it with these KPIs, let's not invest in it.

So we have quite a clear methodology of saying, okay, you've got each iterations to get to, let's say, the first day retention, okay? Day 1 retention means if I bought 100 players yesterday, how many are going to still play the game today. So if they are not hitting a specific number, we're saying, okay, do you know why it didn't happen? If the answer is no, then let's move on. If the answer is yes, I know what I need to improve. We're giving them a few more iterations. If they are still not able to get there, we have to say, okay, let's move to the next opportunity. So we want to have a very fail-fast methodology in that case.

And do you find it being difficult, kill your darling?

It's always hard. By the way, it's always a tough balance between following that very ruthless methodology versus the time when the team says, look, I know I failed 3 times, but we really believe in that game and there's going to be a success behind it. So that's why I'm saying as much as it's almost scientific and almost like binary, yes or no, sometimes you do need to put your faith in the team, especially if it's an experienced team and tell them, yes, I'm giving you another 2 months, for example, but that's where we're ending it because tough part, as you said, it's killing the babies and learning that don't get too emotion, too connected to the games.

Just following up on what Stas said before about the culture, I think to be able to drive successful games is you need to have a culture we are not afraid to fail. On the contrary, failure is a good way to learn as long as there's lessons learned and you can implement what you failed about because I think this is one of the recipes for success.

I agree. Coming back to you, Alex. I mean, we have different types of IPs in our portfolio, I mean we clearly have RAID, which is an amazing homegrown IP. I mean, you work with Warhammer IP. I mean how do you think sort of -- and when you think about maybe leveraging an IP versus building your own sort of how do you think about that? What are the pros and cons? And sorry, is that a given success if you work with the Warhammer sort of IP?

I wish, it [indiscernible], far from it. But what is given is we know that there will be an audience that is interested in what we are doing. So it's derisking quite a lot for us.

But when we approach it, we approach it in a bit different way than from RAID, for instance, where we do a full integration with the game. So it is a Warhammer 40,000 game. While with RAID, you're doing multiple different integrations and you have your own IP.

The benefits from us is that, again, it feeds back into focus. We get a full universe that's just full of characters, full of lore, and we can be creative within that space. And also speaking a bit to kind of the luck factor that was mentioned over here, we are choosing the IPs quite carefully. We are looking at universes and IPs that continuously deliver these types of opportunities that there aren't just one-offs. So we would be much less likely to look at one movie, blockbuster movie that does one movie and then maybe a sequel in 3 years' time, but rather collaborate and work with IPs that are continuously growing, that are basically kind of already on a LiveOps schedule that we know that we can latch on to and that we also know that we can enhance. So we have kind of this symbiotic relationship between what we are doing and what is happening in the rest of the IP.

So that's a key criteria. But also to the point of how big can it be, it needs to be able to support at least $100 million plus yearly run rate revenues. So the IP itself and also what new people we can bring into the IP needs to have that type of ceilings.

Fantastic. No, it is quite -- I mean, the process just behind figuring out which IP actually marries with the game. I mean it's quite a thorough process to actually design on that and also understand the reach of the IP.

Yes, and not having it being something that just feels retrofitted or that is kind of just a skinning. It needs to go down into the core and the spirit and the ethos of that IP. Otherwise, you'll be called out by the players quite quickly.

Yes. The community can be quite brutal sometimes. And a good note, they do love our games, so that we are happy for it.

On a different note, I mean, I think -- I mean, we -- usually before also I said it as well, I mean, our core games is a bread and butter. That's what we have. I mean we want to invest in more new games. But at the same time, you always have x amount of resources to allocate. So how do you think about that? Maybe I look more at sort of both Stas and Helen on this one because you're both having, I mean, amazing games, live games that you support. We would love to scale up new games. Like how do you think about allocating resources, promoting and building up new games and supporting them versus actually putting eggs in a more secure basket, you can argue with existing live games.

Well, I'll start a little bit. It's always finding the right balance. And the balance once you find it, it's never stable. You always need to redefine this balance again and again, depending on what is happening with the games.

Usually, again, when the game started, I told you a little bit how we do the core team of the existing live game that is in momentum. We understand it. We see the strategy of development of that game for several years ahead. We know that it's working. That is the moment -- and there is a team that's already fully operated and has grown together with the team -- with the project, with the live game.

Then the moment starts when we start thinking, okay, maybe it's time to launch the new project, which means that the core team, usually, it's like 5, 4 enthusiasts, people they are doing it usually as a side project after they have done everything else with the existing one, they start exploring ideas. This is called the ideation stage. They try different ideas. They look at the visuals, they look at the technical challenges. They look at the market. They think, okay, what do we feel. First, it starts always as a passion one. What do we feel that we want to, what we learned with the previous game that we want to do better in the new game. So it starts like the ideation with a small team with some prototypes usually as a side project.

And then when the team, this little core team has enough belief into what they're doing, has enough -- has a certain vision what the new game is going to be about, then I think we start going through this green-light process that we said, the same as you have. We have a very clear and very clear, there is a green-light committee. There is a clear criteria of a certain stage of the development of the project. So the team -- it's like the North Star of the team, okay, in order for us to pass to the next stage, we need to clarify this, whether it's the vision or the artwork or some technical prototyping, then the play test starts, whether we see that this game will be accepted by the market, whether there is a market for that game and all these things. So it's pretty thorough. We created this project -- we created this process when we actually did a very serious work on analyzing our success stories and also analyzing our failures. So we kind of have this understanding.

But it starts as a fashion project as a side project. And then at a certain level, when we have this understanding, when we have the vision, when we have the first initial proofs or signals from the market, from the research, from the very initial data that yes, we can do that. Then we try to find this balance into investing into the development of the new project because I think one of the interesting slides was when Oliver were showing is that midcore games are pretty heavy on the development efforts. They're pretty complicated and they require the resources and they're pretty like, again, complicated and for example, like RAID, which is constantly delivering content to the players, and that's a huge amount of work.

So at a certain point, we need to make a decision. We need to find this right balance between keeping the live game live and investing into the new game, investing into the new project. So we understand how it's developing through the stages. But again, there is a lot of science in that, less passion at that moment. And also, I wanted to reflect on what Yoav was saying and when Yoav was presenting, I was actually telling myself, I think we have found the magic solution how to make successful games. You just need great creative ideas and the discipline in execution.

It's not that simple, but yes, because, again, we are talking about the same things despite the fact that we are different clusters with different districts with different games in them. So yes, and then the right balance between passion and science and discipline and execution.

Yes. And from the product side, is a kind of legend that the good manager is working on getting ready someone to replace him in the future -- yes, yes, to make myself abandon. So the good, I guess, Director or Product Director should be ready, should prepare his product for this moment when the focus will be not fully on his product, to be ready to give maybe some people from your team to another team, but to build the whole architecture of updates and everything that is in the product in a way that you will not be harmed because of this.

This is the main idea. like we've started to build, again, all the LiveOps features because we needed LiveOps, but some of them, we started to build like in 2023 because we are -- we know that there will be a moment when we will decrease the amount of the development. But we still want to be on the same level of giving something new to the players. So we are doing tools. We are doing tools to be efficient to give the content to our players. And that, I guess, the main thing is understanding that this moment will happen and let's get ready to it. Why not? It's the most efficient way.

Yes. No, very good. But as we heard today, RAID has a very long journey ahead of themselves. So...

Yes, it is still a lot.

[indiscernible] games coming up next to RAID.

Cool. Moving back to you, Yoav. I think what was exciting on your slide, and we talked a lot about it as well is, I mean, yes, you made an amazing position in word games. And I think now you're starting to successfully scale also games outside of the word category, which is different games. Do you actually work and iterate the new games development differently as you're working with games that may have a different game engine and sort of meta game version on it?

So I think, yes, the answer is different genres require different product expertise. The question, how much do we stretch away from core? If it's very adjacent to core, you can use the existing team and the existing capabilities. If it's like we're going to do a Match 3 game, for example, which we don't have the expertise, then by definition, we need to bring a product -- someone who has the product expertise or the genre expertise to help us with that. We need to develop capabilities that we don't have like in-app monetization because we are very much focused on ad monetization and managing economy, managing monetization in the stores, building the packages is a different story. So we will need to complement ourselves with this.

And this is what I said, either we do it organically or M&A. But the platform and the base is quite similar because if you think about UA, it doesn't matter if I'm marketing this game or another game, it's still the same discipline of understanding what's my ROAS, ROAS is the return on ad spend, what's the cost that it's going to cost me, how much LTV I'm creating there. If I need to analyze the game, it's the same metrics. It doesn't matter if it's a mid-core or a casual game. We're looking at attention and when is the conversion happening, when -- how long they are surviving and so forth. So there's -- I would say, 80% of what is needed to go to another just in second vectors organically is there. The rest is product expertise, of course.

We got a great question earlier from the audience on how many shots of the goal do we want to have and how can we improve the accuracy thereof and what should be our target sort of number of games to be launched. And I mean, if you would dream to aspire, I mean, as you see probably get time to market is much faster in PlaySimple than what it is for mid-core games because we have to be a little bit more patient there. But I mean, if you would dream, I mean, where would you see and we can go through that...

The way we approach it, we approach it, we're very data-driven, very systematically. We are saying, okay, let's understand in the next 3 years, how much we're going to gain from the existing games, okay, given what we -- our ambition to outgrow the -- to outpace the market a bit, and that sets a specific goal. And I was saying the rest needs to be complemented by new games. And the cycle of new games is always like it goes high investment and only then you're starting to see the profits or the revenue coming up. So the more new games we launch, then our EBITDA will go down, okay? But down the road, it will be -- we're seeing much, much more massive goal.

On the other hand, if we don't invest enough, then yes, we'll protect our EBITDA in the short term, but in the long term, we'll have a problem. So it's about more, I would say, a policy approach of how tolerant we are to eroding a little bit our EBITDA for the long run. And giving that sweet spot, which balances our shareholders' appetite to decrease the margin. This is where we're saying that's the amount of money we can actually spend on new games because the spend is -- the cost of people is relatively for asset base is low, okay, because we are based in India. The higher amount is the amount of UA. That's what really makes the biggest dent in the P&L. And that gives us about the budget that we can actually utilize in order to launch the games.

So if you know, for example, that we need to launch 2 new games successfully every year to be able to drive double-digit growth. And for that, we need x amount of millions for UA. We know that also the funnel means that if we're going 1 out of x, we're going to be successful. So we need to have 2x at the top line of the funnel to be able to try, fund enough UA for all the attempts and the scaled games. And that's the number of games we're going to do. That's our approach and methodology for deciding how much to invest for that.

But ideally, as a game level, I would love to do as many new games. That's what excites everyone. I think in the studio, and I'm sure I'm speaking on behalf of everyone here, like if you tell people develop an existing -- a new game, everyone's eyes will shine and would love that.

Any reflections from the rest of the line?

I think our approach is probably quite different. I think here is the differences start to show scale, we probably are thinking about the same way. But when it comes to how often do we want to put something new out is much more seldom. We -- for us, it's probably every 3 or 5 years that we want to kind of kick something off. It's quite big productions with very high upside, of course, as well. But the -- you also see it with the team that they -- when they start one of these games, it is an amount of passion. They are typically very attached to the IP.

So they want to be able to continue to grow the game over many, many years. And we want to grow the company responsibly. So that means that we cannot have too many irons in the fire at the same time. So have something that grows to something very, very stable, that has good profit margins, that has a healthy and thriving and growing community, and then we can start looking into the next project. So much slower tempo in putting new things out.

I'm nodding very actively because I think it's -- we have pretty much the same approach, as Alex was saying, as long as we see that we have live projects that are stable, that are predictable, that are, again, stable in terms of what they can deliver in like 2, 3 years perspective, even more, then is the moment when we can start thinking about launching the new one because also the time for production of the game to actually be launched at a certain level, it's much, much longer and with much, much more efforts with much, much more resources that required for the mid-core. So I think our -- is very close to Alex.

And so we think very carefully how to have this balance of stable revenues and stable profits of the existing game and investing and slowly growing sometimes slowly, sometimes faster growing the new teams and check in and always check in whether we are on the right path, whether we should continue the development, whether we should continue investing in production or whether we should stop and get back to another idea because this one is not proven by the market and doesn't show good signals.

So our iterations of new projects are also longer. But I would also say like something once in 2, 3 years to have something big that would be amazing. Well, of course, we would like to do it every year, at least, that's not very realistic. So let's...

But we do it right and do it a little bit less often.

Yes.

Cool. Last question for me, and then we'll see if the audience has any better questions than I do. But I mean, AI is a topic of everyone, and we'll have an AI panel later. And I'm not going to steal your thunder all the way, I promise. But as you're looking at sort of game innovation, game development and also, I mean, I think everyone is mentioning it's about learning, it's about failing fast and so forth. With the new technology, AI being one of them, are there ways we can actually improve our accuracy, our hit rate fail faster, test sooner? How do you think about that?

I think it's the ability -- it actually expedites the ability to turn around things and seeing what we have in place simple that we started. We just started the water with what we call [indiscernible]. If you think about in the past, the product manager had to write or game designer had to write a long specs, send it through development, get something out, we will take a couple of weeks and test it again. Today, almost by writing the right prompts within, let's say, a day work of iteration with the system, you can get something working, okay, that we can throw to the market. It's like even pre MVP that we can test out.

So that gives us much more ability to try more things, much more cheaper, much more quicker. Of course, once we see -- we're starting to see there is like striking oil, then you need to put it to make it in a scalable thing in a much more robust way. So I do believe that this is something that definitely will expedite the ability to try more things.

Yes. When it comes also to the pure side of the game development side, iteration speed is almost a one-to-one relationship between iteration speed and the quality of the user experience that you're able to put out there. So the quicker you can iterate, the quicker you can test it. It's not about kind of testing just one game quickly and failing fast. It's also about in these big projects, how quickly can you iterate on level design, character design, et cetera. And that the relationship is -- it's just so direct. So that's one of the places where we are very excited about kind of balancing levels and verifying your hypothesis with the help of AI, all of kind of that to empower the developers to create better experiences quicker.

Yes, I agree 100% with the new products, even with the ongoing products, the next step from the idea is a validation of this idea. And while AI may not will help you to create something new, it may create -- help you to validate the idea faster, and it's very important because without validation, this idea is just image, I don't know.

Just an idea.

Yes, just an idea. So yes, it helps to speed up the iterations. So it's a lot.

It also reduces the friction, I would say, between product and technology. Sometimes the product manager has something in his head. And when it tries to convey to the developer, depending on how you develop it, they don't exactly get what they want and it takes 3, 4 iterations until you get exactly what you want. And using AI, you can only show the developer, this is what I want. And then if it's much more complex and you need much more complex systems to integrate, they can understand exactly what the product manager or the game designer had in his head and actually develop it. So it creates, I would say, the waste iteration, it eliminates that or reduces that.

Fantastic. Good. Do we have any questions from the audience. We're going to move for a coffee break. Great. Cool. Thank you.

So hi, everyone. So we're going to take a slightly longer 30-minute break. Please come and talk to the MTG team. We have an experience ready for you with some of our games. The doors will be on stage left. So please follow the red line, and you will go upstairs. And then we will see you back here at 4:30 to have a Spotlight focus specifically on AI, followed by our section of financials outlook and capital allocation. Thank you very much. See you in that half past...

[Break]

We start with followed by the financial section. So we have -- thank you for being with us all the time so far. This is quite a dense -- information dense day, but we had a lot to share. We still have a lot to share. Thank you for staying with us. And with that, I would like to welcome Oliver on stage to talk about AI.

Hello again, everybody. So I'm here now not as the -- just the CEO of the Midcore district, but also someone that deeply believes in the potential of AI to revolutionize almost every aspect of our business. So I'm going to talk now about some real examples. So I'm going to show some real examples of how AI is being used across some of our studios and put some numbers to it because one thing which you sometimes hear is AI as a thing of the future or as an idea but without any real implementation. Within MTG, we're beyond that. We're already seeing today that within our businesses, humans using AI are already outperforming humans working on their own.

So it isn't about replacing humans with AI. It isn't about saying, well, how can we replace this team of 5 artists with a team of 5 AI. It's about saying, how can we empower this team of 5 artists to use AI to do more than they could before, to have more choice than they did before, to have a better template of tools in front of them than they did before. In the same way that Photoshop revolutionized what digital artists could do 25, 30 years ago, AI is revolutionizing again, not just what digital artists can do, but what people can do across the whole range of game development.

I spoke earlier about the impact that AI can have across all of these areas. And now I'm going to do a bit of a deep dive into some engineering, some arts and talk about where we're already seeing in product. So generative AI and AI and art has been around for a while. It was probably one of the things that brought it to the attention of the world. In this example here, it's about how using our internal proprietary AI system called ArtMaker AI, which was built by the Plarium team, but is now available across all of MTG. It's about how this sits in the middle of our art pipeline.

So on the left here, you'll see the model, a 3D model of one of our characters from RAID. And that 3D model is in the game. It's great in the game. It's perfect for playing. But it's not quite right to use in a 2D image. What we need is a way to take it from being a 3D model to using it in a 2D image for some advertising or on the App Store. So what we do is we can use our ArtMaker AI and tell it, well, we need this character to be in 2D, and we need it to have red eyes, blur out some of the legs, change some of the lighting, change some of the shadow and then change the background. We want it in a scary church yard or in a dungeon or whatever it is, we might mean.

So the original image is still made by one of our talented artists in the 3D model. It's then about saying, how can we use that plus AI to get to a different endpoint, a 2D image. And here, you can see at the bottom, that would have taken about 60 hours in the old world. But in the new world, it takes about 48 hours. So that is a real measured 20% decrease in the amount of time it would take. And what that means is that artists can then use that 20% to do something else to start a new piece of work for us. And it's not just characters or big complex things. Where we're also seeing real value in AI of arts is choice for the artists.

So in this example, the artist started with the idea of a spear to be an item in the game, but they knew that they wanted it to look a little bit different. So the artist used AI to say, give me 20 different variations or 30 or 40 or 100 different variations based on this initial sketch. And what the AI can then do is take it and very quickly give the artist a massive range of choices. And then what the artist does is they look through all of these AI-generated pieces and they take what they like from each part. They like the tip of the spear, the color of this one, the hilt of this one. And then they put it all together into a final paint over.

So again, an artist could have done 50 variations of it, but realistically, they probably wouldn't. AI gave them that choice and that opportunity to take the best of lots of different pieces, but still finished by hand.

The place where we're seeing real value of AI in the art world is in early ideation of new games or new versions of games. So this is a piece of AI art generated for one of Hutch's games called Matchcreek Motors. We knew that we wanted the game to take place somewhere in the world. It's a Match-3 puzzle game, but we didn't know where. So we used AI Art to generate versions of images that were in the gritty streets of L.A., the mountains of Europe, the streets of London, all of these different versions. This example here is the kind of the Appalachian Mountains of the U.S.A. Each of these individually would have taken days and days for an artist to make.

But what we're able to do with AI is have all of these options at the very beginning of a new game idea and already start to explore the space, not just think how would it look in L.A. or how would it look in Italy, but actually see an image. And then we can go one step further and say, what would it look like if it moved? So this is AI created. So based on the image I just showed you, we give it to an AI video generator and it builds up this little fly-through. So now we're not just thinking what does an image look like, but we can now imagine when we build the game, what does the world look like? What does the lighting look like? What does the trees and the environment look like?

And we can change this easily. If we wanted it to be raining or we wanted it to be nighttime, we could very easily get AI to do that.

Normally, in the old world of game development, you would never build 20 versions of a city just to test out and see how you feel. It's too expensive and it's too time consuming. Now using AI, we're able to do this at the beginning of the game, explore an idea space with images and now also video.

Beyond art is code. I'm not going to show you screens of code because I wouldn't understand it and probably neither would you. But what we have done is measure the impact of coding assistance on AI -- sorry, AI coding assistance on code deployment. So across our biggest studios, Hutch Games and RAID, somewhere between 60% and 90% of all engineers are already using AI code assistance. What this does is it sits by the engineers they work and helps them with that code, making sure that fewer mistakes are made, making sure that documentation is created.

So let's look at the stats here. Just the basic writing of code is now 10% faster. This is the core of what engineers do. They write code that becomes games. That's now 10% or more faster with code assistance. This isn't changing the code itself necessarily. This isn't asking the engineer to rethink how they work. It's just there next to them supporting what they're already doing.

Documentation. Whenever you write code or whenever you make something in software, you always need some documents to go next to it. These documents usually explain to other people how the code works. If you want to change the code in the future, this is what you need to know about it or don't change this because it might break something. If you ask any engineer, writing documents is their least favorite part of the job. They want to spend their time writing code and the document is just something they have to do.

Using AI, we've managed to speed up that code -- sorry, that documentation creation. It's [indiscernible] 5x faster than it ever was before. So this means that engineers can spend more time writing code without us sacrificing the quality of that documentation. And that means that in a year, when another engineer comes along and wants to change that code, they're better able to understand what it's doing because the documentation is just better.

Complex pull requests and push requests. So these are code reviews. So when an engineer writes code, it's very common to have another engineer read through that code and check it just to make sure that there's nothing in there that doesn't work, could be more efficient, could be faster. Doing these takes time, an engineer has to sit down and literally read them on a screen. With the use of AI, that engineer who is reviewing is now about 20% faster because the AI is able in parallel to review that code and make suggestions to the reviewer to make sure they don't miss anything or if they have a suggestion on how to improve the code, the AI can validate that suggestion or give an alternative suggestion.

So this improves the quality of the code because the review is being done by a human and AI, and it improves the speed of that review as well. All in all, meaning that the software we have at the end is better quality and also built faster. So an easy way to think about this is every single week, an engineer within one of our studios using AI assistant is saving 4 to 8 hours. That's a day a week. And that's not then meaning we reduce the team size of engineers. It's meaning that we free up a day a week for those engineers to start working on the next thing to start having the next great idea or building the next feature for our players. So this increases the speed at which we're delivering content to our players. So this is code assistance. These sit next to an engineer within the system.

The next stage is agentic coding. And what this basically means is you don't write any of the code, the AI writes the code for you. So I'll show a video in a moment. And what this will demonstrate is within a puzzle game, the one I showed, the town of Matchcreek Motors, we were able to have somebody who is not an engineer at all create boosters in the game that destroy blocks. Now yes, an engineer could build those and they are built in many games. But what this shows is that you have a game that works, you can now have people who are non-engineers go back to that game and add new features or change that game.

And what that means is that games that either were not commercially viable to keep alive or the engineers who worked on it have moved on to another project, we can still keep building that game with non-engineers. And as Yoav mentioned earlier, it also means nonengineers can start to put their ideas down. They can start to very quickly have a prototype. They can start to say, actually, what if I change this? How would that work without having to build a spec and give it all to an engineer. So -- what you'll see here is the basic one.

So the hammer in the game, this was built by an engineer many, many months ago. And then a super hammer, which basically does a much bigger piece of damage. That was just a game designer who said, "hey, AI code, please write the code to make it do not what it used to do, but a new version of what it does." The quality of the animations, the quality of the UI is all basically ready to be shipped to players. So this isn't about building a quick prototype or something that's rough. This is about saying a non-engineer has built something that could literally be shipped in the next version of the game and be in the players' hands without ever touching the hands of an actual engineer.

The other thing that agentic coding is being used for is people building tools to help with game development. So it's not just about building things in games, it's about saying, as somebody in the games business, I need a tool that does X.

I need a tool that changes all of the 10s into 20s if this happens. I need a tool that checks that this piece of software is connected to that software. And if it's not, then fixes it. Agentic coding means that people are able to create these bespoke tools very, very quickly for their exact needs. And the AI will create them to the exact needs of that person. So across -- in InnoGames, for example, our studio in Germany, lots of the team there are using Agentic AI to create these mini tools to help them with their day-to-day jobs to automate something, to speed something up.

And all of those tools are built without the need of an engineer. So when we think about the next steps for AI and where it's going, anyone in the room that knows where it will be in 5 years, let me know because I think we can all make a few billion dollars. But what it means for us as a business is that we want to make AI tools available to everybody in the business, whether you are in the art team, the design team, the finance team, the HR team or anywhere, we want to make AI tools available to you, and we want to make it so that it's easy to pick up.

As I mentioned earlier with the mid-core district and also true of the casual district, as we do M&A, we want to make it plug and play. You come into one of our districts, here's a suite of AI tools, which are world-class and already speed up your game development.

The next one is what are called AI mentors in game. One of the big challenges in game development and especially what we do in free-to-play is players will come into the game. Sometimes they will leave for a month or 2, we'll do something big to update the game and they come back. Often when players come back into a game, they've forgotten how to play, they've forgotten how all the games work. And so an AI mentor, the idea there is that you come back and there's an AI in the game or in Plarium Play, our platform that analyzes your game, analyzes your behavior and says, "Ah, well, come back. I suggest that you do this next or you seem stuck on this level or this system. Here's some advice on how to pass it."

We can also think about those AI mentors for new players. So when you first come into a game, I might get stuck at Level 10, you might get stuck at Level 50, I might get lost on one type of mission, but the AI mentor is there. And the AI mentor is there to go, "Oh, okay, you seem stuck. You've been here for a day now. Let me give you some advice. Let me help you.' And as a player, you can ask that AI mentor.

This hero, what equipment should I put on them? Should I put the red sword or the blue sword? And then the AI will go, "Hey, it looks like you're trying to fight these monsters. I think the red sword is a good idea. So it's all about making the experience of the player in game even better through using AI. Third, we've talked about big data. We have billions of pieces of data, far more than any team could ever realistically look at.

Can we set AI loose on that data to find trends, find opportunities, find patterns in it that we can then use to make sure the game is the very best they can be. And finally, AI is not a solved problem. There is no single Photoshop like there is for artists. We need to be constantly evaluating new AI solutions. Where it is today is probably very different to where it will be in a year or 2 years. So we need as a business to always be experimenting.

In some of our studios, we have dedicated experimentation budgets for AI, where people can spend a bit of money on basically whatever AI tool they want to try out and then come back and tell the rest of the team how it's gone. What I do know, though, is that the AI today is the worst it will ever be. Tomorrow, it will be better. Next year, it will be better. And in 2 years, it will be even better. And for us, that's an incredible opportunity if we embrace it, and there is no option to not embrace it. Thank you very much.

So now I'm going to hand over to our CFO, Nick, to give you some financials.

Right. Well, good evening, everyone. My name is Nick Hopkins, and I have the pleasure to be MTG's CFO. I also have the pleasure of being the final section of the day for the final sprint before you all get to go back upstairs for some nice food, drinks and to play a bit more on our games.

Now what I plan to spend the next roughly 40, 45 minutes with you is a recap, looking at our historical and recent financial performance, I look forward to our outlook for this year and beyond and then how we will drive growth, our cash and our capital allocation to drive value creation going forward. Unfortunately, I'm actually a little bit jealous. I'm the only one who doesn't get a video in my section, but I still hope that by the end of it, you share my conviction that we are a growing company, and we will continue to drive sustainable, profitable growth going forward.

And that growth is going to come from multiple vectors. It's going to come, as we've spoken about today, about investing in our existing and our rising star games and making sure we do so in a way that we are maximizing potential returns. It's going to be about growing our new game pipeline, but in a low-cost capital environment. It's going to be making sure we drive those efficiencies to drive agility, and it's going to be making sure that we continue to pursue value-creative M&A, but in a very disciplined format.

Now that's all growth in together, but that goes hand-in-hand with then how we use our cash, how we use our balance sheet and how we use our capital allocation to really drive total shareholder returns and therefore, value creation. I personally am very excited about the journey that MTG has been on and continues to be on. It's part of the reason that I joined. And I'm incredibly excited by the strategic vision and ambition that Maria, Arnd, Oli and Yoav have spoken about today. What's also exciting is that we really do actually have the financial foundations, the financial momentum and the financial framework to deliver on that strategy.

And so if we start by double-clicking on that aspect of financial momentum, we're back to sustained organic growth. We've delivered 3 sequential quarters in a row now of mid- to high single-digit organic growth. And this culminated in our Q2 results with 9% organic growth for the quarter or 8% for the first half of the year. And I think what's actually quite important to call out about this growth is that on the one hand, it was very broad-based. It came from different games within different studios at different parts in their growth cycle. So it came from Heroes of History. It came from Tacticus. It came from F1 Clash. It came from PlaySimple successful geographic expansion, as Yoav just went through.

But also actually, it wasn't with us firing on all cylinders. And so we do still have an opportunity to further optimize some of the performance of our games. Then touching on the right-hand side of the page, as Maria spoke about earlier, we bought Plarium for 3 core reasons. One was the scale, one was the tech, the team and the tools and then the third really was for RAID. And then all the rest is essentially kind of growth optionality.

As you can see, it's delivered on the scale. It's doubled our revenue in the quarter, Q2 '25 compared to Q2 '24. As Oli went through in the mid-court district, it is the foundations of the tech and the tools and the services of that centralized platform. And then on the third aspect, as we said at our Q2 results, RAID is delivering growth. We grow low single digits in Q2 early this year, and we're incredibly excited about the future of that game.

Now where do we stand today? I mean there's lots of pie charts on the page, lots of small fonts, but there's actually just 2 very simple messages. First is we are a very well-diversified group. We're well diversified across franchises, genres, platforms, monetizations, geographies, gaming locations, gaming growth cycles, et cetera.

But also the second point, which I think is the more important point, is this diversification drives growth optionality and growth sustainability. What I mean by that is it means we can actually invest and allocate capital to the areas which will drive the highest returns over time. And those areas will shift, but we've got the flexibility to be able to adapt and invest in those areas. And secondly, it means we'll be able to have more shots on goal. And as you actually heard from the new games panel that we just had, there's a big difference as to what those new shots look like if you are sitting with Alex versus just sitting with Yoav. It means that we can have some low capital, low-risk, very predictable shots, but we can also take some bigger shots with also potentially bigger reward outcomes.

So as we think about growth sustainability, that really goes hand-in-hand with how we think about optimizing our game economies. As you've heard multiple times through the course of this afternoon, we really are a data-driven company. We get huge inflows of data about player behavior, player engagement and player monetization. And what we do is we use that data to ensure that we optimize how we deliver our content. So that's the cadence of the content. It's the marketing behind that content. It's how we structure the content, how we bundle or price the content.

And all of that is done to make sure we optimize the balance between engagement and retention and monetization. Or putting it in a very simple way, if we were to just sell for monetization, our retention would fall dramatically. And likewise, if we were to just sell for engagement, well, we'd have no revenue, which would be a little bit of an issue. And whilst we do this very much on a game-by-game basis, and you can't see the numbers on this page here, on an overall group basis, what you can really see is we've been able to grow across both of these vectors. So we've been able to deliver significant growth in both our daily active users, our DAUs and also in our ARPDAU, our average revenue per daily active user.

So now if we start to look down the P&L, we've actually got a very simple cost structure. The first line item is our platform fees. So as Oli mentioned in his piece, these are essentially the fees that we pay to third-party platforms like Google, like Apple, taken against in-app purchases and subscription revenue. And Oli spoke about kind of the real D2C initiatives that we have to try to reduce those platform fees. And these are initiatives that we are already undertaking today. So whether that is further utilization of Plarium Play further utilization of our own web stores or further activation of direct payments.

The second item in our P&L and the largest is our UA spend, close to 40% of our LTM gross revenue. Now we make our UA investment decisions to really try to optimize between growth and margin, and I'll use the next slide to come on to that in a bit more detail. But for us as a group, what's the real key enabler is how do we get an incremental return or incremental revenue for that same dollar of UA spend. And we can really do that through 2 lenses.

We can ensure that we've got the best-in-class systems in each of our casual and our mid-core districts to drive that UA efficiency or then we can leverage our scale, we can leverage our data and we can leverage our expertise to make sure that we are allocating that UA investment. We're making UA investment decisions against the games and the marketing channels to really optimize those returns.

Then finally, we have OpEx, which is primarily related to personnel, which is again around 20% of our gross revenue. And this on a function-by-function basis, there's really 2 levers for optimization. In certain functions, we will benefit from operating leverage from economies of scale. And then also in other functions, we'll be able to drive either productivity gains or efficiency gains from increased AI adoption.

But overall, when you take all of these into account, we've got incredibly healthy margins that we're proud of, but multiple levers where we continue to optimize those margins. So I said I want to spend a moment to double-click on our UA, which we think of as an operating toggle between growth and margins. Typically, the more UAs we spend, the more revenue we'll generate, but it will come at diminishing returns. And so we ensure that we use our extensive cohort data in returns models, which really analyze and predict the return on that advertising spend or ROAS as you've heard referenced a few times today.

We then use those models to inform and optimize our UA investment decisions to maximize returns. And it's worth calling out these are highly sophisticated models. They've got incredibly impressive levels of accuracy, which gives us conviction in our level of predictability. So multiple of our studios, for example, are able to track it at around 95% accuracy when you compare their predicted ROAS versus actually the realized ROAS, not just on a 1-year ROAS basis, but even on a 3-year ROAS basis, which is incredibly impressive.

I think what's also important to call out, and Oli briefly touched on this earlier, is one of the things we're really striving to, and this will be aided by the district model is for a harmonization and a consistency in how we evaluate ROAS, how we evaluate recoup to make sure that we've got complete apples-to-apples comparability between the studios and the different games to really make sure we are optimizing our view on what is the maximization of returns.

And finally, the thing I'd say as well is, as you've heard, we continue to get huge sways of data on a daily basis, on a minute basis on a second basis. And so this is a continuous loop that we constantly are able to adapt and optimize our UA spend. And so as we've spoken about in our recent results, we've been able to find ways to continue to scale up this UA spend to underpin our growth. And you can see that, that has scaled up over time, and the chart shows the LTM UA spend as a percentage of revenue, which has creeped up over time, but consistently at attractive ROAS levels.

And finally, it's very important to call out this UA spend doesn't just drive short-term growth. Given the nature of our games, this drives near- and medium-term growth. So taking that all together, going down our full P&L, we've got a proven track record of sustainable long-term profitability growth. Despite some of the ups and downs since COVID that our industry has faced, as Arnd went through, since the peaks in 2020, 2021, we've been able to grow our adjusted EBITDA by a CAGR of almost 30%. And throughout that time, we've had very stable, attractive margins, typically in the kind of mid-20s to high 20%.

But enough talking about the past and where we've been, where do we stand today and where is the future. So earlier this year, we gave guidance to the market that we would deliver organic growth in the range of 3% to 7%. Now as a reminder, this is organic growth defined as our existing studios prior to the acquisition of Plarium and on a constant currency basis.

We also gave guidance that we'd achieve total adjusted EBITDA for the whole group, so including Plarium of 21% to 24%. As I mentioned in our Q2 results, we had some very strong performance where we had H1 organic growth of 8%, and we had H1 EBITDA margins of 23%. And so given that strong performance in H1 and the strong momentum we have in the business, I'm pleased to say that we are updating our guidance today.

From an organic basis perspective, we're now updating our guidance for 2025 to be 7% to 9%, so sitting on top of the top end of the prior range, whilst maintaining our EBITDA margin guidance of 21% to 24%. We're also introducing some new guidance for total reported revenue for the whole group, including Plarium, and that is in the range of SEK 11.4 billion to SEK 11.7 billion.

It's worth noting that this is based on you looking forward to Q4 using a SEK 9.41 exchange rate for the dollar to the SEK as at the 30th of September 2025 and so therefore, where we actually land at the end of this year will be subject to FX fluctuations through the rest of the year and also will be subject to actually some of the performance in Q4, particularly around key seasonal in-game events with December typically being a very strong month.

I know that there's a bunch of you out there with laptops open with Excels and calculators trying to do some math. So I'm just going to give you a bit of help on that one. What this fundamentally means is that also, as I said, RAID delivered low single-digit growth in Q2, and we expect that momentum to continue through the rest of the year and for RAID to deliver low single-digit growth on a full year basis. That is offset by some of the declines in some of Plarium's other titles. And therefore, overall, Plarium is expected to be down low single digits on a full year basis.

But I repeat what Maria said earlier, yes, we will look to continue to find ways to optimize those other games within Plarium's portfolio, but really one of the 3 core vectors for the acquisition of RAID Plarium was RAID, and we're incredibly pleased with that performance. And actually, on that note, we're incredibly pleased about the performance of all of our studios in 2025 so far.

But what about the medium term? So we're also now introducing medium-term guidance across 3 core elements. If I start off with our top line growth. So now as you've heard, we believe we've got the scale, we've got the IP. We've got the tech, the tool, the teams and the momentum to continue to outperform the market.

Overall, the market is expected to grow around 2% to 2.5% over the near-term horizon. And we believe that we can outperform the market and grow on an organic basis in the range of 3% to 7%. So if you take the midpoint of that range, we'll be more than double the market growth. Again, it's worth calling out, this is for the total group, including Plarium on a constant currency basis.

If we then focus on adjusted EBITDA margins, we believe we can drive these back up north of 24%, in line with what we've achieved historically. And as we really start to reap the benefits of the combined scale of the group, but also this district model.

And then finally, on cash conversion. We remain a highly cash-generative business, but we actually see incremental growth from where we stand today. And so we expect to deliver steady-state unlevered cash conversion north of 60% over the medium term. As some might recall in our Q2 results, we reported LTM unlevered cash conversion close to the 50% mark. But also as we discussed in these results, that included a number of one-off items related to withholding tax, M&A transaction fees, et cetera, which if you were to normalize out for those, would actually be close to the high 50s already, so close to this number. But as I said, we do see opportunities to take it further from there.

Before I actually now turn to the next section on cash flow, balance sheet and capital allocation, I'd like to spend a bit of minute just double-clicking on our first 2 guidance targets on revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margin growth. So first of all, on revenue growth. As we've spoken about a lot today, we've got a diverse range of games at different scale and at different parts of their growth cycles, essentially what we've been calling the gaming growth flywheel.

We have got incredibly strong established games, which give us stability and predictability in cash flow. That cash flow we can leverage to develop our new game pipeline and then that cash flow we can use to invest to really scale those new games into rising stars, which then themselves turn into established games.

But specifically, actually, if we look at our near-term growth in our portfolio of games, we believe that our top established franchises, so your RAID, your Forge of Empires, your Tacticus, your Word Search, your F1 Clash, et cetera, collectively, we think they don't only provide us that stability and predictability of cash flow.

We actually believe together, they can drive some incremental growth. However, the main accelerator of growth above and beyond the market comes from our new games. But again, it's equally important to call out that, that is broadly 50-50 between new games which have already recently launched and new games which are in the pipeline in development or in concept stage.

And I think that's very important to call out because a lot of those recently launched games are already giving us the data, which gives us some visibility over that near-term growth, in particular, the casual games, as Yoav ran through earlier. So then that growth in new games does somewhat offset the decline in the other existing established games outside of our top game franchises. But as said, we do look at ways to either optimize or harvest those other existing franchises to maximize the cash flow generation.

Then if we double-click on our EBITDA margin guidance and driving that to over 24%. I hope you've heard loud and clear today that we think it's incredibly important that we continue to invest behind our existing established games to ensure we drive their longevity, but also that we do invest to scale up new games into rising stars and established games. And so that is why we will continue to invest UA, but always doing so in a very disciplined manner with very clear return hurdles.

And so there are really 3 core drivers to drive that margin enhancement offsetting that UA investment. The first is the DTC initiatives, the 3 initiatives that Oli and I have now both touched upon. The second are scale efficiencies, so operating scale efficiencies from economies of scale. This is the smallest item because this as we think about it, is really just about ongoing optimization from scale. And then the third item are the mid-core cost synergies that Oli ran through earlier in excess of the $20 million. And as Oli said on that, that is a combination of overhead reductions, which is the slightly larger share and then other centralized saving opportunities. We will start to implement these cost savings and expect to realize them on a fully run rate annualized basis before the end of 2026.

And again, just to recap, this is our margin, excluding any future M&A. Now finally, before turning on to the next section, as we are moving into this new operating model, we're new -- moving into this new village and district operating structure from January, we've also reassessed our financial disclosure. We think it's incredibly important that how we communicate to the market externally aligns with how we internally monitor, track and align our business performance.

Further, we want to make sure our investors have the toolkit, so essentially the appropriate financial granularity to really be able to properly model out our projections. And so that's why starting from Q1 2026, we intend to change our reporting disclosure. Just to take you through the elements on the page, starting off with at the moment, we just provide revenue on a total group basis and then for our 5 franchises.

So for example, RPG strategy, et cetera. Going forward, we will provide that both for the group and for our segments, AKA, our casual and our district and our mid-core districts. But furthermore, whilst historically, we only provided adjusted EBITDA and UA spend on a group basis, we will now provide those also for our segments, so casual and mid-core level UA spend and adjusted EBITDA margins.

Then also, as you heard very clearly through multiple sessions today, there are quite stark differences between mid-core games and casual games, not just in their gameplay, but also in their monetization. And so that's why I think it's very important that we disclose select key KPIs also on a segmental basis. So what that really means is giving both DAUs and ARPDAU on a segmental basis, but then also on monetization, so on third-party platforms versus D2C and also in-app purchase versus in-app advertising revenue on a segmental basis.

Finally, and as we spoke about, we've got a great diverse portfolio, so we do not have any concentration risk. But as Maria alluded to at the very beginning of the presentations today, our top 3 games, as we reported in our Q2 together account for 50% of our revenue. And so the performance of those games is material to our overall group performance. And so going forward, we propose to include absolute revenue and also constant currency growth and reported growth, not just for our top 3 games, but actually for our top 5 games in our portfolio.

So hopefully, this will be well received by the market going into Q1 2026. So I've spent, if I've got my clock on right, about the last 20 minutes speaking about sustainable profitable growth, but that's just really one part of the equation as we think about value creation. And so now I want to spend the final section of the day really speaking about how we marry that profitable growth with our use of cash, with our use of balance sheet and with our capital allocation policies to really drive total shareholder return and therefore, value creation.

Starting to start with, I mean, we're a highly cash-generative business, as I've already said. But importantly, we've got a high degree of cash flow stability. And that cash flow stability is driven by 3 core factors. One is, as we've spoken about, is the longevity and the stability of our top established franchises and the cash generation of those games.

The second aspect is this operating toggle that is UA. And J have mentioned this in the new game development panel as well. We can choose to go down one path of investing more UA, driving more revenue growth, which will short term compress the EBITDA margins or we can go down another path of actually tapering off that UA spend and driving the margins.

But whichever path we go down, it's done through the lens of actually underlying driving the absolute profit and therefore, the absolute cash generated by the game over the medium to long term. And then the third item is our low development costs. UA, as I said, is the large cost item for us as we take a new game and scale it into a rising star and an established game, but the actual cost to develop a game is very low.

For anyone who's watching this digitally online has done a little Q&A questionnaire. I think that was question #6 buried in there about our development costs. They are very low across both our casual and our mid-core profiles. And so as you can see from the right-hand side of the page, which takes the bridge from adjusted EBITDA through to unlevered free cash flow conversion over the last 3 years, our CapEx has averaged just 3% of revenue, and we expect it to remain broadly consistent with that level in the near-term future.

And so that means over the last 3 years, we have delivered consistently unlevered cash conversion in the range of 50% to 60% with actually that variance really being driven by one-off items. And really, it's been averaging towards the upper end of that range over the last 3-year cycle. And you can see those normalized items on the left-hand side of the page, where we do extract out the M&A transaction fees, the withholding tax payments, et cetera. And you can see that steady buildup in cash generation over time, including post the Plarium transaction. And in LTM Q2 2025, generating over $135 million in unlevered cash conversion on a normalized basis.

So -- and unfortunately stole my thunder a little bit on this one, but we thought it was a very important message that we put at the top of the presentation and we put it back at the end. I mean, we're collectively very proud of how we've used our cash, used our balance sheet to recycle capital. Since 2022 -- beginning of 2022, we've generated that SEK 3 billion in cumulative free cash flow.

We've generated that SEK 8 billion in asset disposal sales, essentially the ESL sale. And then we've had SEK 3 billion in debt, which is essentially the SEK 5 billion in debt that we took on for the Plarium transaction, netted off with SEK 2 million of debt that we paid down post the ESL transaction fee -- joint foreign transaction. And so all in all, we've generated SEK 14 billion or $1.5 billion in total cash through these 3 areas.

And as Arnd ran through, we've returned SEK 4 billion of that to our shareholders, SEK 2.7 billion as a capital return post the sale and SEK 1.3 billion as share buyback programs. And then we've deployed SEK 10 billion of it against value-accretive M&A, most recently in the Snowprint and the RAID transactions.

And back to this point about marrying profitable growth with our use of balance sheet and capital allocation, we're also very proud of this. We have not just delivered absolute growth. We have delivered underlying growth in earnings per share and free cash flow per share because we have not diluted our shareholders. And so on the left-hand side, we've been able to grow our adjusted EPS by a CAGR of 14% since -- over the last 2.5 years since FY 2022. And we've been able to grow our underlying free cash flow per share by a CAGR of 25% over the last 2.5 years. And these are our reported underlying free cash flow per share. If I were to use the normalized figures that I was just speaking about on the previous page, that would actually be north of the 35% CAGR.

So again, enough about the past and on to the now and then the future. So where do we stand today? We've got a very healthy and clean balance sheet. We have net financial debt in total of SEK 3.2 billion. This comprises SEK 4.2 billion in external financing, another SEK 0.2 billion lease liabilities, and then we have SEK 1.2 billion in cash and cash equivalents. On the balance sheet, we then also have SEK 1.4 billion in earn-out liabilities, which takes you on a full net debt basis as at Q2, so 30th of June 2025 to a total net debt position of SEK 4.6 billion, which is equivalent to 1.63x our LTM EBITDA, including Plarium and just shy of $500 million.

Now it's important to call out that a large part of that earn-out liabilities is due payable during the course of H1 2026. But because of our strong cash generation, as you can see from the chart on the right-hand side, we paid down that nonfinancial debt. And essentially, we have a convergence of our net financial debt with our net debt. And then thereafter into 2027, our strong cash generation takes our net debt position down to broadly around or just under 0.5x.

But it's very important to call out this chart on the right-hand side is not assuming that we do any additional new buybacks in 2026 or 2027 or that we do any new M&A. And clearly, we're not going to stand still and not do any M&A or not do any capital returns. So now I'm going to spend a little bit building out on what we've spoken about on M&A.

M&A really is a core part of our journey. It's a core part of our DNA. It is our vision to continue to build the best home, the best village and the best districts for game makers. And not only that, but through this district model that we've spoken about, we really do believe that we've got enhanced plug-and-play capabilities by having those tailored value-add centralized services set in each of those districts.

So therefore, we'll have an advanced capability to drive value creation day 1 we will also enhance our reputation as the preferred partner of choice for entrepreneurs. Now given the nature of gaming M&A, it's not something that we pause and restart and pause and restart. We constantly evaluate M&A. It's part of our ongoing core strategy. And as we've spoken about, really what our near-term priority focus is, is making PlaySimple not a party of one within our casual district. So our primary focus is on M&A within casual, but we will continue to assess and we are currently continuing to assess other bolt-on opportunities within our mid-core district.

And then as we've spoken about, could there be new potential districts over time, albeit that is a lower near-term priority. And anything we would do, we would want to make sure it's an adjacent to our core competencies and nothing far afield. Now the gaming market remains incredibly fragmented. So there's real scope for consolidation. But we will make sure we maintain our incredibly high hurdles and our incredibly disciplined approach to M&A. And as we've spoken about, what that really means, what's our key focus? It's on the IP. It's on the team and the tech and the tools and it's on the fundamental KPIs.

All with the overlay that's actually an attractive relative return on capital relative to other ways we could deploy that capital. But we do see M&A as an opportunity to accelerate our growth above and beyond that organic growth guidance of 3% to 7% that I spoke about earlier and therefore, to drive that additional value creation. And as you can see from the right-hand side of the page, we do have material firepower building over the course of the next 12 to 24 months. And this is absent any potential use of equity and also, for example, absent capitalizing leverage on any cost synergies, et cetera. So we really do have the firepower to go out there and continue to explore value-creative M&A.

But then how does M&A fit into our overall capital allocation policy. Taking a step back, again, our aim is to really try to drive value creation from total shareholder return and how can we do that? What is under our control? What is under our control is how we allocate capital within the group to drive earnings per share growth or free cash flow per share growth. And so our capital allocation policy has 3 elements: grow, build and return. If I start off, therefore, on the left-hand part of the slide on grow, we will continue to invest in our existing studios, in their existing games and in their new games pipeline.

We will make sure we continue to refine and optimize how we make those UA investment decisions to really make sure we are maximizing returns from those investments, but we will continue to invest in our existing studios and leverage our data, leverage our governance frameworks to refine and maximize those returns over the medium and longer term. Then as I've just spoken about, we will continue to drive for value-creative M&A.

But we will not just think of M&A in isolation, and we will make sure that we think about M&A in the context of does it drive incremental returns relative to our investment in organic opportunities and how does it look like on a comparison of our unlevered free cash flow per share relative to capital returns. So it's always done in a holistic manner.

But then finally, we will return any excess liquidity to shareholders. So whilst we will prioritize our focus on trying to find organic and inorganic investment opportunities subject to a certain returns thresholds, any excess liquidity, we will return to shareholders. And as I said, I want to make sure that we do maintain a healthy balance sheet, but also an efficient, and that means a levered balance sheet. And so we will make sure that we do maintain net debt but keeping that net debt at broadly below 2x.

So in the context of this capital allocation framework, our focus on the transformation of our operating model and given the status of our M&A pipeline, we are, therefore, today also announcing that we decided to launch a new share buyback program of SEK 300 million, which will run through to the next. So I just say SEK 300 million? Thank you, [indiscernible], for correct me, SEK 400 million, which will run through to the next -- I was taking SEK 100 million off there.

SEK 400 million, which will run through to the next AGM. So as I said, we're very proud of the gaming village that we've created, and we want to continue to grow and build that village, and we think that we're better placed now than ever before to drive that both organically and inorganically. But as the architect of that village, we will not just look at acquisitions, even though that will be our core priority focus. We will look at the full toolkit that we have available to ourselves to potentially drive value creation over the longer term.

And as we've spoken about, one of those evaluations is a potential structural options for our casual district, which could include a listing of PlaySimple in India. We are, therefore, currently conducting a pre-IPO preparedness study. And part of that study is to evaluate the potential by which it can accelerate our M&A ambitions in casual gaming and also the potential by which it could create value. That study is ongoing at the moment, and the outcome of that study will help us to determine what options we have available to ourselves in 2026. And we'll, of course, revert to the market upon the conclusion of that study.

But as Maria said in her opening remarks, regardless of the outcome of that study, we are long-term majority owners of PlaySimple and believe in the future of PlaySimple and its casual ambitions. So to wrap things up for the day and for my section, the 5 key takeaways. First is we have growth momentum. We will continue to drive sustainable growth above the market of 3% to 7%. We have this gaming growth flywheel, the established games, the new games, the rising stars, which will fuel that growth so we can achieve above-market growth. We will drive our EBITDA margins back north of 24%. Despite ongoing UA investments to underpin growth, we'll achieve this through both D2C initiatives and the synergy realization in the mid-core district.

Third is whilst we are incredibly strong cash generative today, we will drive that incrementally higher and achieve cash generation -- unlevered cash conversion of north of 60% over the medium term. Fourth is our build -- grow, build, return capital allocation framework. We will prioritize investments towards organic and inorganic opportunities, but always through the lens of what it does to our underlying return on capital and a comparison on our free cash flow per share with any excess liquidity returned to our shareholders.

And finally, we will continue to look for ways to grow our village, but we will also look at the full toolkit that we have available to ourselves to drive value creation, and that does include an evaluation of a potential listing of PlaySimple. So with that, I will pause. Thank you very much, and I'll take any questions before we wrap things up.

My first question, just to clarify what's medium term in MTG's view?

I think you can talk of that to be a 3- to 5-year horizon. Certain of those we hope to assume it in the 3-year horizon, but some might take 4 to 5 years.

Okay. And on your adjusted EBITA margin target for the medium term, you said at least 24%. And if we're trying to look at scenarios in the medium term, how should we look at the potential ceiling going forward? Is that -- should we look at how it's trended in the past and because there's a lot of incoming here like potential cost savings, AI, et cetera.

Yes. I think it's a good question. Whilst we deliberately have not put out what a ceiling to that range could be, that's in part driven by also there is still not a full visibility as to actually what the DTC initiatives could look like over time, given a lot of that is outside of our control and dependent on regulatory changes, exactly the efficiencies we can get from AI adoption and AI efficiency.

Obviously, we have a base case plan, which is contained within our own analysis, but there are permutations of outcomes that dives to. I think that one of the things I would say is, as we've tried to convey throughout the days, we are focused on growth. And so therefore, we are going to continue to invest in that growth. And the large part of our P&L of our cost structure is UA. And whilst we continue to optimize that -- it's really optimizing to drive incremental revenue rather than shrinking that UA budget. And so I think that, that should provide some context as to where we think the margins could get over time that I do not see our UA as a percentage of revenue materially decreasing in the near future.

Nick. So we have a couple of questions online. So I thought we'll take them just as an interlude until we have more questions from the audience. So first of all, what -- as you expect to increase organic growth, which is something you touched upon just now, so do you expect to continue to increase UA spend? Or when would you expect to reduce UA spend to improve margins?

Yes. And this goes back to the point that we're trying to make about our UA investment decisions are not done at the group level where we have a certain UA spend. What we do is very much on a game-by-game basis, trying to optimize for that individual game as to what is the right UA investment decision, balancing that growth versus margin optimization.

And so therefore, what our future UA spend evolution looks like also depends upon that success rate of that new game pipeline developing into rising stars and established games that we had earlier. If I could choose my way, we'd have a whole bunch of our new games actually becoming rising stars and therefore, continuing to fuel that M&A that new game pipeline scaling through UA investments.

That being said, clearly, if we actually do find a point in time where actually a large number of established games, it's the right point in time to optimize those for cash. And actually, we just, at that point in time, have fewer games which are scaling, then we will make the right decision that across those games, we will taper the UA investment, which means on a group basis that UA spend will come down. But we do it very much on a game-by-game basis. And we do think we've got the new game pipeline, at least for the few years out to come that we will continue to drive that UA spend higher.

And then given that you have disclosed a little bit how we will report our results from next year, is there anything you want to say about the adjusted EBITDA margin of the PlaySimple or the casual district already today?

I think it's premature to give any comments on this and people can wait, look forward to Q1 2026.

That's all we have online.

Yes, Jacob here. Just one question. I mean, the only item that was like incrementally dilutive in the bridge was UA, as you alluded to. Could you give some more light on what studios you're going to ramp up the UA spend the most? Is it PlaySimple, Plarium? Any color?

Yes. I think we don't ever kind of give that breakdown on an individual studio basis. But one thing that I would give some context around is what we spoke about, about the more shots on goal mentality. And in our pipeline, we do have those kind of lower risk and not only the lower capital to develop, but also as we think about the scaling of them, they will also be a lower percentage of that kind of UA spend. But then we also do in our pipeline have some bigger shots.

And those bigger shots are slightly bigger shots as it relates to both the capital development. But then also if we do really want to see those games scale to where we believe they could be post launch, those will also be where we do see that incremental UA spend growth relative to where we are today. And therefore, you can, by association, think about where within our overall district model, those are most likely to come from.

Yes. I have a follow-up on the UA topic here. What's the margin utility for you? You have last 12 months, 38% UA percentage of sales. If you would come up to 40%, how much does that translate into revenue growth for you?

Yes. And again, because it's done on an individual game-by-game basis, it's actually purely dependent on where we to invest that additional UA spend. If we were to do that in one of our established games, even if that was additional UA spend between RAID versus Forge of Empires, it would be a different answer as to where that revenue would come out versus actually if we drive that UA spend towards some of our rapidly scaling games.

So for example, Tacticus or Heroes of History. So that's why I go back to this, and apologies not to directly answer your question, we do not look on an overall group basis as to what is the return on advertising spend for us as an overall group. It is what is the appropriate return on advertising spend, hurdles and thresholds that we should be monitoring for an individual game depending upon the genre that it is operating in and depending on where it is within its growth cycle.

And also depending upon, for example, if it's one of our casual games, we'd also look at a shorter-term ROAS given the nature of the games. We more typically look at a 1-year ROAS versus for some of our mid-core titles, we would look at a 2- to 3-year ROAS. So even within that question, as we look at UA, we don't think of it as a -- if we spend $1 more here, how much will we get more as a group in the year. It's if we were to spend $1, which game would it be best to spend across, balancing, we want to make sure we deliver short-term growth together with medium-term growth.

All right. Thank you very much, Nick.

Great. In which case, yes, I think we're just...

All right. Let's see if I can move to my -- I think my first slide of the day, actually. Oops, sorry. It was too fast. I thought we should go with drinks directly. Calm. I'm back to where we started actually on the day, sort of what are we all about. And I think it is, as I said when I opened the presentation today, it is 3 years ago since we actually did this Capital Markets Day and presented to you what we aspire to build and what we aspire to do. I think what we set out at that point in time was, in all fairness, a pretty bold ambition.

We were probably not in the top league of the gaming companies in the world. But we had a true belief in what we wanted to do. It was a bold ambition, but it was an ambition that we generally believed in, and we had the team behind to do it that we boldly executed on it. And I think, again, what you hear and what you heard today has been a lot about, yes, games, but it's also about team and it's about execution. And I think that's what we've been having over the last couple of years. That's what has helped us to actually build the position that we have today.

And yes, we're setting out a new bold ambition of what we want to do. We want to yet again double in size -- and I'm really hoping that you can feel today what we feel on a daily basis, the team we have, the games we have, the drive that we have. I mean, for me, we are such a better company today compared to when we were 3 years ago. I thought we were a great company then as well. But we've grown tremendously over the last couple of years. And that's why I'm really excited, and I'm really excited to have such many people in the team here today presenting to you so you actually can see and feel them as well because that's the world we live in. And it's an exciting world.

And again, we have great aspirations. So what I wanted to take you with you when you leave the day today, it's been probably for you an information pack day. We gave out a lot of news today. Those are things we worked since we actually -- even before closing the Plarium acquisition, you do those deals with a clear ambition on where you want to go, then you validate it as you get the keys to the company.

But I wanted to leave with the MTG Words actually because it is about continuing to drive that market leadership. We're in a great position. That is something we worked hard to achieve. We continue to work really hard to keep that and continue to drive that. We're continuously transforming. That's the only way we can actually continue to win in this race. I mean we work in a competitive environment. We work in a fast-moving environment. There are new technologies coming again. But what makes us relevant is that we have great games, and we're going to continue to make great games.

And to Nick's point, we're a growing company. We have delivered several quarters in a row, strong growth. We just upgraded the guidance. And hopefully, you can also feel with what we presented today, what Oli, Yoav presented on, the new games team panel, you hope we feel the excitement that we're going to continue to deliver growth for you. So with that, I want to say thank you for being in both of you being here in person, for everyone dialing in, and let's have a great mingle, and let's go for some food. Thank you.