Nitro Games Oyj

STO:NITRO

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Good morning. [indiscernible].

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Good morning.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

It's Jussi Tahtinen the CEO and Co-Founder of Nitro Games here, bringing you fantastic sunshine in the form of 2 Jussi's actually. So today, I'm joined with industry legend, Jussi Immonen.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Okay. Yes. My name is Jussi Immonen, I'm the COO of Nitro Games, and I have been in mobile games business for over 20 years and now in mobile free-to-play business more than 10 years and last 5 years with Nitro Games.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

And it's been a cool ride so far.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Yes, getting better all the time.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. Usually, I'm joined by my Co-Founder and our Chief Strategy Officer and Board member, Antti Villanen, but he couldn't be here today because he is on a business travel meeting with some of our partners. So -- and also, we have some excellent news to share from Autogun Heroes. The game has been killing it in the soft launch so far. So Immonen, who leads our games business is here to tell you a little bit more details about what have we exactly seen and what are we about to do with that information moving forward.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Exciting times.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Indeed, indeed. And for those of you who are potentially new to Nitro Games, in terms of a quick summary. So, Nitro Games, we are your finished mobile gaming powerhouse with more than 150 game professionals in our network. And the way that we operate is that, we have 2 studios here in Finland, and then we have tons of partner studios here and there and everywhere, and that's how we scale up and down. And we focus on action and shooter games on mobile. That's our vision that we want to be the household name in that category. And we also have another business which we call our B2B service business where we offer our services and expertise to our selected partners. And those are mostly mobile games projects, but more and more so business moving forward also cross-platform, cross-play opportunities that we have there.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Service business was actually the way how I got to know the Nitro, I was working at the Rovio and we were buying services from Nitro Games and I saw the same potential, what was coming in the form of development, skills and resources and how advanced all the back end and multiplayer stuff was. And I saw that if this now is something that can be utilized to build own games and not only develop games for the others, but also going into self-publishing and more scalable part of the business and that was the opportunity, and that's the how I got to interested in Nitro and now we are exactly following that pattern.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. I remember many, many years ago, when Immonen used to be our customer, we were done a couple of Angry Birds titles together back in the day.Okay. Cool. So then, obviously, today is all about the Q1 report that we published earlier this morning. So a couple of highlights from the report. Compared to the first quarter previous year, we saw our revenues increase and also we saw our EBITDA improving. In terms of our cash position, we actually improved our cash position slightly as a result of our cost control during the first quarter. And this is all well in line with our #1 priority this year, which is to take Nitro step by step towards profitability. And that's where everything is headed at the moment.And in terms of significant events, obviously, Autogun Heroes was announced during the first quarter, we started the soft launch. We're going to talk more about that. But also NERF: Superblast progressed from the initial 6 months launch facing the live operation space. And we've been very happy to see the game scoring several industry award nominations in addition to what we've already seen before, like tons of price from the players and the app stores and so on. So that's been generating a lot of good PR for Nitro so far.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Yes, not only PR, a lot of good things happening because of the quality of the game and all the awards and ratings and all that how we have seen Apple, for example, giving us continuous featuring and a top visibility in the store. It all translates to more downloads and players and -- right now, we are happy to say that we have millions and millions of organic downloads going for the game already now after 6 months of operations. So...

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Indeed, indeed. And in our service business, we signed an expansion with Supermassive Games. This is one of the 2 key projects we have. So we work with Supermassive Games and with Digital Extremes, those are the biggest service business projects at the moment in the house.And in terms of funding and money, we received a positive decision from Business Finland with this governmental operator in Finland supporting technology and export activities for companies like Nitro. And this project helps us to go forward with our game portfolio, seeking more opportunities there and play around with AI, which is obviously the hot new thing in this business and everybody is looking into it. And now we have a little bit more controlled structure into exploring the variety of opportunities [ what ] comes to AI and how we can take more and more advantage of that moving forward.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

That's super interesting part and we'll probably change also this business quite a lot.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. Indeed, indeed. And after the period, we just announced today that Autogun Heroes has continued to perform above our expectations. So that's what we wanted to talk to you more about during today.And this year, for Nitro, we are the oddballs, we want to make huge things happen. So whatever you have seen from Nitro so far, that's not where our ambition level is at. So we really want to become one of the top companies in this business. And based on what we've been achieving this year so far, we're well on our way towards that. And like I said earlier, the way that we operate is that, we have our in-house teams here in Finland. Then we have tons of partner studios around the world. And this is the secret for us to be able to scale up and down when it comes to development and operational capacity depending on the scale and phases of the different projects. And this is also something that helps us when we are controlling costs when we focus on preparing games for upcoming launch. And also, on the other hand, helps us when we potentially sign new deals on the B2B service business, then we can rapidly scale up depending on the needs of the projects.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Also the same model applies for our publishing operations that we have built the publishing department and all the marketing operations so that we have now all only very senior people working in the marketing team, covering all the main operations. Our technology used is super modern and scalable and we can handle even huge success. But then when the success happens, then we need to start scaling up the operations, we have built everything so that we have the core operations in-house, and we can add to more muscle to our partners and -- other operations that we can scale.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. And that is very important because many companies in this business, they kind of like forget to prepare for the success and forget to build the sort of foundation layer in a way that it can also then tolerate increasing, whether it's in terms of headcount or the scale of the game and so on.And our vision, like we said earlier is that, we want to be the household name in the category of action and shooter games. And that's something that we defined a few years ago now, and we sharpened our vision, and we focus exclusively on games in that category at the moment. For us, a shooter game can be anything from a first person shooter to a third person came to a top-down or a side-scrolling platform like Autogun Heroes. As long as there's stuff that goes kaboom, that's essentially what we mean with that. And we feel that by further exploring that very specific category and seeing the category grow on one hand, but also opening up new opportunities that helps us to focus on a very specific thing and become better and better and better with each iteration that we go through.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Shooter games have been the fastest-growing category on many markets and now become already the biggest category in several markets. So this is a growth category, but it's also a massive business opportunity in many different directions like Jussi told that there's very different style of shooter games and all of those buckets are opening their own opportunity.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. And especially like we have now learned with Autogun Heroes, we are at a point where we're able to implement modern monetization mechanics on top of the shooter gameplay and thus make shooter games monetized better than they have perhaps been doing in the past.If we look at our strategy and the overall road map where we stand, we started with our current strategy at the beginning of 2017. That's when we wanted to start exploring self-publishing and building the capabilities. That's when we listed ourselves in the Nasdaq First North Growth Market in Stockholm and you joined in 2018, I think, as part of that process. And during those years, we kind of like prepared everything. We did our first launches Heroes of Warland was launched towards the end of 2018. And this first phase in the strategy concluded basically in 2020, when Nordisk Games joined as a leading investor. And with their help and support, we've been able to expand the last few years. So 2021, we expanded our project portfolio and made Nitro Games operate more in the B2B service business. And in 2022, we had 2 focus points, game launches and B2B projects. We expanded quite heavily on the B2B process side and increased the revenues quite significantly, but we also went forward with game launches. The biggest of them was obviously NERF: Superblast. We also launched some games on Snapchat last year, but as a result of Snap announcing that they wanted to discontinue the whole games business, we also discontinued those projects on our end as a result. And this year, it's all about getting this company towards profitability. As it's clear, if you look at our numbers from the first quarter, but also continue expanding the business. And the big thing this year is the upcoming launch with Autogun Heroes.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

We are very close to reaching the profitability and that's the main goal for the company. But at the same time, also all the growth directions are looking super good. We have a very strong games now in the self-publishing portfolio and also very cool opportunities on the service business side. So we are naturally seeking those growth opportunities all the time, but with the profitability the first mindset now.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. And a lot of the dynamics how us getting better and better with our own games, also introduce a new type of opportunities on the service business. So these 2 are supporting each other very well.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

I have seen it many times happen in the other companies that when some -- one thing works, then all the projects around starts to work, and that's a little bit what I'm seeing now and getting the sense of that's happening now with across the portfolio.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. Indeed, indeed. Overall, this year from the vibes that we have inside the house and with the team, we are very much already like sort of headed towards the success. So the vibes have been really good and strong here this year and the year just keeps getting better and better the more we go forward.And with our strategy, we have a portfolio strategy. And basically, at the moment, we have 2 key projects in our games business, and we have 2 key projects in our B2B service business. And with these things, what we are seeking to do is that, basically our games business is designed to produce shots on goal when it comes to finding these hit games and discovering the [ holistic ] potential, whereas the service business is giving us the backbone in the form of steady revenue streams, but also improving the brand recognition and allowing us to explore different type of opportunities, especially in the form of other platforms and so on. And during the quarter, we continued forward with all of these 4 projects. And today, we're going to talk mostly about Autogun Heroes because that's the cool new thing, and I think that we haven't spoken too much about earlier.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Also worth mentioning that now we are soon with our own game in the state where we have 2 live products out on the market. But also same interesting thing happens now with the partner projects. So we are getting closer and closer with those projects also to phases when those games can become a success. So we might end up towards the end of the year having very many successful games in our operation [ that we have ].

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. And that what's builds tons of excitement within Nitro as well because there's so many avenues how we can make it this year.If we look at the numbers, we started to follow the IFRS, so the International Financial Reporting Standards this year. The difference between this and the previous FAS, Finnish Accounting Standards is not huge. There's some technical differences in how the numbers are reported. But essentially, everything that we report forward from this Q1 report is in IFRS and we compare to the previous year numbers that have been also converted to IFRS to keep things clear. And what we saw during the first quarter is, essentially with our revenues increase compared to the similar period previous year, we saw our EBITDA improve. And at the same point, we were able to protect our cash position, and we actually had a little bit more money in our cash compared to where we started the quarter.And moving forward, what we're going to continue to do is to continue on the step-by-step approach towards profitability while also making sure that we maximize the opportunities with the game launches at hand and with the business opportunities at hand in the service business.But then let me pass the microphone to industry legend, Immonen, and we start talking about Autogun Heroes, and this being our own project and not a partner project, it means that we don't need to oblige to any confidentiality agreements that we usually have with partners and stuff. So we can talk a little bit more openly about the results that we have seen so far.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Yes. So this is a project that I'm super excited about. We have been also now fairly open with our partners and industry partners and all the discussions that we have had with partners like very big companies, they have wanted to give opportunity for us to work with them, with this game, maybe we have seen some publishing offers on the table. We have seen super good take from the Apple and Google regarding this product and the numbers that we have been pushing from the soft launch. The game has been, not only evaluated by us, but also several external analysts have been looking, under the hood, they're looking at the metrics and trying to kick tires and seeing where are the problem, so the problems haven't yet seen. So, yes, that's why we are a very confident that something that we have now in the hand is definitely a future success.For me, the only open question is that, this is going to be scalable free-to-play, but then how scalable and how successful that's the next question. And that's only something that we explore when we start scaling that's when you learn that. We don't have money to start doing scalability testing with the millions of budget because that we can see them when we start actually operating the game live.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Indeed, indeed. Let's talk a little bit about how we got here, the thing that we have been discussing earlier is how we have this data-driven process and the MVP process where we test tons of games, both our own and also from our partner studios and so on.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Yes. So if we look at the road map in the a time scale, we have already been working with this game with our partner studio maybe a couple of years. So we started following the progress with the game, and we saw the potential very early on. And then we went to the direction where we we're discussing that since that company didn't have the mobile publishing expertise and skills and resources that maybe we should publish the game and we were testing that game for the publishing opportunity. But then pretty much a year ago, when we started going into more late phase testing of the core game play, we saw outstanding results, which were definitely something that I haven't seen in this business in terms of retention and in terms of ad monetization. And very quickly, we decided that this is the way too massive opportunity to be used as a publishing opportunity where the upside is shared and there's a lot of friction for the scaling. So we decided that this is the a play that Nitro Games need to play as a -- as a driver seat. And we went very quickly to the acquisition deal with the company. We acquired all the rights for the core product, and we hired a whole team that was working on the game.And now ever since that, we started scaling up the business with our own resources and made things now since that last summer was that we started pushing our free-to-play expertise, monetization expertise, we needed to build the whole back end and on the live operation tooling. Just the original game was only client running game that was not built for the a very efficient modern free-to-play operations. So more like a game as a service mentality. And now everything is -- was finalized for the early this year, and we started then measuring the success of the more final looking product. And now all the testing that we have been doing since end of January is looking that we have a really winning game in the hand, we are seeing all the metrics are definitely on the a high part of the industry standards and validating that this game needs to be launched and scaled.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. We've never gone through this fast soft launch period ever with any game in the past. One of the reasons is that, we saw a pretty exceptional performance out of the box after a little bit of balancing and tweaking that always has to be there. But also because this a single player game, you don't need to worry that much about how the experiences between different players is going to impact the player journey like you have to do in a multiplayer game. So it's also more straightforward and makes measurement more easier because you don't need that huge cohorts to get tons of players to populate servers and things like that. So you can isolate the player experience in an easy way.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

And also the balancing of the game is very simple when we can follow the progress and tool how hard is the monetization, how that starts to be impacting the engagement and making sure that the balance for a player fund versus the monetization and all the friction that is on the way is fine, too.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes, indeed. And moving forward from here, what we're preparing now is the upcoming hard launch for the game and that will then start the launch phase. Usually, we like to do roughly 6 months launch phases, but we always look at those case by case. And during that phase, we usually scale up the game and start seeing revenues grow and all those things. And then we -- during that phase determine what exactly is our live operation strategy beyond that, how much do we want to invest in the live operations space for years to come and how does the project life cycle look like?But let's go forward and have a look a little bit in terms of what have we actually now seeing during the soft launch and what are these numbers telling us?

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

All right. So normally, we don't publish these numbers because there's always debatable facts on the table because what was the cohort, what a testing was done, what are the markets where the testing is done and so on and so on. And you can slice and dice these numbers and you can look at them from different angles and it's a very complex world. But since the numbers are so solid from all the different point of view, we wanted to give this for the public so that we can be more really talking about these numbers with our partners and possible investors, but also -- because we are so confident that the levels are super high.So when it comes to retention, we are looking at a day 30 retention, so 30 days after the game install how many players will be on that day playing the game. And we are seeing now everything which is above 6%. And 6% is already like a strong long-term retention at this stage, but when the game was more in the fun and run shape last summer, we know that this number was close to 10%. So there's now a much more friction put into the game in order to make the monetization super efficient. And that's why the retention has taken a little bit hit, but we know that now when we balance the game and start operating actual live events we know that this number will go up. And naturally, we want to maximize the [ younger ] retention.But then the most interesting things with these products are definitely the monetization. So we have seen ARPDAU, which have been on the record high number. It's like here, EUR0.45, and this is a net ARPDAU from the in-apps, and we are a looking product that is not fully operational. We don't have all the live operations. We don't have like a surprising deals and those things happening in the game. It's a very based MVP product, but it monetizes in same manner. And...

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. What it mean essentially with that is that, before the actual hard launch and stuff, we don't usually play around too much with live events or special promotions and [ offers ], which are tools that we, of course, use after the launch, which only usually further improve both the retention but also the monetization of the game.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Yes. And naturally these are down numbers, like average revenue per daily active users, those are super high, but they are mostly high because the conversion percentage for the daily payments is super high. So we have seen that normally when people start playing this game, it takes a maximum 3 days when they convert to paying customer. And then ever since that, they start doing regular payments for the game and that is visible in the super high conversion, but also a super high LTV. And the same applies to ad monetization. Naturally, we want to balance this game experience is like how much you have ads and how much you try people to convert to actual in-app purchases, but we haven't seen any a cannibalization between these, right? Both of the monetization avenues are delivering like an insane high performance. And these ad numbers here are -- when looking any a game business case, even like hypercasual, we are looking conversion percentages, which are comparable to the best-performing games on this business.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. And when we talk about the ads we've been discussing that a lot internally, but why are we exactly seeing such a high performance from the ads, especially when the IAPs are performing so well? And what we've been hearing tons of feedback from our players is that, the way the ads have been implemented that seems to work really, really well for this game that they don't interrupt the game play in a negative way, but they kind of like hit that each when you want to continue the game play session.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

And this ad monetization opportunities and techniques that we are using here are not possible in multiplayer games because we have basically implemented most of the ads in the core roots of player is offered instant gratification and instant [ rewinds ] and instant a battle boost during the gameplay. And that is almost like impossible to pass from the claim perspective.And then naturally, everything comes down to return on ad spending measurement, and that's the only one that is meaningful because then you need to always look, okay, we are looking definitely high LTV, but then what is the cost per actual [ install ]. But then all this balancing comes in the form of return on ad spending. And we have seen that the game starts monetizing very early, and that's very good for the steering the performance marketing, but then also that return on ad spend is growing nicely on the curve and hitting those magical points like after 2 weeks, we have already seen that the 30% of the ad spending is received, and we are looking at a full payback in 2 to 3 months. And that's the short window -- payback window, which we now start operating. They're scaling the game. And then -- and everything looks solid, we can start expanding the window and increasing the spending and are scaling the a maximum business case out from this opportunity.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

And these are things that are -- I love as a CEO because a big part of my job is derisking our plans and making sure that we always protect the downside while we are seeking to get those [ holistic ] scenarios. And are the fact that we have a single player game that starts to monetize so quickly, means that what we have seen already during the soft launch is actually money returning and coming back to our bank account because in the end of the day, the most important KPI is money landing on our bank account and the revenues that we're seeing. And with this game compared to things that we have done previously, it's a world of difference because we're able to see things now during soft launch that we normally have only discovered after the hard launch when we are able to populate the games big enough, and that's beautiful for us at the moment.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Yes.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Let's go forward with Autogun Heroes and start to summarize all the greatness that we have seen so far and where do we actually stand now?

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Yes. So like I said earlier, we have now very confident that we have found a winning product now through our validation process, which we explained. And now the question is more like how big and how successful this opportunity will be. And that's why we have now wanted to keep all the cards in our own hands, like even though there has been lucrative partner opportunities on the table, we want to go forward and start operating this game and showing the actual potential through that. And everything so far, like however, we have been looking the numbers and success everything is exceeding the or meeting the all the business and volumes that we had for this product. And that's why we have now green lighted the global launch. We are not publicly stating when it happens, but the Apple and Google already know. So we want to keep the partners preparing for the launch, and we are now busy preparing for that launch.And everybody pretty much like we have already stated that all the biggest players and partners are super excited about the game and want to participate one way or another. So I think this opens up lot of partner opportunities going forward in the form of like if we need to have a more muscle for the scaling after the initial success, there's plenty of partners line up who want to jump in or if we see this being big there's plenty of companies who want to invest or even acquire the whole company.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. And in terms of our Autogun Heroes and moving forward, obviously, all those opportunities with different partners, they are still going to be there down the line. So the fact that we are going forward with self-published release to begin with, does not exclude anything moving forward. So we've seen several examples in this business during this year and the previous years where companies take their game to a certain stage on their own. And maybe then after that, if they don't want to continue on their own take and then sign it up with a partner. So we're pretty much enjoying the fact that we have something that's very much wanted at the moment and going forward step by step with that.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Also, one thing to note still about the Autogun Heroes is that, we opened the game in Sweden. So it's available now from Appstore and Google Play store for people to test. And I want to also [ talk about it ], this is a consumer business and -- the cool thing about this business is that, you can go and test the game and see whether this is a quality product or whether you are enjoying and many of us are probably thinking that, okay, the mobile games are not for us. But actually, when we have been testing the marketing and a target demographics for this game, this game is a targeting plus 30-year-old male audience, not exclusively, but as a primary target group. We naturally want this to be in as inclusive and a wide appealing product as possible. But those players who grew up by playing Marios and all the side-scrolling platforms and then went to [ Duke Nukem ] games and Contras and those are definitely the best probably and probably at least the most monetizing audience. So I'm one of them, and I have spent a lot of money for the game and enjoying every cent.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes, because at the end of the day, it is an entertainment business, and our job is to deliver fun for the people. And the game is now out in Sweden. So I think what we can do is to encourage everybody and have a go with the game and try to fight somebody who does not like it and see if you succeed with that. We've been trying. We haven't yet found that person. So have a go with that.But this wouldn't be a webcast without questions and answers. And let's see what we have here.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

There's a couple of questions here in the chat. So let me have a look-see here. What is the reason to change to IFRS now? I track the international capital question mark or change stocklist question mark. So let's handle that one first.Switching to IFRS is technicality, if you ask me. We've been thus far following Finnish Accounting Standards, which are not that far off in terms of our numbers from the IFRS. So it's not because of anything like that, but simply put, we want to be super professional in everything we do. And the most professional thing you can do is to portray your numbers in IFRS, which makes them easier to read for everybody and removes any possible hesitation that what's behind the numbers. So we believe that we are doing a service for our shareholders by doing so because it makes numbers more standardized.Then question is that what does Hasbro think of NERF: Superblast and will they push the marketing of the game moving forward?Obviously, everybody has been loving NERF: Superblast so far. And with Hasbro, what we have seen is that, they have been supporting the launch already thus far, and we can expect to enjoy more of that moving forward as well. For example, I think we just, together with them, gave away some [ real life blasters ] in the competition and so on and we...

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Yes, that type of collaboration is all the time ongoing and further activations are ongoing. And many of the Hasbro's big marketing campaigns are something that they are planning for 3 to 6 months forward. We have been continuously working with them towards those bigger marketing [ beads ] and being part of those. But anyway, it's not going to happening like this. And there's more planning and more that type of execution happening.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. Somebody once said that big ships turn slowly. So there's always a lead time for certain things.Then let's see what we have next. Congrats on the great results. On Autogun, what are the total downloads for the game and which territories?

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

We have mostly or, let's say, exclusively done all the testing now in U.S. because we need to succeed in U.S. That's the -- if you want to go to the belly of the beast, let's go there first and validate the numbers in U.S. and if they work in U.S., then we know that they work everywhere else as well. So we have -- we don't reveal the actual numbers, but we have tens of thousands of downloads from U.S., from different type of campaigns, so from install optimized to high-quality value-optimized campaigns. And all the sample sizes have been naturally minimum what is needed to deliver the results, but also big enough to be statistically significant. And now we are looking single player experience. So we are in the position where we can measure the things in very a standardized way. And then only thing that we need to make sure is the sample size that sample size or this type of measurement is big enough.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes, compared to the multiplayer games that we have done in the past, there's so much less noise in the data and are so much less...

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Experience changes depending who you play with if you have live players and so on.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Then there's something which we're not going to answer directly, but this is a question about how much are we estimating downloads for Autogun Heroes and stuff like that.We don't communicate any future guidance or expectations towards download revenues, none of those things. So you have to bear with us and continue to see the upcoming reports when we then see how we did.Then there was a question about data available in public sources. There's so many different public sources. And, of course, we can't comment on those in detail, but this is a question we get a lot. And usually, when we look at our own games or other games where we know the data points in reality, if it's during soft launches or smaller scale, those are not that reliable. What you can see in public sources benefits in super big scale and so on, then I think they give a pretty good indication about where the game is headed and how it's performing. But those are always more or less estimations and assumptions built on publicly available data points.And then...

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

I think immediately after the global launch, when we start to get scale in a meaningful manner, those public sources start to deliver fairly good indications for the game performance in terms of downloads and also revenue.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Indeed, indeed. Then there's so many more questions about the Autogun Heroes performance, which I think you've already covered, [ we avoid ] that. And then questions about how does this compared to our previous games?We don't want to pinpoint into any game specifically, but I think it's safe to say that what we're seeing now is completely on a different ballpark than what we have seen earlier. And that's why we are so excited about the opportunities.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Especially the monetization part is like when comparing to any industry's available data, how the best-performing games are performing, these monetization numbers, both from the in-app purchase and outside are -- they can withstand the comparison to anything. So that's on the solid level and definitely much higher than what we have seen with our internal [ operation ].

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. Indeed, indeed. Then there's a question about the service business, how confident are we about our ability to discover new service business projects? And could we provide insights on how the service business market has evolved over the past year? And especially with the challenges faced by the overall mobile gaming industry and have we observed any significant shifts in demand and things like that?So long story short, we are very optimistic about the service business overall. What we have seen in the service business market specifically is pretty well aligned with what you have seen in the global markets overall. So, obviously, end of last year and earlier this year, things weren't up right when there was a lot of companies canceling big projects and companies announcing cost savings and all these things happen. So, obviously, that means that there's less opportunities available in terms of new projects. Thanks to us having these long-term partnerships, we've been able to continue forward with the existing partners that we've had, and that's part of our long-term strategy to make sure that we deliver quality. So we're not relying on us signing new customers.That said, what we have seen this year is definitely things starting to, how to say, go for the better again. There seems to be more and more demand. And I hate to put it this way, but less competition for Nitro because not everybody survived last year. And overall, in terms of trend lines that we're seeing moving forward, what we are seeking out to do is bigger projects. There's more and more opportunities on the cross-play cross-platform side. And that's what puts Nitro in a unique position because we have our background in PC gaming. We've been doing some white label console in the past. We worked with so many companies in our history on a variety of platforms, and we still have those capabilities and fresh samples on how we've delivered IP from other platforms to mobile, how we work with other platforms in our service business and so on. So that's an area where we see a lot of opportunities moving forward. And maybe if we previously said that there's more and more companies we're seeing who want to bring their shooter IP on mobile, that's still very much the case. But also what we're seeing as a new angle is bringing that shooter IP to a cross-play cross-platform direction where mobile is one of the components. And the unique nature of mobile games, advertising and marketing makes it very attracting to track the masses to the IP through mobile and then spread it around the different platforms.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

The portfolio LTV becomes interesting measurement because the mobile marketing is the most efficient out there you can get the masses of players into your product. And if you can provide the same experience on the mobile device than on the a console platform, we are already seeing that this product is holding a more processing power than Nintendo Switch. So you start understanding that the capabilities on this platform, once you have figured out the launch roles and all that game play for the device than the world is opened.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Yes. And recently, since we've been working with so many different technologies, we work a lot with Unity game engine. We work a lot with Unreal different versions of Unreal Engine, but also with some proprietary technologies and so on. So that puts us in a position where we are able to basically respond to any demand that's out there in the service business.Next question is about what should you expect in terms of operating expenses and cost of goods sold moving forward? Are there plans to increase costs throughout the year? Or is a more conservative approach being taken to manage expenses?Very good question. The #1 priority for Nitro this year is to get ourselves towards profitability step by step, which means that we are, at the same time, seeking to increase our revenues and control our costs while we do so in order to make sure that we get there step by step. If we, for example, look at an approach in game launch, that's why we are super careful about the return on ad spend, for example, to make sure that we get the money back. Obviously, in this business, everything we do, whether it's a game launch or starting a new partner project or expanding an existing partner project, any of these potential scenarios always means that we need to add to the cost usually in terms of labor for either internal or outsourced, but we always make sure that we have revenue stream covering those costs. So if you would see our cost base increasing, that would mean that we also have a revenue stream increasing with, obviously, profits included.Then let's see if we have anything else. Just a second. I think that's all for now. So thank you all very much for the questions, and that means that we are ready to wrap up. Thank you, industry legend, Immonen for joining.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

How did I do? Is this an ongoing basis to replace Antti or...

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Competition has been started. For Antti, I think we wish safe travels. I believe he's in Dubrovnik at the moment, and like I said, meeting some industry friends and our partners. So pretty much looking forwards to what you guys bring home from there. And for everybody who tuned in, thanks for this, and please don't hesitate to reach out through e-mail and so on. If you have any further questions, we're happy to go through those.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Please test the game.

[Jussi Tähtinen, executive]

Indeed, go and check it out. And until next time, have a good one. Bye-bye.

[Jussi Immonen, executive]

Bye-bye.