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Earnings Call Transcript

Earnings Call Transcript
2020-Q2

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E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Q2 2020 report with me, Ebba Ljungerud. I'm the CEO of the company, and...

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

And I'm Alexander Bricca, I'm the CFO. Welcome.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

I think we have a lot of listeners today. There has been huge interest and loads of questions. So we're going to run through our report, and then there will be time for questions afterwards. If you haven't already asked, you can ask in the Twitch chat as well. How are you?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

I'm good, yes.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes? Holiday?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, had holidays In July. I would have preferred slightly warmer, but still good to be away, but also very good to be back. How about you?

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Same. Sweden, which has been very nice, no travel abroad, not this time...

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

No, maybe.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

But maybe later in the fall. I would love to go visit our new studios as well. Shall we hit it off?So we are incredibly proud and happy to present our most successful quarter ever. A revenue increases of 20% compared to the same quarter last year, and profit before tax up actually 29%. This is -- well, we're hugely thankful to our staff and our fans for this result. If we can switch to the next slide, then I can talk a little bit about. We have launched 4 expansions, Invasions for Planetfall Emperor, for EUIV. Island Bound for Prison Architect, and Apocalypse for Stellaris: Console Edition. The biggest one here is definitely Emperor for EUIV, which it was a while ago since we had an expansion on that game. So it was great to see the reception and sales on that. We have also released Stellaris: Galaxy Command, which is our mobile game in hard launch. So that means it's available all over the world. And we have had 2 Steam sales. The first one was the Paradox Publisher Weekend, which was in May 14 to 18. And then we had the Steam Summer Sale, which was end of Q2, beginning of Q3. Especially the Publisher Weekend I can talk about, it was -- we saw all-time high numbers on Steam in general. And we also saw actually our best publisher sale ever. So that was very exciting for us. We have 4 million monthly active users, and we have 14 million registered accounts, so growing numbers there. The quarter has been very much about building for the future. We announced that we are opening a studio in Barcelona called Paradox Tinto the studio will be led by Johan Andersson, who has been working on Europa Universalis and other games as well for a very long time. So that will be the focus of the studio going forward as well. We've seen loads of applications. So the business is kicking off there now when the fall starts to happen. Very exciting. This means, together with the other additions to the group, that we now have studios and offices in 9 places. So we're definitely growing. It's Barcelona, as I mentioned, Paris, Tammerfors or Tampere in Finland, Delft, the Netherlands, Seattle and San Francisco or Berkeley really in the U.S. And then in Sweden, we have 3 locations, Malmö, Umeå and Stockholm. So 6 countries altogether, very exciting. At the end of the quarter, 534 employees and we have signed a collective bargaining agreement for our staff in Sweden. That's actually technically is also Q3 because I think it started -- it starts on the first of July, but still. Two very big things that we've been working on during the quarter, is to buy 2 studios. Both of them actually happened in July, so Q3, but since the work was a big part of Q2, we want to talk about it now. First, we have Playrion, which is a mobile studio in Paris. They have a game called Airline Manager (sic) [ Airlines Manager ] a very cool game -- management game on mobile, similar to other Paradox' games in a lot of ways, and it really helps us take our next step in the mobile platform. And then we have Iceflake Studios in Tampere in Finland. Iceflake are working on Surviving the Aftermath, which is in early access on Epic. We're also releasing it on early access on Steam in the fall, and then the full release will be in the spring next year. So that cooperation has gone super well, and we really like working with each other. So it's very nice to see them join the family. Yes. When we look at M&A, as we look at a couple of different things, I would say that, first of all, we look at IPs, do they fit with our portfolio? We look at things like do we maybe want to expand the talent in a certain area? Or do we want to add to skills that we don't know super well? So you could say that Iceflake is an example of the adding to things we know and Playrion is a bit more helping us expand and grow in an area that's more new to us, at least adjacent, we should say. So very cool, and welcome to all of you. We are very excited to have you in the group. And COVID-19, of course, a very big part of the quarter for not just us, I think, for everyone in the entire world. All of our employees in the different offices are still encouraged to work from home. We will follow what government says, so recommendations might be slightly different from country to country. But in general, we believe that we will be working from home at least most of the fall. I'm personally very, very impressed by how well our teams have adapted to working from home. I think it's -- it happened really fast, and the transition has been smooth, but it is a long time to be at home. So we're now trying to find ways to engage with each other a bit more naturally all the time, really, and hope to continue to do that during the fall. The sales, as you see in the numbers, we have seen a bump from people being at home and playing a lot of games. We see a slight, shall we say, not really a drop more back to normal levels now in July. So we'll see how it continues here in the fall. But part of the very, very good Q2 is definitely because of this. Long term, we see some impact, starting to see some impact on productivity. It's really hard to -- this is a very creative industry where a lot of the work is about meeting each other and being creative together and finding solutions together. And it is taking a little bit of a toll on -- not this -- not being able to meet up. We don't have any exact numbers or anything, but we do see that we are looking at small-ish delays on some of our unannounced projects so far. So you'll, for sure, hear more about that later in the upcoming quarterly reports. Looking at what's happening going forward, I think what we hear in all of our offices are currently extremely excited about is the Crusader Kings release, Crusader Kings III, I should say, release on the first of September. We haven't disclosed any numbers or anything yet, but we are doing a lot of streams on Twitch, there you can follow. You can see a lot of gameplay there. So if you're interested, make sure you check it out. We're also working on studio integrations with the new studios. It's a very fine balance between letting studios have their creative freedom, but also making sure that they have help with things like legal and HR and finance and all of those things. COVID-19, as I said, continues to be a big theme. And then as we also announced this morning, we have decided to push the release of Bloodlines 2 to 2021. And this is partly due to COVID that we haven't been able to work as closely together as we would have liked. And we're seeing some -- we're not -- the game isn't exactly where we want it to be to release. So that's why we decided to push it. It's -- we do this all the time, but we know that it's a very, very long road for a game. So of course, we look forward to being able to release it later. I think that's it for me right now. Yes. Over to you, Alex.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Let's dig into the numbers. So as Ebba mentioned and as we have written in the report, we have had a record quarter revenue-wise, SEK 465 million in Q2 compared to SEK 387 million Q2 of 2019. So that is a 20% year-on-year increase. We saw the revenues coming from 4 of the usual suspect games, the Cities: Skylines, Stellaris, Europa Universalis IV and Hearts of Iron, of course. And then on fifth place or included 5, Planetfall, if you understand -- follow...

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

It's just really cool to see.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

It's very, very good to see that. But we can also add that several of our other games like Surviving Mars, Surviving the Aftermath, Prison Architect and so on, they were kind of close to the firth place. So we're starting to see a nice spread between the games in terms of generating the revenues. So that's very good. We often point out that it's not always relevant to compare quarter-to-quarter. Or if you're going to do it, you need to dig in a bit more to see what -- especially what has been released in terms of games. And if we compare Q2 over this year and last year, in terms of expansions, they have been very similar. We have had 1 full expansion on one of our bigger games both this quarter and last year's quarter, it's EUIV this quarter. And it was Cities: Skylines last year. We have had 2 full expansions on 2 of our other games. BattleTech last year and Surviving Mars last year. This year, it was Planetfall and Prison Architect and kind of similar size games. And also, we had releases of expansions on Console, one --

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Last year as well.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Last year as well. So in that terms, a very similar quarter. The main difference is the following: Last year, we had actually a new game, completely new game that released. So that was Imperator: Rome. And that, of course, pushed up the revenues quite a lot.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

And that game did really well in the initial sales.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

It did. It did. So then it's, of course, impressive that we still beat the last year's quarter this year. And a couple of things that has been in our favor. One is the COVID situation, of course. And then we have had, as you mentioned, Publisher Weekend on Steam. We had this in May this year. Last year, we had it in October, together with PDXCON. So we didn't have it in Q2 last year. So therefore, that pushes up revenues this year. And also, we get quite substantial revenues from our partnerships with Microsoft and Epic. We had the Microsoft -- we started the Microsoft collaboration last year in June, but at that point, only with 3 games and only 4 with a little less than a month. So this year, we had it for the full quarter.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

I mean it's very exciting. We're actually releasing CK III on Game Pass from release. So that will be exciting for us, of course, to see how that works.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, yes. So good revenues and good profit as well, SEK 199 million in operating profit compared to SEK 154 million last year. So that's a 29% increase. Similar differences, if you look at profit after financial items, SEK 198 million this year compared to SEK 154 million last. And profit after tax, SEK 155 million this year compared to SEK 120 million last year. With high revenues, normally comes, higher operating margin. That happened this quarter as well. So 43%, very strong margins. We're very happy with that. And of course, the profit margins follows along. Equity over asset ratio has gone down. That is due to the new accounting standards that were implemented last year, which means that we have our office lease agreements, taken on the balance sheet as debt and as an asset. So that pushes down this ratio.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

I mean, that goes for all companies pretty much, right?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, yes, yes. But it had a big impact on us because last year, we moved into new offices in Seattle, in Delft and not the least here in Stockholm with a big office for long-term, of course. As you mentioned, 534 employees at the end of the period and the acquisitions of Playrion and Iceflake were closed just after. So those -- so our colleagues in Tampere and in Paris are not included in 534. So we're looking at roughly 50 more colleagues and...

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

So maybe 600, end of Q3 then. We'll see.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. I mean, I've seen a lot of activities last week.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

We're growing.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Many new faces. So we are very close to 600.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes, that's true. Lots of new colleagues after the summer.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. So our charts, green line shows revenue and the other 3 lines shows our main expenses or our main costs. If you compare it -- compared to Q2 last year, nice and healthy growth, especially for revenue, but especially the last 3 quarters have been an increase. That is a bit unusual for us. Normally, our revenues fluctuate more from quarter-to-quarter. Now we have had the positive trend for 3 quarters. I shouldn't take that as a trend. The fact that we will not continuing to see the fluctuations, I think that will go on for many, many years. But if you look at it at a longer time, then there is a trend that I hope will continue for many, many years, and that is an upgoing trend for the revenues. Of course, cost also increases. If we compare to last year, it has gone up. If we put all the cost together, it's up 7% compared to the 20% of revenues. So that is, of course, the way we want it to be. We're very happy to increase our expenses as long as it comes with more revenues. Doesn't always happen in the same quarter, but over time, that is how we want it to be. Let's continue. The charts revenue and operating profit per quarter. Just as I mentioned, it has been a steady growth during the last 3 quarters, but also if you look a bit over a longer period of time, which you can see on the next chart.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

But I think it's worth pointing out that the beginning of this slide is more normal for us. The end of this slide.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

That is more normal. Hopefully, in the long run, where our portfolio is even bigger than it is today, it will smoothen out, but at the same time, we keep making bigger and bigger games. So I think we're going to see this choppy growth for many, many years. And I'm happy with that as long it's a growth and especially if the list continues to grow. So this is the rolling 12-month revenue and rolling 12 months operating profit, and that is, of course, a much smoother increase. Cash flow. Equally important as the revenue and as a profit, not to say, perhaps more important. So another financial record for the quarter. The cash flow from our operating activities, it reached SEK 269 million -- no, sorry, SEK 279 million in the quarter. So that's a new record. Investing activities, we tend to see new records there from quarter-to-quarter because we increase our investment into new games, which that is mainly. This quarter, we didn't. We invested slightly less compared to Q1, but I wouldn't assume that to be a trend. On the opposite, I think that we were going to continue to see the trend we have seen in previous quarters where we continuously increase our investment into games.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

And that's how we've done it for many years, like we grow continuously and reinvest most of what we make, I mean, we invest into new games.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Exactly. Exactly. And I think, of course, in Q3, it's going to look a bit different because then we have invested into new studios as well.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes. So that makes the -- so that, you can see, for instance, in Q4 2018, that was.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. That was the acquisition of Prison Architect, the game. Yes.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Prison Architect. Yes.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

So that's why that was up. Balance sheet strong. Very strong balance sheet. This is -- this shows our total equity in green and our total noncurrent assets. Well, our noncurrent assets, that's mainly capitalized development and licenses and brands that we've acquired. Now since 2019, it also includes these lease agreements as an asset. And you can see a big jump in the ratio between equity and noncurrent assets from Q3 to Q4, and that has to do with the fact that we moved in into our new premises, especially in Stockholm, that pushed up the asset, the noncurrent assets but didn't affect equity. So therefore, as you might remember on an earlier slide, the asset per equity ratio has increased or the equity per asset ratio has decreased, and that's due to this. Yes. Those were the slides I had planned to share.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

We have loads of questions. So that's good. I'll start to read.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Please do.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

And then -- and you can write in the chat as well, of course. We're trying to keep trying to keep track of all of them, so to catch all of them. We start out with 2 Crusader Kings' questions that we'll try to answer a little bit more general. What are the presales numbers like for CK III? As I said, we don't disclose that. It's also not necessarily such a great indicator on how something is going to sell. So we try to -- of course, we have targets, but we try to really see what happens. What really is relevant is what happens when the game goes live. We're -- what I can say is we're incredibly excited. And I think the whole team is very excited about it. And so we're really looking forward to the launch. You should check out the stream for sure. And then we have maybe a little bit more for you, but it's -- how big is the CK III launch in terms of resources and development time? Is it similar to EUIV?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. I mean, similar answer. I mean, we don't disclose how big investments we do in specific games, but we have many times said that we are constantly increasing the efforts and the resources we put into new games and EUIV was released 7 years ago. On Thursday, it's actually the 7-year anniversary for Europa Universalis IV. So compared to the games we released 3, 4 years ago, we have increased a lot. And compared to 7 years, even more. So if we compare it to the base game, we have, on EUIV, we've invested much, much more in CK III, a lot. We have also come out with tons of expansions on EUIV. So if we add that together, then I'm guessing that we are fairly close.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes. That's true. Yes. All right. Then we have what does organizational changes in the communication regarding Bloodlines 2 mean? Well, I mean when we do decide to push a release of a game, we review the whole structure of everything. So it's nothing really strange about it. It's part of -- we continuously evaluate how we work on a game and how we continue to work on a game. So it's pretty much what we would do all the time. I know, I mean Emperor -- Empire of Sin is also coming out later this year. And I know that we had a push of that game as well before, and it was the same then. We just review how we do things and try to make sure we give the game the best possible preconditions for a good launch. What about the financial forecast for Bloodlines? How is that affected by the delay?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. I mean, 2 kind of clear impacts. One is, of course, since we released a game later, it's going to -- the revenues from it is going to come in later. But then the reason why we delayed this game as is almost all the time, the reason why we delay any game, is that we want to push in more resources and spend more time developing it. So that means that the development cost increases. But since we capitalized the development costs during the development, that doesn't show up now. It shows up in the cash flow, but not in the result, that will be seen once we release the game, then we will have more to depreciate.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

We've said it many times before, but the only cost we take here and now is marketing costs.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. And then there are...

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Or only, but it's the main...

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Yes, that's right. We don't capitalize that. But then, of course, with the development comes, R&D, managers' time and all that we don't capitalize.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

What about virtual PDXCON this year? Or will there be a PDXCON this year? We have had many questions in the chat as well. We don't have any news to share at this point. We, of course, want to have a PDXCON. COVID definitely came in the way. And as soon as we have good plans, we will share them with you. We would love to have a PDXCON if we can find a cool way to do it.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Yes.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

What about the goal of 10% revenue? Do you want to answer that, maybe, Alex? Does it still stand? If so, is the focus for more internally developed games, licenses or further studio acquisitions like Playrion?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Right, well, the 10% of our revenue is going to come from mobile games. We decided some years ago that we wanted to make a huge effort to expand our platforms from PC.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Not just mobile. Any platform.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

No, no. And we have been very successful, I would say, regarding console, where we now or for at least a year, is constantly seeing around 50% of our revenues coming from console.Mobile, we would like to see the same. But so far, we haven't managed to achieve the same success on mobile. If we look at the first 2 quarter this year, I think it's just below 1% of our revenues that is coming from mobile. So in order to hit 10% over the full year, sounds a bit unlikely.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Probably behind a little, like there.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Probably behind. But now we have added on Playrion. So and through that, we get the game that is up and running, that has a very solid revenue. So therefore, we get...

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

It would help for sure.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

That will definitely help. And then, of course, Galaxy Command that it's a bit too early to perhaps to say what it's going to yield this year, but who knows?

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

I see it as 50% from Console in the chat notes. 15.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

15, 1-5.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Not quite there yet. Okay. How do you see Paradox' game library growing in the future? More games or fewer bigger games? Both I think. We are developing more games. But we are also seeing that the games grow, like if we go back to what you said before around EUIV being released 7 years ago, the individual games titles have grown since then. And that's how we foresee that it will go in the future as well. Having said that, one has to remember that our games tend to be very niche. So it depends a little bit what you compare to, we can be very happy with a game that doesn't tell that many copies. And so it's more about what is the game cost and what does the game sell. It's not only what the game sells, both are relevant. Definitely a question for you, Alex. The Swedish krona has strengthened in relation to the U.S. dollar, how does that impact us?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. I mean, yes, it sounds good that the Swedish krona has strengthened. But we have only a small part of our revenues in Swedish krona, but we have a quite big chunk of our costs in the Swedish krona.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Our biggest studios are here, for instance.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Our biggest studios are here. It has changed with the ratio a bit because I would say almost all our external games are developed by foreign studios, yes. And we're getting more and more studios that have salary and tax costs in foreign currencies. But we have much more costs in krona than we have revenues. So that means when we have strong foreign currencies, we, as any exporting company, gain from that. So we have had 1 year, maybe 2 years with very strong dollar, especially, which has been in our favor. Now we have during the last quarter, seen a strengthening of not only the dollar but in pound, in euro as well, where we could, say, weakening of the SEK. And that is, on the bottom line, it's negative for us, of course.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

It's also part of the world we're in.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Exactly. Exactly.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

So it's -- we know that this happens. So we do panic over it. All right. This -- how has the pandemic affected PDX? What measures have been put in place? I said it a little bit before. But we've done a lot of things. So first of all, of course, moving all employees to work from home. We've opened up a little bit, so you can choose if you want to be in the office, you have to sign up and everything. We've done a lot of activities, both for ourselves, but also for others. We've done a lot of sales. That have been really appreciated internally as well, where we have donated. I think last quarterly report, we talked about a donation we made to the COVID fund. I can't remember how much it was...

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

It was just above $500 million. $500 million.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

$500,000.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

$500,000.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

I mean, good.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

I wish. I wish I...

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Like that's a lot.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Just above $500,000, [ SEK 5 million ].

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Yes. That was a good donation. That was a big donation for us. So we do a lot of those things. We also -- we've also started working with some organizations that look into how you can make games more accessible for people with various disabilities, which isn't technically connected to the COVID situation, but it's more like how do we work in a little bit more broad sense of that. And then I talked a little bit about the financial implications as well. What about -- and then the next one is, can you tell us anything about the game Paradox Tectonic is working on? We've gotten a lot of questions on what different studios are working on. As I think all of you know, we don't disclose until we decide to disclose because we want to make sure that the game is what we want it to be. I think you also have heard me say before that we cancel around 40% of our projects, so around 4 in 10 projects are canceled, which means that if we announce too early, we can lead -- that can lead to big disappointments in various groups. Having said that, they are working on a new IP, we've said. And in terms of our other studios, we both have situations where studios help each other and work on various games. For instance, in Malmö, they are working a lot on Imperator right now. And so that can happen, and then they're also their own games. So -- okay. And then we have one around M&A. You seem to be on a roll. Are there any other mergers and acquisitions coming anytime soon?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. It looks like we're on a roll. I mean, we closed 2 acquisitions within 2 weeks in July. But that is...

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Unusual for us.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

It's unusual. It's quite some time that we did it. But it's more a coincidence than a trend that it happens within such a short time. But yes, we are continuing, as we have been. We want to grow. We want to grow capacity-wise and competence-wise in terms of both development and publishing skills. So -- and we want to grow our numbers of IP. And this, we can do either through organical growth, as we have seen with Tectonic or with the Tinto, or we can do it through acquisitions. And as we play on Iceflake or Harebrained or Triumph. And which one we chose has to do, we look at the time it takes to build something on our own compared to -- that's when we acquire something, we can get it immediately. We, of course, look at the costs. Often if you're going to acquire something, that is already there and existing and running, you need to pay for it more than it cost to build it. And then the risk. Building something yourself often comes with not getting it right the first time. So we look at all these things and want to have a good mix of organic growth as well as acquisitions.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

All right. Okay. We have been seeing lots of new projects announced for the World of Darkness IP in the past year. Is your intention to develop some of the other IPs in the same way. Well, I mean I think that several of our brands have potential to grow and become bigger. It goes with the -- what we do and what others do. So it's also connects to what we license out to other people. If it makes sense, we make games. But if we want to do something else around the project, then it's -- we're happy to license it to someone else. And that's why we've seen a lot of board games and books, et cetera, on many of our IPs. It makes sense for us to do licensing, definitely. And the base of a decision is really will it help to grow the IP in general, and will it make it bigger for the future. So yes, absolutely, we can do that. Any plans for BattleTech? Do you want to answer that?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

There is another one, I see regarding economics.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

I kind of skipped that.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Okay. Okay. You skipped that one.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

I answered it. I answered it.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, you answered it. But it's a very good way. It's a very financially sound way to build your brands.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes, exactly. We got the help from others.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

You get the, we guess, revenue through it. Yes. BattleTech?

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes. What do you think?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

I don't know.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

No. We -- BattleTech has gone into what we call legacy. So we won't be developing more on BattleTech. We love the game. And the fans are super passionate about it. It's still played a lot. So it's more -- we balance it towards other things. And HBS, the studio who have built the game, they are working on 2 new projects actually that we still haven't announced. So that should be coming out. All right. And then the next Stellaris expansion? Well, it's kind of the same answer, as I said before, we don't disclose when things come until we know when they're coming. We want to give the teams their peace of mind to build and to -- often in the beginning when you start building, you don't know exactly how long it's going to take, so it also doesn't make sense to announce too early. But that doesn't mean that we aren't working on more Stellaris contents. That, we will do for sure. Then we have some questions around Spain. Why we chose to open a studio in Spain specifically or in Barcelona even more specifically? Well, I mean there are lots of reasons why we choose a location. In this case, we know that there are many studios who work with slightly different types of games in Barcelona, which means that there's a pool of very talented people who can come work with us. You -- it's also very important to have a creative lead, and Johan Andersson, who will lead the studio, he wanted to move. So it also makes sense to build around that. In general, it's for us, we always look at studios having strong creative lead and strong passion for the games they're building. You can't really force anyone to build a game they don't want to build. So that's really why. Okay. Then we have a few questions here on business models. I saw some on this chat around why we chose to go with Game Pass for -- we did it with Imperato but also for CK III. We have 1 around learnings from the test with the EUIV subscription offer. I don't know if you remember, but you could on Steam, you could buy all DLCs in a subscription model for a while. And then the free weekend for Imperator. In general, for all of these tests, and different ways of selling our games. The only thing we know is that how things sell change over time. That has been true for as long as Paradox has been around, and it will be true for the future, which means that we always do tests of different things. Subscription is a big thing at the moment. It's coming on very strongly. So we do various tests in that. We will continue to do that. And the same goes for free weekends where we give away the base game. If a game has been around for a while, it's a good way for us to introduce new players when we release a new DLC, for instance. So these tests will continue to happen. And I think 3 weekends have been very successful. Subscription also looks to be very successful. It's not for everyone. It depends on how you play the games. So for us, it's not one or the other. It's how can we add to how we make our games available for all our fans, really.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

And I think regarding free weekends, that's something that has been very successful for us. When we have -- when we think that we have done great improvements on the game, so we did it on Surviving Mars last year. We had -- and we saw a very positive impact. And we got in a lot of new players. That's tried it and stay on and therefore, we did something similar with Imperato: Rome this year after last year's improvements. We did --

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Exactly.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

-- since the launch. And we've seen benefits for that game there as well.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Okay, then cloud gaming. That's a big one that we've been talking about a lot. What's our stance on that? Do we like it? Do we not like it? Stadia, xCloud, GeForce Now, et cetera?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. We like it.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

We like it.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

I mean...

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

It's the same, right, it develops over time.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. We want to be on the platforms that our players prefers to be on now -- whether it's now in the future, and we can't really know what -- how it's going to be in the future. So therefore, we're super happy to try on different new things. And currently, we have games on both GeForce Now and xCloud, so...

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes, and they're doing really well. How does Paradox Interactive work with Triumph Studios from game design to release? This is a very broad question. It's basically how do you publish a game. So I think we're going to have to save that for another time. I recommend that you listen to the podcast, where that Champs and Daniel have every now and then. There are some episodes specifically on that. It's a very long cooperation, a very close cooperation, I can tell you. Okay. Where lies your biggest market, Europe, Eastern Asia, North America, et cetera?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

I normally answer that with the truth. That is that North America and Europe are our biggest markets, and they are fairly equal. And then Asia, China, Japan, South Korea are big markets as well for us.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

They're growing as well.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. But not in relation to how big those gaming markets are. So North America and Europe are still -- are big markets.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

What about the broker firms who follow Paradox? Do we know them all by heart? SEB, Carnegie, Handelsbanken.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Danske Bank, ABG, [indiscernible] and then we have...

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Jefferies.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Jefferies and Berenberg.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

And then we have a couple of new ones that are about to start.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

They're not always super easy to get hold of, these analysts.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

No, I mean, they're...

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

They're a product that the banks charge for.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. And they are very thorough products that they put in quite a lot of time to. So they are quite interesting reading.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

But in the financial press, a lot of the times, you can see articles based on them.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Yes.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

So that's a good way to find them. Do you plan to acquire more mobile game studios in the future? You kind of answered that already that we are. Are you guys allowed to talk about if you make money off Game Pass download or comment on all how Game Pass has impacted your business? It's a little bit too early to say. I mean the big test for us here is the CK III release, where we will be part of Game Pass.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Yes.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

So maybe we can come back to that later quarterly update.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. But historically, what you've seen has been positive, I think. I mean, we have definitely got added revenues from the Game Pass collaboration. And at the same time, we are seeing record numbers from Steam. So far, it looks very promising.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Ebba mentioned a somewhat decreasing trend in the last weeks. Would you expect another pickup in fall/winter if COVID persists throughout that period? It's really hard to say. I mean, all at-home entertainment, if you will, has seen uptakes due to COVID, so it's not impossible, but I would -- I think it depends a lot on how different countries are going to react in different parts of the world and how it's going to pan out. The famous second wave we've been hearing about, we don't know how that's going to pan out, for instance. So that's a little bit hard for us to predict. But if a lot of people spend a lot of time at home, they tend to also spend time on entertainment at home. So those two go together. What kind of revenues will the 2 acquisitions add? That we don't actually disclose, do we? Or do we?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

No. No, we don't. You will see in the Q3 report. You will be able to figure out something regarding the economics around them. But what kind of revenues -- I mean, I guess, the question is size-wise, but otherwise from Playrion, it will be mobile revenues, of course. And Iceflake will mainly produce development for the games that we publish here.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

All right. Two more questions. Do we have time for that?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

One is, is there a possibility to get Paradox stock available for buying on Revolut?

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

I don't know what that is.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

It's the bank card that you can withdraw money in any currency. And I'm guessing it's also some sort of trading. But let's rephrase: Other markets than the one we're currently on.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

No. I mean we are listed at Nasdaq First North, and that is where the shares are bought. But -- so I think you should -- if you are, for example, abroad, you should find your broker or find a broker, I'm sure they can help you with acquiring the shares.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

And we don't have any plans to change.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

No, we don't have any plans to change. We're very happy to be on -- almost like first one.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Last but not least, then the collective bargaining agreement that you announced for Sweden, is your intention to extend similar do things to other parts of the world. I mean, we've grown so much as a company, and especially in Sweden, we've grown so much. We -- just in the years that I've been involved since 2014, we are many times bigger. So it felt like a good time to actually find these a little bit more structured ways of working. We're not against it in other countries, but we -- for -- absolutely not. It's more that it depends on the size of the -- of how big we are in the country and also how the employees in that country want to handle things.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

All right. I think that's it.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Good. The timing.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Thank you so much for tuning in.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, thank you.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

We're going to have new one of these in November.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, November 17.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

17th of November.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

The Q3 report.

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Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Same time, same place. The drill is that we released a press release at 8:00 a.m. Central European Time, and then we release -- we have our stream at 12 Central European Time. Same procedure as always.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Same procedure.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

Thanks a lot, Alex.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, and thank you for watching.

E
Ebba Ljungerud
Chief Executive Officer

And thank you to you. Bye.

A
Alexander Bricca
Chief Financial Officer

Bye.

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