Modern Times Group MTG AB

STO:MTG B

Earnings Call Transcript

[Anton Gourman, executive]

Good morning, everyone. Hello, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our results for Q4 and the full year 2024. My name is Anton Gourman, and I'm the VP of Investor Relations at MTG. With me and hosting this call, I have Maria Redin, our President and CEO.

After the presentation, there will always be an opportunity to ask questions, both over the phone and via the web. If you are dialing in, please follow the instructions from the operator. Otherwise, please use the online form for your questions.

And with that, I hand over to Maria. Maria, please, over to you.

[Maria Redin, executive]

Thank you, Anton, and hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm very happy to present a strong set of results, and that is on back of great games performance that allowed us to finish the year on an all-time high. Our studios has maintained a very high level of activity in Q4, both with strong events and a higher number of events in total, along with the geo expansion through localized game and new titles that we've seen in PlaySimple.

We reported total Q4 sales of SEK 1.7 billion, representing a 6% increase year-over-year in constant currencies. And our sales were also up 3% for the full year in constant currencies, and we have, therefore, delivered in the middle of our guided range for the full year. Our sales were also up 15% in constant currencies for Q3, which shows the strong activity that we had in the quarter and also the fact that Q4 is the seasonally strongest quarter of the year.

On the advertising side, overall eCPM dynamics continue to be somewhat muted in Q4. We did see an uplift in Q4, which we should expect given the season. But in the period after Thanksgiving, it was lower overall than what we saw in 2023. And I would say, in general, the lower eCPM levels is something that we've seen throughout the year, and that is also something that the team in PlaySimple is focused on mitigating throughout the year, and we will also touch upon this shortly.

We reported SEK 455 million of adjusted EBITDA in the quarter, which is a record quarter, and it's up 4% year-over-year. Our adjusted EBITDA was also up 8% for the full year, and we reported operating margins of 27% in Q4, and 28% for the full year. This means that we also delivered in the upper range of our margin guidance for the full year, and it's also in line with what we said when we reported our Q3 results.

We generated SEK 288 million in free cash flow in the quarter and SEK 1.2 billion for the full year. We continue to be highly cash generative, and we delivered a 71% cash conversion for the full year 2024, which is higher than the 50% to 60% range that we expect long term.

Before also we get into the nitty-gritty of our results, I would like to briefly spend some time on our acquisition of Plarium, the makers of RAID: Shadow Legends. We signed the deal, as you may remember, in November, and we do expect to close it in a couple of weeks at the most. The acquisition of Plarium is a major milestone in our journey to become a leading gaming group and is a major catalyst for us to realize our ambitions to build an international gaming village where game makers can thrive.

Both for me personally, and I think I can say for the whole team, we're all very excited to get our new colleagues on board, and we look forward then to also come back to more information to you, our audience with the plans once we close the deal and gone further into the work with the onboarding.

So next up, let's look at our sales. Our revenues in reported currencies were up 8% year-over-year in the quarter, and they were up 3% for the full year 2024. Revenues were up 6% and 3%, respectively, in constant currencies, as I mentioned, for the 2 periods. As you may recall, we did say at our Q3 results that we had an exciting and a busy period ahead of us. So today, I'm really happy to be able to report that our organic revenues were up 9% year-over-year in Q4, which meant that our events and activities that we have planned performed very strong. And this was driven by fantastic growth of Snowprint, a strong operational performance in InnoGames and a healthy momentum in PlaySimple.

Our organic revenues were down 1% for the full year, reflecting the slower Q2 and Q3 that we've seen after a solid Q1. Let's now look deeper into our franchises. As I've said, I'm very happy with our overall performance. As always, we will have things to do, but there's nothing different from previous quarter.

When you look at our Q4 results, it's worth keeping in mind that, as I said before, Q4 is the most important quarter for us seasonally, both on the mid-core side as we can do more events and activities, especially coming up to the Christmas sales, but also on the casual side where we see increases on the eCPM levels.

Sales for the Word Game franchise were up 4% year-over-year in Q4 and 17% from Q3 2024. This reflected the agility and the speed of the PlaySimple team. The results were driven by the success of the geographic expansion of the localized version of Crossword Jam and Word Search Explorer, and by the growth of the new puzzle games, including Tile Match and 2048 Numbers Merge. This was even more encouraging considering that we do see continued muted eCPM environment, as I just mentioned.

Whilst we saw an uplift around the Halloween season, we didn't see the same boost following. The sequential uplift in sales was also affected by a slight delay in the booking of some third-party revenues from the third into the fourth quarter, which we mentioned in our Q3 results call.

The Strategy and Simulation franchise had a very strong quarter. Franchise revenues were up 25% year-on-year and were up 28% on a sequential basis in constant currencies. Our success was driven by very strong performance in Warhammer 40K: Tacticus, which once again delivered all-time high sales in the quarter. The team has continued to deliver successful live ops, while supporting the game with well-received stream of content like new characters and fashion. And the team is also working on future PC and Mac versions of the game, which will be launched this year.

We also continue around the game to benefit from the overall broader mainstream interest in the Warhammer 40K franchises that comes from everything that's happening in the broader market around the franchise. Forge of Empires also continues to perform strongly in the quarter. They had 3 game events in the quarter 2024 compared to 2 events last quarter. The events were also well received by our players, which means we execute them well. We compounded the positive effects with more events and successful events. And it's also worth mentioning that the October was the best month that we've had in the last 2 years, which means that since COVID.

Tribal Wars, which is now a 21-year-old game, one of the first games that InnoGames launched, actually delivered its best year ever in 2024, and even outperformed the revenues we saw during the lockdown in COVID times 2020. So this again shows the longevity of strong old franchises. And overall, I would say we had a very strong performance from our largest mid-core titles, and it was a great effort by the InnoGames teams.

The Racing franchise were down 14% year-over-year and down 17% sequentially in constant currencies. The team continued to add content and improve the gameplay in both Formula One Clash and Top Drives during the quarter. The content was well received by the players and community, and we saw a good ARPDAU increase. but we are, however, still affected by the lower number of players that we see in the games year-over-year. Our newer game, Forza Customs has not performed in line with our expectations. So the team is currently working on major changes to turn the game around.

And the Hutch also introduced one of the older games, Hot Wheels on Apple Arcade in the quarter. Again, interesting to see one of our older games coming back to the market again. Hutch also saw some leadership changes after the end of the year as Oliver Bulloss, who is MTG's Chief Product Officer, has become the interim Co-CEO. Shaun Rutland, who is a Co-Founder and the previous Co-CEO of Hutch, has now stepped up to become the Executive Chairman of the studio. And he continues to work closely with Oliver and us in the management team to continue to improve the future performance of the Racing franchise.

Tower Defense franchise revenues were down 25% year-over-year and down 15% sequentially in constant currencies. Our flagship title, Bloons TD 6 received 2 smaller updates in the quarter as the team was fully focused to polish and launch a major paid DLC priced at $9.99 that went live earlier this week. So far, it's still early days, but the community has been very positive about the new content, and I'm really excited to see how it continues to perform. Ninja Kiwi also continued to evolve its Bloons Card Storm, which was soft launched in October 2024. Again, similar here, early days. So we look forward to see what that games will bring.

Next, let's then take a look at the early scaling games and our pipeline of new games. Today, we have a total of 18 games that are either in early scaling or in development in our pipeline. 11 of these titles are already fully available across platforms. And together, they represented 21% of our revenues in Q1, and it was mainly driven by the Warhammer 40K: Tacticus. As we said before, Snowprint continues to be on an amazing trajectory with Tacticus, and we're very happy that we can continue to support them on their growth journey. We believe that the game has continued potential to be even more exciting, and we look forward to see the game scaling it in 2025 and beyond.

InnoGames latest title, Heroes of History, which was soft launched in Q3 last year, has continued to show encouraging results, and it is outperforming its predecessor Rise of Cultures on a like-for-like basis. The team behind Heroes continue to evolve the gameplay and add content to the game and also made the game experience fully available on browser during the quarter.

As I said before, Ninja Kiwi continues to evolve Bloons Card Storm after its soft launch, we're improving the gameplay and features in preparation for the commercial launch further down the line. And as you probably know, the collectible card game attracted a passionate community of players, and this is a new genre for Ninja Kiwi and it's also a game that is free-to-play rather than premium game like the BTD6.

Now as we're getting ready to scale and deploy UA, we will now come to the second phase of the game launch. So we're excited to see its future potential. Ninja Kiwi also announced 2 new game titles in the quarter, one of them being Fightland that is a battle arena game, which will be launched later this year. And the second one is Zombie Assault: Resurgence, which will be a sequel to the successful SAS Zombie Assault 4, which was a shooter game from 2017 and is still in the early phase of development.

PlaySimple, as always, continued to expand its portfolio in the quarter. The latest addition is Crossword Go, and they now have up to 7 games in the portfolio that they're working on and starting to test scaling on back of.

Let's now move on and look at our performance indicators for the quarter. 60% of our revenues was from in-app purchases and 36% of our revenues was from in-app advertising. The increased revenues from in-app advertising mainly reflected PlaySimple's successful geographic expansion of the key titles. This drove DAU and helped mitigate the negative effects on the CPMs from Google shift to real-time bidding that we discussed earlier in the call.

Our daily active users continued to increase sequentially and were up year-over-year, driven by the word games players in the new geographies as well as new puzzle titles. The sequential increase also reflected the newly launched Heroes of History from InnoGames, successful events in Forge of Empires, and the overall scaling of Warhammer 40K: Tacticus.

Looking at our average revenue per daily active user, we saw a clear uplift both sequentially and year-over-year. And I'm really happy to say that we have increased our ARPDAU at the same time that we increased our number of daily active users. ARPDAU levels grew sequentially in 4 out of our 5 studios. The year-over-year increase reflects the strong performance from InnoGames and Hutch, -- and I also want to highlight that Snowprint, they have grown their ARPDAU levels every quarter since acquisition a year ago.

I will now hand over to Anton, who will walk you through the UA spend, profitability and financials.

[Anton Gourman, executive]

Thank you very much, Maria. So we spent nearly SEK 680 million on user acquisition in Q4. This was an all-time high, representing an 11% increase year-over-year and a 21% sequential increase from Q3. In total, we invested over SEK 2.2 billion in user acquisition for the full year as we saw progressively better traction in the second half of the year. Our total user acquisition spend represented 40% of our revenues in the quarter, which, as Maria mentioned, is the seasonally largest one. This was an increase from 38% both in Q3 last year and in Q4 2023.

As a result, we spent 37% of our revenues on UA during the full year 2024. Our year-on-year increase in UA was more or less evenly split between Snowprint, InnoGames and PlaySimple. On a quarterly basis, PlaySimple represented the largest increase, but both Snowprint and InnoGames also increased their UA from Q3. PlaySimple's increases in marketing was driven by the newly localized word games and several of their new puzzle titles. Snowprint, of course, continued to push content and live ops in Warhammer 40K: Tacticus, like Maria said, which enables significantly more marketing.

And last but obviously not least, InnoGames capitalized on their strong events and on the positive traction of Heroes of History, which was soft launched in Q3. So we're happy to be able to invest more as this builds momentum for future organic growth. I also want to note that we continue to have a disciplined approach to UA as we have always had, and investments continue to be profitable in our marketing.

So when it comes to our profits, we reported a record adjusted EBITDA of SEK 455 million in Q4, which was up by 4% from Q4 2023 and nearly SEK 1.7 billion for the full year. The increase mainly reflected scaled mobile revenues across our studios, supported by growing browser revenues as well. This was driven by more and successful events as well as the fact that eCPMs are typically stronger in the seasonally important Q4.

Our profits also benefited somewhat from the delay, like Maria said, of a booking of third-party revenues from Q3 into Q4 last year, which we mentioned already. So all in all, we delivered a strong operating margin of 27% in the quarter and sustained our high profitability levels despite increased UA, thanks to the factors I just mentioned. Our operating margin for the full year amounted to 28%, and we, therefore, delivered in the upper range of our guided interval, as Maria mentioned earlier.

So next, let's take a look at our financials. We continue to have very strong cash generation and cash conversion levels in the fourth quarter, and we reported free cash flow of nearly SEK 290 million. This enabled us to finish the year with a high cash conversion level of 71%, which once again is above our guided long-term range of 50% to 60%. And all in all, this reflected positive working capital timing effects and boosts from interest income in the quarter, our disciplined capital allocation, low CapEx levels, which all enabled healthy underlying profit to cash conversion.

Also, as you can see, the timing effects worked in our favor in Q4, but we expect them to fluctuate throughout 2025. We once again had positive working capital in Q4, which included transaction costs of SEK 72 million as well as timing effects in both receivables and payables, reservation for incentive plans and tax refunds. The increases in accounts payables primarily reflected increased UA spend in PlaySimple.

I would then also like to comment on our SEK 325 million net financial items in the quarter. We had other financial items of SEK 359 million, out of which SEK 216 million comprised discounting effects and revaluation exchange rate differences on earn-out liabilities. These charges in the quarter were largely noncash items and were driven by FX and the increased price of the MTG share.

So we -- while we do have somewhat of a natural hedge on these items, it's only partially reflected in the P&L. And this is because both our liabilities and the cash reserves that are held on the HQ level are in U.S. dollars, which partially offsets the currency effect, but the rest of our cash is held in our studios in local currency, and only the balance revaluations on the cash held in HQ impact our financial net. And the locally held balances are reported as part of our other comprehensive income.

When we then look at CapEx, it was down slightly year-over-year in Q4 and was down significantly for the full year. The full year dynamics were mainly driven by the divestment of Kongregate in February 2024, whereas the low levels of CapEx in Q4 continue to reflect where we are in our current development cycle as several of our new games are now in soft launch or early scaling and therefore, part of our OpEx.

Thank you. That was all from me, and I will now hand over to Maria for a summary.

[Maria Redin, executive]

Thank you, Anton. Before we move on to our Q&A section, I would just like to summarize where we stand as we get into an exciting and transformative 2025. We just finished a very strong quarter and our improving momentum throughout the second half of the year enabled increased UA spend in Q4 and onwards, supported also by a somewhat better marketing environment.

When it comes to the start of the new year, it's still early days, but we continue to be able to scale UA on a healthy level, up year-on-year, and I hope to be able to keep the current spend levels for the rest of the quarter. Remember, also for last year, we were a bit more cautious on the UA side, it's worth to remember. And if you look in general, I would say the marketing environment has, however, been slightly weaker than what we expected in January, but also we're coming from a quite strong period in the second half of Q3 and also in Q4.

We reported record operating profit for the quarter, and we delivered on our outlook, both for our sales growth in constant currencies and adjusted EBITDA margin. We continue to deliver strong cash generation and cash conversion, and this puts us in a very good position to continue to invest prudently in our business to drive organic growth. And at the same time, also deliver on the SEK 400 million share buyback program approved by the AGM last year, and we will seek a new buyback mandate at the 2025 AGM.

We have a strong financial flexibility, and we're committed to create value, whether through smart acquisitions, additional share buybacks or paying down the debt. We are now also getting ready to begin the onboarding of Plarium and to take MTG to the next level in terms of our games, our tools and take, and our competitive position. We expect the deal, as I said, to close in the next couple of weeks. And as soon as that is done, we will kick off the dialogue and the collaboration.

As we announced when we signed the deal, our ambition is to onboard Plarium and to evaluate the opportunities and the resources we have in the business in order to build a world-leading commercial ecosystem for game makers and gaming entrepreneurs. We plan to host a Capital Markets Day this year, which we now expect in Q3.

With that, I want to thank you for following our progress, and I'm ready to take your questions.

[Anton Gourman, executive]

Thank you very much. Operator, over to you.

[Operator]

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

[Simon Jönsson, analyst]

Congratulations on a very good quarter. So a few questions on the segments here. So first, on the Word Games. So if we exclude the timing of third-party revenue, I still believe sales was up year-over-year. And what I wonder is if we also exclude the impact from FX and ad prices, how was the sort of underlying player trends, you would say? Was it still negative year-over-year? And was it better than Q3? So a few comments on that would be very helpful.

[Maria Redin, executive]

Simon, thank you. If you look at PlaySimple, I think they've done an amazing job in the way they took on the challenge on the changed sort of eCPM environment in the beginning of the year, and they focus on both the geo expansion with the localization and also launching new games. So I think what we were able to do starting already in Q3 to scale up UA. That has, as you can see in our DAU numbers as well, driven quite a strong boost on both installs and daily active users, and I think that's the foundation for the growth.

What has then helped, of course, as always, we do see eCPM levels increasing, which we did see as well in Q4, especially around the Black Friday event. But as we also wrote in the report that thereafter, it was -- yes, it was higher than what we see in the Q3 because it is the seasonally strongest quarter, but it was much more muted than what we saw last year. So I would say underlying, you saw like an organic growth. It would be less if you remove then the third-party platform fees that we provided you information, but it will still be growth.

[Simon Jönsson, analyst]

All right. And growth also in DAU you say year-over-year or was that still slightly negative?

[Maria Redin, executive]

No, I think that was one of the key overall drivers behind both sequential and year-over-year growth in DAU.

[Simon Jönsson, analyst]

All right. That's very good. And on strategy. So it's very nice to see the performance in Snowprint, of course, very impressive. Are you still operating that on sort of 0 EBITDA, investing heavily? Or are you starting to see some scaling effects here?

[Maria Redin, executive]

I think the way to look at it, we don't break out EBITDA per company, but I think what we said in the beginning of the year is that we will scale up UA to the extent possible. And I would actually be happy if we run it on a sort of 0% margin almost because that means that we have a great game that we can scale. I think what they are showing is they're actually starting to be able to scale the company, which means that they can continue to ramp up UA very nicely, as you've seen also this quarter. But they are also turning that into better sort of bottom line performance, but I don't want to say more than that. It's nothing that is going to move the needle for the group, but I think it is an important signal for them to show that you can drive growth on both ends.

[Simon Jönsson, analyst]

All right. That's helpful. And on Racing, has been a bit weaker also in Q4. So what I wonder is how we should think about or view the effects from lower sales from the newer games like Forza and NASCAR. Do you think the negative effects from those games declining, that's bottoming out here? Or is there still significant contribution for those games that will continue to decline in coming quarters?

[Maria Redin, executive]

Yes. I don't think those games will turn around as such. I think we are doing the pivot now on Forza to see what can that become. That is still to be seen, to be honest. I think for now, what our focus is when it comes to revenues as such, it will be on existing franchises, Top Drives and Formula One Clash. And I think it's also exciting to see Hot Wheels coming back, which is again showing that there is some unique old games that sit there that still have an attractiveness to the market, and that was a game we could bring back with quite limited sort of work on our end and arcade though it fits perfectly into their portfolio. So that shows a nice small sort of revenue add with very few resources put into it. Hopefully, though, we can still find a new game to scale during 2025, but it's too early to say. So right now, I cannot give you any new updates on where we are in Forza and NASCAR.

[Simon Jönsson, analyst]

All right. But is it fair to assume that we're seeing like the largest drop for those games sequentially?

[Maria Redin, executive]

Yes, you're probably going to see a little bit in Q1 as well because we did scale up. If you remember, I think we launched it sort of start to scale up Forza during Q4 last year and early indication looks very strong, but then the retention number were unfortunately not at all what we wanted to see, which meant that Q4 and Q1 were the 2 key quarters for Forza last and this year.

[Simon Jönsson, analyst]

Yes, I understand. So year-over-year, still tough comps, but I think maybe sequentially, it's going to be more stable.

[Maria Redin, executive]

I think that's a fair way to look at it.

[Simon Jönsson, analyst]

And lastly...

[Anton Gourman, executive]

No, sorry, just maybe to add to that. I think we also mentioned already in Q3 that the latest update to F1 Clash actually worked well, just that the player base, as Maria said on the call earlier, was slightly smaller year-over-year, but the underlying spending on average per player has increased in F1 Clash, which is really encouraging and a strong performance from the team.

[Simon Jönsson, analyst]

Yes. Lastly, you mentioned this that you're seeking new buyback mandate on the AGM. But is it fair to assume that you will continue to allocate the same share of your cash flows to buybacks in that case?

[Maria Redin, executive]

I think that is one assumption. I think that is something we will discuss with the Board well ahead of the AGM and then be able to be clear probably as we announce our Q1 results.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

[Jacob Edler, analyst]

I have a couple on my side as well. Starting a bit on the marketing environment. You talked about eCPMs being a bit weakish since Thanksgiving. But I'm just thinking in PlaySimple, the comps should be improving in H1. But is that towards the end of Q1 or more of a Q2 thing? Just thinking about what happened on the bidding side, et cetera? That's my first question.

[Maria Redin, executive]

Yes. No, I think you're pretty spot on it. So I would say the bigger impact started to see halfway through Q1 and then Q2 was probably the low end also because we were not able to scale up UA until Q3. So I think you are getting into a territory with easier comps in sort of halfway through Q1 and Q2 and then you're coming into normalized comps thereafter.

[Jacob Edler, analyst]

Cool. And then second question, maybe just on the third-party revenue. I think last quarter, I guess that you were -- the miss you had last quarter on top line was kind of the size of the third-party revenue deal, at least according to my estimates. Is that still a fair assumption, would you say, that delayment from Q3?

[Maria Redin, executive]

No, I think there were 2 things actually. So 50% was exactly that, which we said that we have some third-party revenues that shifted from end of one quarter to the beginning of another. And the other one was also the Fellowship Event or the fall event in InnoGames, where we actually forgot about how many days there is in September. So we thought it was going to be in the end of September, but actually it was in the beginning of October. So that's how it goes sometimes.

So you saw also -- that's why you had 3 full events in Q4 for InnoGames, and they also performed very strongly, which was great to see, and that's also why they performed the strong performance both sequentially and year-over-year.

[Jacob Edler, analyst]

Great. Great. Just another one on Hutch. I think in connection with the Plarium acquisition, you also showed a pipeline chart for the whole group. And I believe there were 2 games in the pipeline for Hutch and now it appears it's only one. I'm just asking, are there any write-down risks? Have you closed on a project? Or am I just missing something?

[Maria Redin, executive]

No, I don't think there's anything changed. I think sometimes we define games a little bit different. I think the 2 games that are live is Forza and NASCAR, and they are both sort of under review. And then you have the arcade game, Hot Wheels has been launched. And then there one in early thinking, but that's not yet anything that's been...

[Jacob Edler, analyst]

Great. Just double checking. And last question on my side. I mean now you've had like 4 quarters of positive working capital release. Is it -- should we expect that to negatively swing back here at the start of '25, would you say?

[Maria Redin, executive]

Yes. And I think that's also why we're not changing the guidance range, 50% to 60%. We've now had quite a few factors working in our favor. We know some of them will reverse, which also means that we do believe if you look over a longer period of time, it will be the 50% to 60%, and you should expect some swings also now going forward.

[Operator]

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

[Jesper Stugemo, analyst]

I was just wondering a little bit around the user acquisition spend here. I know that it's on seasonal patterns, but you look to have a quite good traction here in Q4. So how should we expect the UA as a percentage of sales going into Q1 and Q2 here? Should we come up north of 40% or stable levels or more a seasonal pattern to decline here?

[Maria Redin, executive]

Yes. No, I think something gave me we call it Q5. So I think the period post-Christmas is usually a very strong period to do UA. And I think we were quite successful to do UA in this period of time, which means that we come in, in the quarter on a very good level. if we're able to sustain that, I think that you are right to assume that we are going to be on the higher end of our range.

I think we said a few years back, 38% to 42%. I think that was quite some time ago, we were above 40%. So hopefully, we can continue to scale profitable UA. I think it's worth to remember, as we look into this year, you have 3 sort of driving factors that we didn't have last year because remember last year in Q1, in particular and also Q2, we actually had very low levels of UA because we didn't see the options to do successful UA. But this year, we have the geo expansion and the new games in PlaySimple, allowing us to scale UA in a good way.

We have PlaySimple -- sorry, we have Snowprint coming in on a completely different level where they are today scaling UA compared to a year ago. And I think then exciting in InnoGames, we have Heroes of History, which we didn't have last year being able to scale UA on a good level. So I think those are 3 key drivers on elevating our UA spend. And if we can, we will continue to spend UA at the levels that we start to see now in January.

[Jesper Stugemo, analyst]

All right. Great. And I was just wondering some around the Plarium deal here as well. I know that you will have a Capital Markets Day here in Q3, et cetera. But maybe if you could give us something around the synergies and opportunities you see, for example, with the 2 platforms that they have and when you integrate this with your own Flow Platform, what do you see here that could be achieved?

[Maria Redin, executive]

No, I think it's super exciting. And I think we all are very eager to actually spend more time with them and actually be able to iron out those details, which we cannot do until we formally close. But I think definitely, we have our hypothesis, and we have our Flow Platform, they have the GoGame platform and their Plarium Play. I think those are 2 tools that most certainly, we should be able to find exciting opportunities for the group to say how do we leverage the best of our Flow Platform with their tech and tools.

And on top of that, you have an amazing craftsmanship in both groups to say how do we leverage that knowledge flow. So I think both when it comes to UA and publishing, in particular, there are exciting opportunities, but then more on the creative and knowledge sharing as well. So I think I'm very positive that 2025 will be a busy year for us. It will be an exciting year for us, and it will be a transformative deal and year for us. And then I can't give you more specifics now because we simply need to sit down with the Plarium team and iron out the details and also communicate internally as well as communicate externally.

[Operator]

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

[Anton Gourman, executive]

Thank you very much. We do have a few questions in the chat. Some of the questions we have in the chat, we've already addressed. So I'll -- we're not going to take them again. But maybe, Maria, first, can you please comment on the quarterly performance year-on-year for Ninja Kiwi or rather for the Tower Defense franchise, what the main drivers are? And last year, rather in 2023, we mentioned a China exploration. So maybe some comments on that.

[Maria Redin, executive]

Yes, very good. I think our Ninja Kiwi friends had a tougher quarter this quarter. As you can see, their revenues were down year-over-year. I think 2 reasons of that, they did have lower installs, but also the events. I mean, Q4 is quite event-driven. And for good reasons, they had only 2 updates, and they were actually a bit softer than what we initially planned because we moved also one of the key updates, the DLC launch, which we did actually this week, we moved it forward because we simply needed to make it more ready.

That's how it is sometimes. I think on a good note, it was rather successful as we launched it, still early days. We are 2 days in. So we only had the first 2 days of trading and also most important for Ninja Kiwi, the first 2 days of community engagement and discussions around it. But overall sentiment is very positive. So let's see. And that's how we would like to see them grow to add more events, more content and features. And the most recent one is basically a whole new way to play the BTD6 game, which, of course, we then hope to bring more excitement to the customers, more engagement to the customers, and also bring back all customers into the game. And that would then, over time if we're successful, transform the company back to growth.

Second to that, yes, we look into China. I think we're quite excited about the opportunity. But as we also know, China is a very different market, and we couldn't do it on ourselves. I think we didn't succeed in the version that we did together with our partner. And that's why, yes, we do have some general framework agreement, and we're getting the money as a baseline for that, but it hasn't really moved the [ deal ] for us as we would have liked. So that's how it goes sometimes.

[Anton Gourman, executive]

Thank you very much. And the last question we have on the chat is, when it comes to targets for 2025, can you comment on what our plans are and what our thinking is today?

[Maria Redin, executive]

Yes. I mean we normally say go and give the guidance as part of our Q1 results. We will give you an updated outlook the same this year. And then you will get a broader outlook at our Capital Markets Day when we also had time to work through together with sort of our studios and the Plarium teams on sort of how do we see the combined company and where do we take ourselves from here. So it's going to be a 2-phase approach this year.

[Anton Gourman, executive]

So just to clarify that, would it be fair to assume that the updated outlook in Q1 would be on the MTG as it is [ pre-carried ]?

[Maria Redin, executive]

Yes. We will only provide an updated outlook for the old MTG, if you want to put it that way.

[Anton Gourman, executive]

Thank you very much. And with that, I would like to thank everyone for joining us today. Maria, thank you very much. And thank you for following our progress, and we will speak to all of you soon.