G5 Entertainment Aktie

Good morning, everyone, for the Q2 2026 earnings call. We wait a few seconds for the attendee list to load properly. [Operator Instructions] With that said, I will hand over to our CEO, Vladislav.

Thank you, Stefan. Welcome, everyone, to the earnings call for the second quarter. We obviously have Stefan Wikstrand, our CFO, with us today. And as usual, we'll go through the presentation in about 15 minutes, and then we'll open the line for the questions.

And I'll start by giving you a brief overview of this morning's report. And first, I'll tell you about the current optimization of the workforce. As we disclosed in the first quarter report, the plan was to reduce our staff by approximately 180 employees with the aim to have a total of around 635 employees. And this first wave of redundancies was completed during the second quarter. And since then, we have continued to review the workforce and the active projects and we have identified further redundancies.

So the second wave of optimization took the total number of employees down to now approximately 550, and it was completed in early August. So this is the number of employees as of today. And the total yearly savings from both these waves of redundancies combined is approximately USD 11 million.

So let's continue with the numbers from the report. Revenue was USD 20.1 million, and this was a decrease of 16% year-over-year and 7% sequentially. We, unfortunately, continue to see a sequential decline across all 3 main pillars of revenue, Sherlock, Hidden City and the Jewels family of games. Hidden City, in particular, suffered due to new functionality that unfortunately had negative effects and the game declined 10.5% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. So that functionality has been restored. And as of July, the game was trending back gradually.

Sherlock declined 16% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. And finally, we have the Jewels family of games that declined almost 30% year-over-year. And as we have stated in previous reports, we have had a roadmap in the second quarter. We worked on it. And this roadmap included a number of changes to the Jewels games that were supposed to change the trajectory of these games. And reached the end of the road in the second quarter towards the end of it with little success. So we see that we cannot justify continued investment in these games and the Jewels games will, therefore, be put in harvest mode. And we will maximize the profitability of these games going forward, assuming that they will continually -- they will continue to gradually decline.

On the bright side of things, we have seen a very strong performance in the third-party distribution on the G5 Store during the quarter. Revenue from the distributed third-party games increased 100% sequentially, which is pretty good. The interest from the developers is growing. We are releasing more third-party games in the G5 Store and the pipeline of new games to be signed is forming very well, too.

We have also reached another all-time high gross margin of 73.1%, up from 70% last year. The reasons are the same, the continued growth of our direct-to-consumer channel G5 Store, including third-party distribution and the continued positive development of our efforts to monetize players on mobile devices directly, including through the web shop.

Monthly average gross revenue per paying user continues to go up as well. And here, we also set a new record of USD 79, which is a 15% year-over-year increase, reflecting the high quality of our loyal audience. User acquisition was 19.5% of gross revenue, higher than 18% a year ago. And at the end of the quarter, our cash position stood at a strong USD 24.4 million after paying the dividend and share repurchases. We continue to remain debt-free and to have a strong balance sheet, which gives us strategic flexibility.

Now let's move over to -- and have a little closer look at G5 Store and our D2C strategy. So by now, the G5 Store has established itself as the clear #1 among our distribution channels. The low single-digit processing fees and the growing G5 Store continue to be a key driver of our margin performance, as just discussed, given that third-party app stores typically charge between 12% and 30%. And this cost efficiency directly contributes to our improved profitability and the expansion of our gross margin. And we're talking about the gross margin, of course.

Third-party mobile store sales continued to decline for G5, while G5 Store grew 5% sequentially and 15% year-over-year, and it now accounts for 25.5% of total group revenue and 24% -- sorry, 29% of net revenue, which is after the commissions.

The share of payments from the players of mobile devices processed directly continues to grow rapidly. In the first quarter, we saw a doubling of such revenue from the fourth quarter, reaching 11% in total. And in the second quarter, this trend has continued, and this share reached over 17% in the second quarter, further reducing platform fee exposure.

The expansion of the G5 Store as a distribution platform continues. We launched 3 new games during the quarter. And of the games that were in negotiations during the quarter, 5 have been signed and negotiations are underway for 9 games as of now.

Revenue from third-party games is growing steadily, and we continue to be on track to make this a significant fourth revenue pillar for G5 over time.

Let's move on to the next slide and look a little bit more in detail on the development during the quarter. Right, the negative trend here is explained, as mentioned before, by the decline in all 3 main pillars of our revenue, Sherlock, Jewels family of games and Hidden City. And they all, unfortunately, underperformed, and that's why we have this dynamic. The share of own games is currently on the negative trend as well. And this is due to the weak performance of Sherlock and Jewels family of games, and this effect is further amplified by the increase of revenue from the distribution of third-party games in the G5 Store.

As mentioned, our gross margin reached a record high at 73.1%, up from 70% a year ago, primarily due to the continued growth of the G5 Store and processing more of the mobile player revenue directly.

Now let's look at our operating profit for the quarter. Reported operating profit for the period came in at minus USD 0.2 million compared to positive USD 0.6 million last year. The reported margin was minus 1.1% versus 2.5% a year ago. User acquisition was 19% as a percentage of revenue compared to 18% in the second quarter of 2025. EBIT margin was slightly impacted by the increase in UA spend for the quarter. EBIT was also impacted by positive currency exchange effects and negatively by severance payments. Adjusting for these, EBIT was USD 0.1 million, 1.6 million last year, corresponding to an EBIT margin of 0.4% compared to 6.8% last year.

During the quarter, the net capitalization impact on earnings was USD 0.1 million compared to minus USD 0.3 million last year. Net capitalization will go down following the optimizations that we've made.

Now let's talk about our cash position and move on to the next slide, yes. G5 remains debt-free with a strong cash position of USD 24.4 million, providing flexibility to fund new game development and marketing from our operations. The quarter was negatively impacted by the dividend of USD 1.6 million, USD 6.5 million last year and repurchases amounting to USD 1 million, USD 0.2 million last year. Total cash flow during the first quarter was minus USD 1.9 million compared to minus USD 4.5 million last year.

And let's move on to the next slide and go through the final thoughts of our earnings call. As we move through 2026, we remain focused on key drivers. The organizational changes have materially been completed in the third quarter with a run rate decrease of USD 11 million. We remain vigilant about the cost structure while maintaining product momentum across the game portfolio, the G5 Store and other initiatives and as the second quarter, obviously, not third, sorry for saying that.

We will continue to sign and launch high-quality third-party titles to G5 Store to solidify the store as our fourth revenue pillar. We are also looking to increase advertising monetization as another tool to stabilize the portfolio performance and further improve the gross margin. And finally, we are moving forward with our games in the pipeline towards potential global launch or cancellation depending on the results of the soft launch and utilizing agile teams for continuous innovation.

We remain committed to financial discipline and generating long-term shareholder returns through dividends and buybacks. And I'd like to thank the whole G5 team for their resilience and our shareholders for their trust. And this concludes my presentation, and I'd like to open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] We'll start with Hjalmar Ahlberg from Redeye.

Maybe start with a question on the core franchises to say Sherlock and Hidden City, some challenging environment or challenging development in the quarter. Hidden City, you said you see some improvements after removing that functionality. What about Sherlock, I mean is it -- do you see that it could be tough to regain performance of that game?

It is difficult to say, to be honest. We have teams that ideate and analyze the why the performance of the games evolves in a certain way. And quite often, they can identify changes that maybe led to some setbacks. And as the case is with Hidden City, from June to July, once these things were addressed, the situation improved.

With Sherlock, I don't think we have identified one specific area which caused this. But if you look over the years, if you look at our monthly paying users trend, for example, over the years, you can clearly see a gradual decline there, which is only partly offset by the increase of revenue per user. And so I think the fundamental challenge in the present market for the portfolio of games that we have is whether we can replace the paying users that we are gradually losing due to the natural churn.

And if you look at the industry analysis, you could have seen the news that the cost for user acquisition continue to increase in the market. And it really is a challenging situation on mobile for us because the sort of replenishing the users is becoming more and more difficult in the market and even improving the LTV of games and increasing the revenue per user in games, sometimes feels like is not enough because the costs in the market are -- costs for installs in the market continue to go up sort of at a higher pace than it's possible to get for the increase in the ARPU from the player.

And so I think these local issues like with which feature has improved the situation and which feature may be temporarily kind of made the situation worse, that's kind of a higher frequency fluctuations that we work with every day. The fundamental reality of this market is that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to replenish the number of users that we need to -- for the revenue to stabilize or for the revenue to start going up.

And especially with older games and Hidden City is now 14 -- 12 -- what was it? 12 years on the market, it's getting a little bit more challenging even for older games. And so that's the situation. And then I could sort of dive deeper into the details of what exactly was done and why it affected sales for some time or what do we plan on doing in order to improve the situation.

But I feel more and more that the probability of us fixing the LTV in our older portfolio to such an extent that it will allow for the increase in the revenue of these older games I think that probability, to be honest, is decreasing after a few years of trying to do that with some wins, of course, along the way, like the stabilization of the last year, but generally still a gradual decline if you look at the underlying audience metrics.

And so we definitely need new areas of growth. We have some of these areas like G5 Store and the user base there and the number of paying users in the G5 Store is growing. And with increasing the number of third-party titles there, we will be, at some point, offsetting the decline that we have on the mobile if the situation there doesn't change. And our user acquisition spend on G5 Store as opposed to mobile is actually driving the user base up.

So we have this part of the business that is growing and growing quite quickly, but we have this older part of the business, older part of portfolio that is clearly stagnating in terms of the audience. And we would obviously like to have a driver of growth in our portfolio. As I said before, we remain cautiously optimistic about the remaining new game that we have in development.

However, that is still probably months away from finding out the answer to the question whether it provides the LTV curve, especially on kind of deeper into the lifetime of the player that can justify big investments and scaling this game in the present market situation. So this is the situation we find ourselves in.

And for now, we do what we can to stabilize the old portfolio and to invest in the promising game that we have and to try and invest as much effort as we can in building up third-party distribution in the G5 Store. Sorry for a very, very long answer.

And I mean mentioning the growth opportunities, you talked a bit about third party, but also own games. I don't know if you can confirm it, but we can see in App Store that Spooky Suits it's a game that has appeared on your portfolio there. Can you confirm that that's the game that is in soft launch? And I guess, it's always difficult to say, but would you dare to give any chance of the game going into global launch?

It is really hard to say. And as we've learned from before, sometimes we have really good metrics early in the game, but then we just cannot get longer-term metrics right. In this case, we have certainly moved deeper from the early days and kind of building out the LTV of first few days towards sort of a longer depth within the lifetime of the player. But it is still -- if you look at the current breakeven horizons that you have to assume in the market, that's still just a fraction of the sort of consistent LTV increase that we need to deliver.

And testing these changes is also quite time-consuming because you have to make these changes and then you have to sort of see how new users flow through these changes, not only the old ones because you might have lost some users along the way. And then you have -- you want to watch how your new cohorts advance through the gameplay.

And the reality of the market is such that even when if we get to the point of going to scale this game really dramatically, we would have to spend quite significant amount of money, while still taking a leap of faith because the -- we would have to do it realistically before we are certain that the LTV curve will take us where we want to be after, let's say, year 1, right, and year 2.

And compared to even 6 or 10 years ago when we were launching other games, the cost of install has grown several times over. So to get a game to a certain level of revenue costs several times more money nowadays. And so there's more risk. And so we'd like to take a little bit more time to make sure these metrics are there. And it really is hard to say from having fixed, I don't know, first few weeks if the month 6 is going to look good. That's the reality of business.

But again, I want to sort of compensate the gloominess of that with saying that this game has the best early metrics we've seen by far. So it's a really, really good start, and we have to work with that to make sure that it's also built out the right way into the -- sort of further into the depth of the lifetime of the player.

All right. It will be interesting to watch in the coming quarters here. And also interesting to hear that you have talked a bit more about ad revenue. Is that something that you push in your own games? Or is it that something that has evolved with more third-party games on the platform?

Well, the -- first of all, we do think that it needs to be done on mobile nowadays. If you look at the market, what's happening in the market is that basically even the biggest developers realize they have to put advertising into their games. This is just the way that the user acquisition industry has evolved and the way that the big players in this area are forcing the sort of the members of this market to behave. It's kind of imposed right now and assumed that really without having advertising in your games, it would be difficult for you to acquire users from other games, so to speak. That's the way the ecosystem has evolved.

And so we've taken very patient approach with advertising. We always thought that it's a distraction that we'd rather not have. But now we -- like everyone pretty much in the industry, we have to do it. We're trying to introduce it in a very gentle way as much as we can. But generally, I think we will roll out advertising monetization over time across all of our portfolio on mobile. And when it comes to third-party games in the G5 Store, we'll certainly make this option available. And we have some initiatives that will make it possible shortly.

All right. And then just a final question, if you have any comments on the outlook for UA in H2 and going forward?

Well, we will try to -- we really take it on a case-by-case basis, let me say that. And we would have to look at the situation on a particular game and what the models are showing. We are trying to find a way to acquire users to stabilize the revenue of the games over the long run. As you can see, sometimes we are more successful like last year or less successful like this year. We'll continue to try and do that.

We'll probably try to protect our margin or at least protect our reserve and not go negative unless we see strong reasons to believe that kind of becoming unprofitable for some time will certainly pay off. As the case may be if we decide to go into global launch with the new game, depending on its metrics. But for the older portfolio -- for the old portfolio of games, we will always try to find a balance to make sure we can fund both the development and user acquisition from revenue. So I would expect the same level in other words.

And then we have Simon Jonsson from ABG.

First of all, on Jewel [ family ] in harvest mode. And given the revenue decline we have seen so far and what we should expect now when you put it in harvest mode, should we expect the decline to accelerate further because of that or do you think that -- or do you expect that the games will continue to decline at a fairly similar pace? I think it was around 10% sequential decline here in the quarter, quarter-on-quarter. Do you think that, that pace should be or can be maintained? Or should we rather expect that, that pace will accelerate?

I would actually expect that this pace would sort of slow down over time as the game goes to lower levels. We're not doing user acquisition for these games for some time already. So it's not going to get worse because we put these games into harvest mode. Harvest mode is more about not investing any more money into trying to change the game or deploying new features, things like that. But we would still -- we are examining whether we will continue providing content for this game, which may affect revenue a little bit.

But usually, when we see that continuing to develop content can help keep the revenue at the same level or slow down the decline, we would choose to do so. So that analysis is being -- is happening right now.

So yes, I don't know if putting this game into the harvest mode will affect its trajectory into the future. The game at this point is pretty much priced out of user acquisition in the market for this genre. So it's on its own. And -- but we will support it with the cross-promotion from our existing portfolio and obviously, within G5 Store and the games there. And hopefully, this will help support the game's revenue to a certain extent, especially in the G5 store where the audience of the overall store is actually -- the overall portfolio is actually growing.

All right. That's very clear. Then just a follow-up on Hjalmar's question on user acquisition. And just to clarify a bit because what you said last quarter that you expected increased investment. It sounds like you now expect more stable user acquisition. But is that on an absolute level or do you mean in relation to sales going forward?

Yes. So I think that the situation that happened is that the -- between last quarter and this quarter, the market became quite a bit more expensive. And that sort of threw off our plans a little bit. So in a given situation, we'll try to find a strategy that supports the revenue of the games in our portfolio. But through the decrease in the top line, we have already consumed the margin space that I was sort of trying to warn you about.

Does this make sense? And so therefore, like I don't feel like we want to go negative for that sake if we don't see strong enough belief that we can -- that this will be limited in time. But when I communicated that in the previous quarter, I thought we, after the optimizations that we've done, we're going to have some margin that we could deploy to spending more on user acquisition.

But 2 things happened. Due to the decline in the revenue, we no longer have that margin that can be used towards that. That's one thing. And another thing that prices in the market for user acquisition also went up, which sort of made realization of that plan also less realistic.

So we're sort of back to the strategy where we're just going to try to operate the portfolio and with the UA strategy that aims to stabilize the revenue across all platforms, which means we'll probably continue losing some revenue on mobile, while trying to gain more revenue on the G5 Store to compensate for that.

We also have a question in the Q&A box from Erik Larsson from SEB.

It's 2 questions, but the first one is how are third-party games trending versus your expectations? And is the strategy ambition unchanged or have there been any tweaks recent months?

Sorry, can you repeat, please?

Yes. How are third-party games trending versus your expectations? Is the strategy ambition unchanged? Or have there been any tweaks recent months?

It's -- I would say it's a confirmation of what we wanted to see. The revenue from the third-party games on the G5 Store is tracking really well. As we mentioned, 100% increase sequentially, which is very good. We have some very strong games, some new releases coming to the G5 Store, very soon. And our strategy of acquiring users into these games seem to be working well.

You can see the difference between the growth -- the sequential growth in the third-party games and our own games, other games on the G5 Store. It's supposed to be -- it was supposed to be more balanced. However, with the decline of the performance in these games in our portfolio overall, it looks a bit skewed. So I hope that it's going to be more -- the growth in the G5 Store will be more distributed and not entirely sort of concentrated within third-party games. We will certainly work on that.

But I think that our general premise of first, being able to cross-sell new games with our existing audience of non-paying users and to convert these non-paying users into new games, that certainly worked out. And our models for user acquisition within this space were certainly validated. We are able to consistently acquire users and increase the number of payers in the G5 Store, and we can see month-to-month that this certainly pays off, and we manage this in a responsible way where basically the growth in the G5 store is being funded from the revenue of the G5 Store.

So I think, if anything, it's a further confirmation that this can become a substantial source of revenue for the company in the coming quarters. And we are really excited that we have developers that are really, really interested in putting their games on G5 Store after the initial successes that we have demonstrated. And I think we can do good things here for ourselves and for other developers.

And it's not a -- there's a lot of pressures for the development studios right now, especially those with just a few games. And I think what we're doing here is quite -- is a thing that's quite in demand for the studios, creating this incremental revenue streams. So that's why we are able to talk with the studios that have really high-quality titles that make substantial money in mobile, and they're really willing to talk to us about putting them on G5 Store. And these games are in the pipeline and will be coming to the G5 Store in the coming months and in some cases, in weeks.

It will be really interesting what we can do with bigger and better games in G5 Store as well. So I'm quite optimistic about that development.

Erik also had a second question. He appreciated the color or the nuance that we gave on the quarterly savings ahead.

Is it fair to assume these will only be partly realized in Q3?

Well, in Q3, I think we still have some severance left. Well, generally, it remains the same situation. Yes, Stefan, go ahead.

No, I would say that there's still a bit to be done in Q3. As we said, the majority is done more or less as we kind of released this report. So the full effect will not be seen in Q3. So it will be partially realized in Q3. But obviously, the -- as we communicated in the report, the first wave of redundancies were completed in Q2. That should be -- have full effect in Q3. And then the second wave is going to be partially realized in Q3 and from the mid part of the quarter, you can probably expect those to fall into the P&L.

I think that was that. [Operator Instructions] I don't see anything currently. Okay. I think that was it. Vlad, I will hand over to you for final remarks.

Well, thank you for attending the call and for your continued interest to the company. That's the end of our call. Have a great day. Thank you, everyone.

Good morning, everyone. And whilst we're waiting for the attendee list to fill up. [Operator Instructions] And then we'll answer them when we get to that point on the agenda.

But I think attendee list seems to be not moving anymore. So then I will hand over to Vlad for the remarks for the fourth quarter.

Thank you, Stefan. Welcome, everyone, to our report. I'll start by giving you a brief overview of the quarter. Stefan, can we move on to the next slide, please?

So revenue declined 9% year-over-year in USD terms. But because of the exchange rate changes, it went down 21% when expressed in Swedish krona and was SEK 221 million for the period. Sequentially, it was down 2% from Q3 to Q4 in USD terms.

And looking at the 3 main pillars of our revenue generation, our 3 main games, we have achieved stabilization of 2 of these. Hidden City had a strong performance during the quarter. It grew sequentially 8.3% from Q3, really strong result. Sherlock declined sequentially by 5% after delivering a strong performance in Q2 and Q3. And looking at the same -- looking at the game year-over-year, it declined only by about 5%, which was significantly less than before, even in the first half of the year.

Its performance was negatively affected by specific events that happened in November. But outside of November, the underlying trend remained consistently strong. So we consider that Sherlock and Hidden City are stabilized in revenue.

But at the same time, we have the Jewels family of games that declined year-over-year by 19% in USD and sequentially by 12%. And the performance of Jewels family of games is the reason we continue to see the revenue decline for the group. The team has a plan to fix this performance, but it is not a fast plan to execute. We expect to see improvements by the middle of the year, or we will consider what we call harvesting the game, which is optimizing the team to the minimum to produce the best cash flow while the game continues to decline. So that's basically the reason you're looking at negative trend in the top line in this quarter.

Monthly average gross revenue per paying user hit a new record of USD 71.7. Our gross margin reached an all-time high of 71.6%. That's up from 69.1% last year, thanks to the continued success of G5 Store.

During the quarter, we continued to build momentum in strengthening the top line revenue performance. We increased UA spend to 23% of revenue on the higher end of the previously communicated range compared to 17% last year. We intend to remain on the higher end of this bracket going forward in an effort to stabilize and turn around the top line trend.

We will continue to invest profitably in the growth of our portfolio revenue through existing and new games in order to turn around the top line dynamic. Earnings in the quarter were impacted on one hand by the currency exchange related to the weakening USD, which is the main currency of our revenue generation, and on the other hand, by the increased UA spend.

At the end of the quarter, our cash position stood at a strong SEK 216 million. It is actually virtually unchanged compared to the end of Q3, if adjusted for working capital fluctuations and USD-SEK exchange rate.

We remain debt-free, and we continue to have a strong balance sheet, something we are very proud of. And on the right side, you can see the chart of G5 Store continuing to take over the percentage of the total net revenue generation in the company quarter after quarter.

With that, let's move on to the next slide. And let's talk about G5 Store with a bit more detail. It continues to deliver solid growth. It became our second largest distribution channel now, up from being the third, and the way it's going, it may soon become our #1 distribution channel. We wouldn't be too surprised.

The low single-digit processing fees have increasingly become a key driver of our margin performance, given that third-party app stores typically charge between 12% and 30%. This cost efficiency directly contributes to our improved profitability and the expansion of our gross margin.

During the quarter, G5 Store accounted for 23.4% of total gross revenue, up significantly from 16% last year. And furthermore, the G5 Store played a key role in stabilizing Sherlock and Hidden City as these games continue increasing the audience and revenue on G5 Store for over 5 years now. Gross revenue growth for G5 Store in USD terms was 20% year-over-year and 3% sequentially.

In addition to the continued progress with G5 Store, we continue to gain momentum with processing payments of our players on mobile platforms directly. Web shop and other G5 systems that internally we started calling G5 Pay, allow players on mobile platforms to make payments directly to G5 through their browser, which dramatically lowers the payment processing fee.

During the quarter, such directly processed revenue accounted for 6.4% of total net revenue from mobile platforms, a substantial improvement compared to only 3% in Q3. And we believe that this percentage has more room to grow in the coming quarters.

As mentioned in the previous quarters, we will further scale the revenue of G5 Store by opening it up for distribution of third-party games that are or were successful on mobile platforms. We have now launched the first 2 games late in the fourth quarter. And we see very encouraging results. We consider it proven at this point that distribution through the G5 Store can create a very attractive incremental revenue for mobile developers.

Based on what we see so far, after only 1 month on the G5 Store, quality games can make up to an additional 15% of their mobile revenues through the G5 Store. We will scale this initial success, both through acquiring users into the distributed games, and through bringing more great third-party games to the G5 Store.

The interest in the distribution on the G5 Store is growing among third-party developers and the number of new games are already added to the G5 Store. Our goal is to have a curated catalog to bring more high-quality games to the G5 Store and maintain high player satisfaction. As we increase the number of games on G5 Store and expand user acquisition, it may start positively affecting the overall top line dynamic in the coming quarters.

I would also add that this initiative with third-party game distribution in G5 Store leverages our experience as a publisher. As you know, we've had a lot of success publishing premium and then free-to-play games on mobile platforms. And we've created some very prominent hits through these partnerships. So the developers know us. There is good traction in attracting games to the G5 Store, because it's a well-known business model for the company, and we have very good understanding of what developers need. And for the majority of developers right now, an incremental revenue from other platforms is a very important thing to have. So I think we are doing it at a good moment in time.

With that, let's move on to Slide #5 and talk about -- look a bit more in detail on the quarter leading up to another record gross margin. So our own games accounted for over 70% of net revenue and active own games accounted for 61% of total net revenue, down slightly from 62% last year. This has to do with the improvement of the performance of Hidden City.

Our gross margin reached a record high of 71.6%, up from 69.1% a year ago, primarily due to the continued growth of the G5 Store. Monthly average gross revenue per paying user reached a new high of USD 71.7 and it increased 1% sequentially and 9% year-over-year. This reflects the continued trend for the improvement of the underlying quality of our audience. G5 Store is a key factor with its generally higher paying users, players and overall smaller player numbers than on mobile platforms.

In the quarter, we also saw at first in a little while a sequential improvement in the broader audience numbers, where MAU and MUU grew by 1% and 2%, respectively, while DAU and MUP declined 1% and 2%, respectively. All in all, basically a stable sequential performance when it comes to audience metrics, which is a significant improvement compared to previous years and a testament to the stabilization of Sherlock and Hidden City.

Let's move on to the next slide. Let's look at our operating profit for the quarter. Operating loss for the period came in at SEK 6 million compared to profit of SEK 32.8 million last year, and this resulted in an EBIT margin of minus 2.7% compared to positive 11.8% last year. The lower EBIT was impacted by foreign exchange revaluations. Adjusting for that, the EBIT margin would be positive 0.8% compared to 9.6% last year. And even bigger impact on EBIT was the increase in the amount of user acquisition that I spoke about, that we have deployed during the quarter to stabilize the revenue of 2 main games, Sherlock and Hidden City, and also to support the scalability test of the game called Twilight Land, which was unfortunately discontinued based on the results of this test.

So UA increased by 6 -- by whole 6 percentage points compared to Q4 2024. And during the quarter, the net capitalization impact on earnings was SEK 0.8 million compared to minus SEK 3.0 million last year.

Now let's turn to the next slide to talk about our cash position. Capitalization impact on cash flow was minus SEK 23.2 million, less than the minus SEK 25.5 million last year. The movement of working capital was negative minus SEK 26.4 million compared to minus SEK 21.5 million last year.

We have large fluctuations in working capital between the quarters with a few large counterparties. In Q4, we also see some year-end effects from earlier payments. Total cash flow during the third quarter was minus SEK 31.1 million compared to positive SEK 18.9 million last year.

Total cash at the end of the period stood at a strong SEK 216 million, down from the same period last year. But, again, one has to remember that our business primarily is denominated in USD and that we are holding our reserves in our functional currency in the USD, which declined about 16.5% to SEK compared to the close of 2024.

In USD, we closed the quarter with USD 23.5 million compared to USD 25 million a year ago, not that much of a difference. And also buybacks of SEK 2.7 million were made during the fourth quarter.

All right. And that was the last slide on performance, and let's sum it up and some outlook for the future. As we enter into 2026, we have multiple strategic initiatives that we are pursuing. We will continue to execute on the G5 Store strategy and expand our third-party offering with additional selected high-quality games from the initial launches that we have made. Once again, we see that high-quality free-to-play games have the potential to earn up to 15% in incremental revenue from launching of G5 Store.

We will continue developing G5 solutions for processing payments from players on mobile platforms directly. These are web shop and other modules that together we call G5 Pay. We want to see the percentage of payments for mobile platforms made directly to us grow over time. We'll continue to work on stabilizing and growing our main revenue pillars.

Sherlock and Hidden City are starting to perform better and the road map of improvements will be implemented for Jewels of Rome in the first half of the year. For user acquisition, we will continue to be in the higher bracket of our previously communicated range of 17% to 22% of revenue.

We have promising games in the pipeline, one of which is showing the best metrics we have seen in soft launch. That's cautiously encouraging. We have also formed several smaller agile teams that are rapidly testing innovative game concepts at a higher pace. So -- and we are excited to see what will come from that area in the next few quarters.

Resources that were freed up from the Twilight Land game, that was closed as I mentioned, were reallocated to strengthen these strategic initiatives or let go. We will continue to work actively on the cost structure to maintain the high momentum we have in the product and in the G5 Active store development, while also being fiscally responsible to be able to continue to fund these initiatives from operations.

We continue to have a strong balance sheet and 0 debt, a foundation to be able to pursue all the initiatives that we have going as we enter into 2026. And thanks to our stable performance, we are proud that the Board was able to propose a dividend of SEK 2 per share, corresponding to approximately SEK 15 million.

With that said, I would like to thank the whole G5 team for their outstanding work in 2025, and I look forward to a prosperous year ahead. This concludes our presentation, and let's open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have a few of those already there, so we'll get back to those. But we'll start with Simon Jonsson from ABG. Simon, you're -- there you go.

I have first a few questions on G5 Store. And I wonder what's your visibility in third-party games joining? Do you have like a prospects lined up? Or how does it work?

Well, we have -- we know -- we happen to know a lot of studios that we worked with over the years or that we know through industry contacts. And we have a business development team that basically knows the industry, and they know developers of a certain caliber, that we believe is the sweet spot for us, for the G5 Store, that we believe can really benefit from launching their games on G5 Store.

So there's a balance to be found between the quality of these games and the size of their business so that this additional revenue through the G5 Store can be sizable enough for them, but the games are successful enough that we can expect them to perform really well on G5 Store. So you can think of developers that have games that are roughly the size of our games, for example, or approaching that.

And we -- as I mentioned, we have very large developers actually very, very much interested because the situation in the market is that everyone is looking to maximize the revenue through -- incremental revenue through different channels. And in that sense, G5 as a channel, as we've seen with the first 2 games that we've launched, really delivers.

So we are being thoughtful about who we invite on G5 Store and a little bit selective, but we also want to try some genres that we actually do not have in our catalog, as you can see from the first releases, but we can be even more bold and try genres that are further away from our core offering.

So a number of deals is already signed and the developers are working on providing the builds that we will launch in G5 Store. This is already ongoing and new deals are being negotiated as we speak. So there's -- a little pipeline of games is formed. We don't want to bring tens of games or at least not yet to G5 Store in 1 year, but we will look at the performance of the new releases and decide as we go.

All right. Yes, that makes sense. Then on the cost side, I mean, are you taking costs for this -- the third-party initiative right now, like upfront costs, which is weighing on the margins? Or is this -- are those potential costs quite negligible?

Well, we certainly have to develop certain SDKs and frameworks to be able to launch external games. So -- but the team -- the platform team that does it is relatively small compared to teams that actually do make games. So it's not very significant.

When it comes to the deal terms, I wouldn't want to reflect on specific deal terms, but it's kind of a usual industry standard for distribution of games. And they are -- they're not very costly, so to speak, as usually in distribution, because we're not talking about funding the development or exclusive publishing. So these -- the commitments that distributors make, they're relatively limited.

All right. In terms of you making like some kind of payments for the rights or something like that, is that something you think will occur? I mean, we have seen it in other cases in the industry when companies are using other platforms for distribution. There's sometimes some kind of fee for that, some right. Is that something you think you will have to pay as well? Or do you think that it will be more revenue sharing?

Well, again, I think that there's clearly a need for the developers that are similar in size for incremental revenue. And it is not the -- I think the practice that you're saying that it exists, it's a practice from different kinds of games and casual games. I don't think that practice even exists.

I think developers are quite eager to distribute their games on alternative channels. And I think we are aiming at finding the right partners. The space is very fragmented, as you can imagine. There are many games that are making sizable amounts of money, but they're not like top hit games, and these games can really use incremental revenue. But we're not looking to obtaining like super brand, high -- like high brand recognition games, at least not yet.

So that's just -- I wouldn't say that it's relevant to our business model at the moment. There are many developers out there who just want to find additional revenue for their games, and this is what we are providing.

Yes. But I think I see where Simon is coming from, but it's not like we're paying huge amounts for some exclusive rights that would be kind of significant or take any kind of significant balance sheet risk if we would capitalize that either.

So if I would answer that question shortly, if I interpret you correctly, I would say, no.

Yes. The short answer is no. And again, we're not talking about any exclusive distribution or exclusive partnerships. So it's just a distribution through G5 Store, while developers are free to distribute their games elsewhere. So it doesn't cost us outrageous commitments and everything is within very reasonable, and we're more than satisfied with the initial launch.

All right. That's helpful. Then just a final one on the capital allocation. You reduced the dividend as a result of lower earnings, of course. But what's your view on share buybacks now? Is -- Have you changed your view on that in some kind of way? Or what's your view or the Board's view?

No, we still have the mandate from the Board. We still do make buybacks. We did buybacks in Q4. We're likely to continue doing it in the future. That's -- the position hasn't changed.

Then we have Erik Larsson from SEB.

Let's see. Now you can hear me, I think. Great. Yes, I just wanted to follow-up on some of the distribution of third-party games. So it sounds pretty promising, but could you just speak a bit more to how did this -- these initial signs were -- or how did it come in versus your expectations? Have you had to do like material changes along the way these first few weeks? Or just any flavor there would be interesting.

Essentially, what we are doing with new releases is we are letting them be exposed to the audience that we have accumulated in G5 Store and that continues growing through user acquisition in our own games.

And as you know, as always with mobile free-to-play audiences, there is a percentage of people who pay and they drive virtually all of the revenue. And then there's a very large percentage of people who never pay anything at all, but they still play these games. And what is achieved by widening the offering is that we are -- we're making it possible for those audiences that are not monetizing in the games that we have, to monetize in the games that we bring in.

We obviously have to think a little bit about the cannibalization. That's why we want to have a curated experience, at least for now and bring in games carefully by sort of complementing the games that we have in our store rather than competing with them. And our thinking was that basically, because we are in a situation where our games are not doing terribly well on mobile, but they continue to grow on G5 Store, we thought there can be other developers in exactly the same situation where they are a little bit stuck on mobile, and they're looking how to increase their revenues, but they cannot do it on mobile.

And it may work exactly the same way as it works for our games, which are stable on mobile, but they're growing on G5 Store. And that's exactly what we tried, and that's exactly what we saw is that these games that we brought to the G5 Store, they are very stable. They're unable to grow on mobile stores in the present market environment. But once we put them on the G5 Store and expose them to our audience, they found players, they found paying players and their revenues started growing fairly quickly pretty much organically.

And this confirmed our thesis that if we had more games in G5 Store, the G5 Store would be even more successful. So we just need to -- we can help other developers earn incremental revenue, but also bring even larger audience to the G5 Store and improve the offering of games that we have in the G5 Store.

So it's an interesting snowball sort of to try and roll down the hill. We've been working on G5 Store and on bringing people to G5 Store for over 5 years now. And we've gathered in G5 Store some of the highest paying users actually, driving the revenues within G5 Store, people who are very loyal to the brand, people who really love these casual games and really love playing them on large screens. So that's our thinking there. And so far, we see confirmations of the original idea that it's worth pursuing.

Okay. And then just a final question on, I guess, materiality, because it does sound very promising, but at the same time, it sounds like you want to manage expectations. So for 2026, how much impact could this be? Are we talking low single-digits, high single-digits or even double-digits in terms of share of revenue? Just to get a sense if you could comment that?

From these external games?

Yes.

Well, I wouldn't want to set expectations too high. So I think low mid-single-digits would make more sense than aiming even higher. But we -- the truth is we do not know. The games are in route to G5 Store. It's not entirely dependent on us. Developers have to allocate resources to create these versions. We have to test them and so forth. It usually takes time.

Time line moves a little bit. We'd like to release as many of the games that we have signed in G5 Store already this year. And then some of the games that we will be bringing into G5 Store this year, they are very big on mobile, but also some are in genres that are a little bit off from our core offering.

So we don't know exactly how well they will perform, but it's very exciting to try and launch something very different. So it's really hard to say, but we want to move there as fast as we can and try things.

And then we have Hjalmar Ahlberg from Redeye.

So yes, also a kind of a follow-up on the G5 Store there. A bit curious on how you see -- I mean, in terms of growth of the total, so to say, players that find G5 Store, I guess you see potential that more players come into these new games, but you also kind of invest UA in terms of getting players that have not found your games coming directly to the G5 Store, if you understand my question?

Yes. Again, the logic is that we're basically doing for other developers what we have achieved for ourselves in G5 Store, where we have managed to find a way to continue to grow our very high-quality, casual free-to-play games within a PC environment, within our direct store distribution, even when they don't really grow in the current market situation on mobile platforms.

And not -- I mean, not only we see organic traffic in G5 Store, and we see a substantial amount of organic traffic in G5 Store, we also do user acquisition as well. We do it for our own games, and we want to try exactly the same thing for third-party games because there's -- nothing is different, except that we will only operate this game within the G5 Store, and we can acquire organic traffic or rather improve our offering within G5 Store, which should benefit organic traffic, but also bring in -- use our knowledge of user acquisition in this environment to bring in users into these new games in the G5 Store in order to cross-pollinate, so to speak, all of these games. And we do have cross-promotion between all the games.

So the games that we bring in, they benefit from our existing audience and the cross-promotion exposure within our existing games. But then there's probably going to be situations where our games will benefit a little from the audience that we bring into the other games, third-party games that we bring to the G5 Store.

As always, like I said, like 95% of people, or 90% of people never monetize, right? So you can -- you don't have to move around the 10% that monetize, and we try to avoid it as much as possible, basically just try to leave people be if they monetize. But we can move around people who do not monetize in the hopes that they will monetize in some other game that they will particularly like. And so by expanding our offering and by bringing more users through profitable user acquisition in these games and ours, we can continue growing G5 Store, but we can continue growing it with more games than we have now, right? Because right now, our selection is offered to our own games. And when we open it up to games of other developers, this selection can grow several times over very easily.

And these games can be really, really good. If our game that makes a certain amount of money on mobile platforms is still growing on G5 Store, there's a good chance that another game that's making this amount of money, about this amount of money on mobile platforms, cannot grow there, can still grow on G5 Store. And that's the thesis that we have. And so far with the first 2 games, we see the confirmation.

Okay. Sounds promising there. And also a question on -- I mean, Jewels, you've been able to kind of stabilize Hidden City and Sherlock, as you said. Are you hopeful for Jewels or do you see that it's more difficult with that -- those games compared to the other 2?

Yes. Well, this game, unfortunately, has the most game design debt, so to speak. Our thesis is that the match-3 genre has sort of moved a little bit away from this type of games. It's been, I think, about 6 years since we released it. So some catching up needs to be done. And there are some major changes that are coming into the game, which we think will benefit it in any way.

Question is whether this will benefit the game by expanding its life cycle and just, like kind of increasing its terminal value, or are we going to be able to actually go back to stabilization and possibly growth. So we will find out in the next couple of quarters. That's the ambition.

Okay. And looking at your pipeline of new games here, I mean, Twilight, as you see, didn't work out to be a global launch, but you still have some new promising games there. How do you think about the process here? I mean, you've changed development funnel to a few years back. Twilight was quite a long time in soft launch. Is this the kind of way it can be going forward? Or do you think it will be quicker processes going forward, I mean, comparing for -- to Twilight, for example?

So Twilight Land is actually quite old game. So we launched it even before we've changed the new funnel process. So it's the last one that we had in development, which was initiated before the process was put in place. Since the new process was put in place, we've killed quite a number of games and usually in the early stages. I do not think we brought a single game to the scalability phase under the new funnel. So this one that I'm cautiously excited about is the first game that actually made it to the scalability phase, and it was initiated after we have the new funnel process.

So we think about it the same way. The problem is that the bar is very high in the market for a number of reasons, including decisions on how mobile user acquisition is being made by large players by their action or in action. It is a very high bar to be able to create a game that is scalable. We will still be doing it.

However, this is what makes us exciting about -- excited about G5 Store. That it's -- at some point, you start thinking, well, it's really hard to acquire users on mobile and you have to pay this tax to the app stores, which is quite insane actually. So you are essentially investing money to pay this tax to them, which doesn't make a lot of sense. It did make sense some years ago. Now it's almost impossible to do business this way.

So you have to have either a groundbreaking game, which we hope to have. We just need to raise the bar, aim higher or we have to find an alternative way to work with our players. And this is where G5 Store and G5 Pay come into play.

If you look at the G5 Store, the size of G5 Store business, it's pretty significant already, and it continues growing. So I think it's time we open it up for other games. And we try to work even more actively on expanding the G5 Store as a direct way to reach our players just by passing mobile app stores entirely.

Okay. We have one question in the Q&A box currently. [Operator Instructions] What we have currently is from [ Olle 898 ]. I don't know if we have a new Olle or if he just added an 8 in the end. But can you say anything about what happened in Sherlock in November?

Yes. So let's call it a live ops incident. There were actually several incidents, which affected the revenue. And conclusions were made from that. We hope they will not be repeated. Sometimes it happens. It doesn't happen very often. But live ops is driving a lot of monetization in G5 Store and then mobile stores. And if something doesn't work, there can be material consequences in the percentage of revenue that's lost. And so we had a few hiccups, unfortunately, in November, which affected the performance of Sherlock specifically.

Okay. That was the last question as far as I can tell. Yes, I think then we'll just wrap it up here. Vlad, any final remarks?

No. Thank you so much. Very thoughtful questions, and you gave me opportunity to talk about G5 Store, my favorite topic. Thank you again for joining our call today. I wish you a good rest of your day.

Thank you all. Thank you all. Bye.

Bye.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q3 earnings call. Whilst the attendee list is starting to fill up here, I just want to point out that we will do this call as usual. So, we'll start with a brief presentation of the quarter. And then we'll go into a Q&A section where you can ask questions. [Operator Instructions] I think the attendee list is done, and everyone connected.

So, with that, I will then hand over to our CEO, Vlad Suglobov.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter results call. And we obviously have also Stefan, our CFO, with us today. And let's begin by giving you a brief overview of this morning's report.

We are pleased with the quarter's overall performance. In USD, revenue increased 0.2% sequentially in comparison to Q2. It's been a while since it happened when we had sequential revenue growth. The change of the trend is attributed to product improvements that we made in Q1 and Q2, and the gradual expansion of user acquisition spend, which was made possible thanks to these improvements in our products, namely in Sherlock.

And Sherlock was the highlight of the quarter, achieving 5.6% growth sequentially in USD terms. Year-over-year, over the last 3 quarters, it went from minus 7.3% in Q1 to minus 3.5% in Q2 and then to plus 7.9%, almost 8% in Q3 in USD terms. So, with the positive changes that we've made to the game in Q1 and Q2, we were able to increase profitable user acquisition spend, and our new management and marketing helped bring energy to this process.

And now the game seems to be on the trajectory for at least moderate growth. And the game accounts for about 29% of our net revenue. It's 1 of our 3 pillars of our revenue generation. So, this is a welcome change that should help our top-line dynamic. And if we look at the other 2 pillars of our portfolio and revenue generation, Jewels' family of games had a stable performance quarter-to-quarter, but it declined year-over-year. And Hidden City was down 5.2% sequentially in the quarter and down 14.1% year-over-year.

So, not as good performance as Sherlock, but again, we did the changes, successful changes on Sherlock. And so, we were able to expand user acquisition there, and the dynamic of the game has changed. And now we have to work on the other 2 pillars of our revenue generation to try to achieve the same.

So, our actively managed portfolio of games together increased 2.6% sequentially in USD terms. So, this positive dynamic of Sherlock, which is quite strong, actually shines through a more mediocre performance of the rest of the portfolio. And now that we have made these improvements to Sherlock, we will, of course, turn our attention to Jewel's family of games and Hidden City to try and use the lessons that we've learned on Sherlock to try and improve the dynamic of these 2 other games. And hopefully, will help us turn around the trend in our top line.

In other news, monthly average gross revenue per paying user was at a new record of USD 70.8. And again, during the quarter, one of the tools that we used to turn around the performance of the top line is user acquisition. And we increased UA spend in the quarter to 21% compared to 19% in the previous quarter and also 19% a year ago in Q3.

And if you look at how our user acquisition spend was evolving over the last few quarters, we kind of hit a minimum outside of our -- or very close to the bottom bracket of the range we previously communicated. And from there, with the help of the changes and the new management and the marketing and adding new advertising channels, we started increasing the spend, and we went all the way up to 21%, which is very close to the upper bracket of the previously communicated range, 17% to 22%.

And during the fourth quarter, we think that we will have to go outside of that range, but probably not higher than 25% of revenue, most likely not higher than 25% of revenue. So, our goal is to continue this momentum and expand user acquisition to invest profitably in the growth of the portfolio revenue through existing and new games and primarily Sherlock, in order to turn around the top-line dynamic.

The gross margin reached a record 71.2% in the quarter, up from 68.8% last year, thanks to the continued success of G5 Store. And we remain debt-free and continue to have strong, solid cash flow, and something we are very proud of.

Now let's take a closer look at G5 Store, which continues to show remarkable growth. As you know, one of the key advantages of G5 Store is lower payment processing fees, which are in the low single digits. That's quite a contrast to the 12% to 30% fees typically charged by third-party application stores. The cost efficiency directly contributes to our improved profitability and the expansion of our gross margin.

G5 Store is our third-largest source of revenue. And during the quarter, it accounted for 24.7%, so almost 1/4 of total net revenue of the company, up significantly from 17.1% last year. And it's a great milestone for us when we launched G5 Store some 5 years ago. I don't think we really thought it will be responsible for the quarter of all revenue generation in the company. And yet here we are, and it continues to grow quite substantially. Gross revenue growth in USD terms was 30% year-over-year in G5 Store and 6% sequentially.

In addition to the G5 Store, we've also seen steady growth in our web shop. And web shop is a module that allows our players on mobile platforms to pay directly to G5 through their browser, through our payment processing, which obviously dramatically lowers the payment processing fee because mobile application stores, they charge the highest processing fees.

And during the quarter, the revenue flowing through web shop accounted for 3% of total net revenue from mobile platforms, an improvement compared to 2.6% in Q2. We believe and we are optimistic that this percentage can continue to increase in the coming quarters, boosting our gross margin further in addition to the effect that we're getting from G5 Store.

And last quarter, we mentioned that G5 Store will start to scale its revenue by licensing and distributing third-party games that are or were successful in mobile platforms. We have signed a few of these deals, and we aim to release the first game from other developers on G5 Store before the end of the year. This will bring much desired incremental revenue to mobile game developers while further expanding the reach and scale of G5 Store operations.

And now G5 Store is 25% of our business, it is at a size where its strong continued growth may start positively affecting the overall top line dynamic and help us with the plan to turn the situation over to growth, obviously.

Now let's look in a bit more detail on the quarter, leading up to a record gross margin. Own games accounted for over 73% of net revenue, and active own games accounted for 66% of total net revenue, up from 63% last year. Gross margin reached a record high of 71.2%, up from 68.8% a year ago, primarily as we discussed, due to the continued growth of G5 Store and with some help from the G5 web shop. Monthly average gross revenue per paying user reached a new all-time high of USD 70.8. This is compared to the last year's figure of USD 64.9.

So, this continued growth of this particular key metric reflects the continued trend for the improvement of the underlying quality of the audience. We are in a situation where a relatively small number of high-paying users, high-paying players in key countries, drives a substantial part of the revenue, while acquiring other types of players in other countries is not economically justified. And so, the overall player numbers, therefore, decline.

But as long as that gold cohort remains with us, as long as we can refill it with user acquisition and retain them for a long enough period of time, the fundamentals of the company will be healthy. So, in the future, you may see a situation where there is actually growth in revenue, but the audience metrics are still trending down. That would not be something abnormal.

And G5 Store is another factor which affects these numbers because generally in G5 Store, we have higher paying players compared to mobile and overall smaller player numbers than on mobile to generate the same amount of revenue. So as G5 Store continues to become a larger and larger part of our revenue, the overall user numbers shrink.

But again, this really doesn't mean that there is anything wrong as long as we have our golden cohort of users, and we know how to find them, and we know how to retain them and we know how to monetize them. As you remember, in free-to-play games, there's only a small number of people that actually play for the experience.

So now let's look at the operating profit for the quarter on the next slide. And operating profit for the period came in at SEK 12.6 million compared to SEK 22.9 million last year, and this resulted in an EBIT margin of 5.5%, down from last year. The lower EBIT was only marginally impacted by foreign exchange revaluations.

More importantly, we have deployed more capital into user acquisition during the quarter, which increased, as I mentioned, 2 percentage points compared to both previous quarter and as well as compared to last year. And this obviously had a negative impact on EBIT. However, as mentioned before, the positive changes we've made to Sherlock made it possible to expand profitable user acquisition from lower levels and turn around the game’s revenue performance.

The long-term vision here is that as long as we can continue to acquire users profitably and increase the acquisition of users profitably, it does make sense for us, obviously, to do that. And we will grow back gradually to a higher profitability through that, through increasing our top line, but also with the trends in the G5 Store and G5 web shop, we'll also see in the future the expansion of the gross margin.

It's been happening very reliably over the quarters, which will also help us restore profitability eventually once we have fixed the top line trend situation. During the quarter, the net capitalization impact on earnings was SEK 0.6 million compared to minus SEK 5.4 million last year.

Now let's turn to talk about our cash position. Capitalization impact on cash flow was minus SEK 23.2 million, less than SEK 25.5 million last year. The movement of working capital was negative SEK 1.7 million compared to positive SEK 27.2 million last year. And total cash flow during the third quarter was SEK 10.4 million, down from SEK 53.3 million last year. Total cash at the end of the period stood at a strong SEK 247 million despite the buybacks of SEK 8.4 million that we made during the quarter.

All right. Let's move on to the final slide and discuss some final thoughts on the outlook from here. So, we will continue to implement our core strategy of improving the metrics of our active games of our existing revenue pillars, which will make expanding profitable UA possible in order to turn around the trend of the revenue of these pillar games and through that, our portfolio.

We also see positive momentum going into the seasonally strong Q4 and Q1. So hopefully, we'll have some help from that. In Q4, because of this, we may go as high as 25% of UA reinvestment from gross revenue. The increase will help us optimize for growth while maintaining profitability. That's the aim. And as we've said before, we will notify the market when we venture out of the range of 17% to 22% of UA to gross revenue, which is what we now plan on doing, and that's why we are communicating it clearly.

During the quarter, we made 14 iterations on several games in our new game pipeline. Among notable developments, there was a discontinuation of 1 game after it failed to reach sufficient metrics, while another game passed early soft launch with promising metrics. This new game is moving forward to more advanced stages in the funnel, and we look forward to seeing further development of this concept in the next quarter.

Twilight Land is now in the late-stage soft launch phase. And we have achieved very good early metrics and good midterm metrics in this game, but we need more work on the long-term metrics, and we need more observation of these long-term metrics and a few more tests. And tests at this stage of soft launch take a little bit more time because you have to wait for the players to get to the point which you're trying to measure.

So, we expect that over the next several months, we will gradually increase user acquisition on Twilight Land while still doing some more tests and doing some iterations on the game. Then this increase in Twilight Land is another reason why we think we will go to a higher level of user acquisition expenses in the Q4.

And through our recent initiative to expand the G5 Store with the distribution of third-party games on the platform, we have made agreements to bring third-party games to G5 Store. The teams are actively working on preparing their games for release on G5 Store and the first release, as I mentioned, is set to happen before the end of the year.

And as I mentioned again, both the size of G5 Store and the speed of expansion will continue to have a positive effect on our top line dynamic. And now the store is much bigger, so it will be much easier for this effect to sort of shine through the overall revenue mix to the top line dynamic.

The G5 Store growth and also growth of the flow of payments from mobile users through G5 web shop will continue to help us boost our gross margin. And we will, of course, continue to focus on operational efficiencies in development and marketing, including continued integration of generative AI where it makes sense. And it actually makes sense. Tools are getting better.

Throughout all of this, we maintain strong financial discipline. We continue to generate solid cash flow and maintain a strong net cash position, which gives us the flexibility to execute on strategic initiatives that will strengthen the foundation for future growth. I'd like to end the presentation by thanking you for following G5 and also thanking the whole G5 team for their outstanding efforts in delivering this quarter's result.

This concludes our presentation, and let's open the call for questions, which I think we already have.

Yes. And I will just repeat if you want to raise a question verbally, you raise your hand. We have already -- I will get back to that in a minute. You can also ask questions in the Q&A box that [indiscernible] has also done already. We'll get back to that one as well. But I will start by inviting Simon Jönsson from ABG to ask his question.

Hope you can hear me. I want to first off revisit the UA spending and the guidance you provided for Q4. Of course, very interesting. And I understand that the increase in Q3 was mainly Sherlock, but the further increase you expect in Q4, is that also Sherlock primarily you think? Or is it primarily other active games? Because, yeah, you said Twilight Land needs more time, so that shouldn't be the main UA driver, I think, at least. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

That is right. The primary driver will be -- is Sherlock. And then number two is likely going to be Hidden City because the games are quite close in terms of the genre and the mechanics. And so, we've tried, so to speak, transferring some of the successful things that we've done on Sherlock to Hidden City, and the game is quite responsive to that. So, we expect that this will continue, and we will be able to spend more on user acquisition in Hidden City.

It is more difficult with Jewels family of games, Jewels of Rome, specifically, our experiments of transferring our findings from Sherlock to Jewels of Rome did not really work out. But over the next few months, we will be trying different approaches. It may or may not have effect on Q4 user acquisition, probably not. It's a short period of time until the end of the year.

And then a little bit is Twilight Land. And then we don't know exactly how much, but we felt that it would be prudent to communicate that we might be exceeding the range. We basically do not want to be held back in Q4 by the 22% or having to deliver exactly 22%. And as we said, we will communicate if we think that we will exceed the range, and we think we will exceed the range for these reasons.

All right. And a follow-up on that. Since you have made changes to Sherlock earlier this year that sort of prompted this growth, have you already done similar changes to Hidden City? Is that correctly?

It's in early stages. So, the report covers Q3, so we discussed mostly Q3. But it's quite straightforward that if you have fixed one hidden object game, you might actually be able to fix another hidden object game as well. So, it's natural to think that we would try to do that, and we have some encouraging signs.

All right. Makes sense. Just on a final note on new releases since you said you need some more time on Twilight Land. Should we still view Twilight Land as sort of the main upcoming game, you think? Or are there others that have sort of catch up? Or yes, what's the near-term outlook coming quarters?

Yes. Well, it's the most complete and the most ready of the new games. Another game that was probably the second by completeness was discontinued during the quarter due to not having reached the metrics. And then the 2 other games, 1 of them already successfully passed through the initial soft launch stages with great results, I would say, unprecedented results for us. So, we're quite optimistic about this game, but it's still in the early development stages.

With regard to Twilight Land potential or the potential of early -- of other games that are in earlier stages, it is -- again, it is hard to say. We try to only allow the games that have a chance of scaling to certain benchmark that we have of meaningful monthly revenue. So, in that sense, Twilight still -- we've not given hope on this game. So, it has some really good things going about it, but we have to work more on the certain longer-term metrics. And that's the situation. And we will find out in the next few months, I think.

Then we have Hjalmar from Redeye. There we go. Hjalmar go ahead.

Maybe just first a quick follow-up on Twilight. Would you say that, I mean, there's a small chance that the game is not being launched or that's rather a thing about when it's being launched?

That's a great question. I think there's still some chance that it will not be launched, and it always exists. I think until we are totally happy about the metrics. I would say, to be totally honest, I think there's still a chance that it will not be launched. But also, I think that so far, we have achieved really good results with the game on the early and medium-term LTV progression that there's also a very good chance that we will resolve the rest, and it will be launched. But we will have to wait and find out.

I'm also not the person actively hands on working in the game. I know the overall situation and what is good and what is holding up. But it is difficult for me not being on the team to know exactly the chances or how they feel about that. And if you work on games for a long period of time, you always get attached to games.

So, I reserve the right to say, well, this is not good enough or if we cannot reach the metrics that we think we should be reaching, and it takes too much time. But at the same time, I still -- part of me believes the team can turn this around, and we will find out which reality is going to happen.

And with your new guidance, so to say, for UA in Q4, I guess it's -- I mean, difficult to say how top line will respond in the short term. But other than that, would you say that you aim to remain stable in terms of other OpEx and so on, just to get some flavor on what to expect in terms of EBIT margin in the short term.

Yes. I think we are quite stable in terms of OpEx and other parameters from quarter-to-quarter. So I think there are no big changes are expected.

Right. And also, regarding the launch of third-party games, I think this was asked in Q2 as well, but have you decided how you will report this? Will it be similar to your own games in terms of gross margin, UA and so on? Just to understand how it will look financially. I guess it's a small impact in Q4, but if you can give some information and update on that.

Yes, it's probably a small impact in Q4. But yes, we'll be reporting exactly the same way that we report on our existing games.

All right. And also, regarding this kind of new UA approach and more focus on higher paying users. Are these kind of players that are coming from other games? Or is it like a growing user base overall? Is that something you can have any insight to?

Well, this is the -- the way I think about it, and we are discovering more about our user, about this golden cohort, so to speak, is the -- this is the audience that sometimes has been with us for a very long time and played several games. And sometimes this is the audience that we have acquired relatively recently.

But the key differentiator for us is that the person not only plays the game for a long period of time, but they also fall into this schedule of repeated purchases that are aligned with their play cycle or every week or every couple of weeks. And some people wait for like very special deals and then buy in bulk. Some other people are more like impulse buyers.

But in the end, one uniting characteristic is that they can afford to pay in these games. It's not that much money, by the way, taken on a per week or per month basis. And they are -- they seem to be okay and happily doing that for quite a long period of time. And the way our games are structured is that you can enjoy them for years.

So, I mean, these users, they're mainly from the United States and Western Europe. This is where there's the highest concentration of them. But this is also where it is quite difficult to acquire organic traffic, right? Because these are highly valued users and advertisers of the whole world are after them, whether on PC or on mobile platforms.

And then if you look at other countries with lower value per user, we sometimes get the influx of people from countries where historically, we cannot really find these gold cohort users. And then these players may not be as engaged or they make payments, but those are relatively small, but they inflate our user numbers and user metrics without bringing any substantial contribution to the company's revenue.

And I think the overall situation in the mobile marketing ecosystem is that it evolves towards fully valuing the user, right, for the product that can make -- justify paying for that user and making profit on them. And so, we can justify paying and be competitive in the market and paying for these users and then turn a healthy profit on them.

And we cannot actually justify buying in cheaper geographies, at least for now, in many cheaper geographies, the users are way cheaper there, but they also don't fall into this pattern, so they don't recoup the investment. So naturally, we skew towards buying fewer but more valuable and profitable users.

And I guess, in the countries where our games don't work as well, then those users are better sold, so to speak, to some other business that can extract better profit from them, right? So, kind of that's the way the -- I think the ecosystem evolves, and it's natural that when we go from the times of receiving a lot of big numbers of users in early days of mobile gaming. But over time, we're sort of looking at consolidating the user base towards the type of users that actually is driving the revenue of the company.

So at least this is the view from my perspective, looking at how mobile marketing is evolving. And yes, and then if we look at the demographics of these users, again, we discussed the countries, but they are predominantly female players of age 35 plus or even higher depending on the platform, we tend to have even more pronounced characteristics on G5 Store, where these tend to be players and payers who are even older and are even more -- skew even more female.

All right. And also, can you give some -- I mean, you indicated that 25% of UA for Q4 and that you will be in the higher end of your range. Is that kind of an indication for 2026 as well? Or will you change depending on how you perform in the coming quarters?

I would say that if it works out and the aim here is to kind of bottom out now, right, and then to grow out from here, we'd be happy to keep UA spend at that level if we can be certain that we are driving the growth that will make us profitable eventually. I would rather not be reducing that.

On the other hand, if we feel that we are unable to deploy this much capital in Q4 for whatever reason, be it the market or the fact that we weren't able to continue improving the characteristics of games, then it will be good news for the margin in the short term, but this would also mean that maybe long term, it's not the best thing in the long run, right? Because the way out of here is expanding the acquisition that is fundamentally profitable and that will drive the increase in the top line.

Got it. And also, a final one, I forgot if you can give any information on the third-party games. Are those games that are already available on other platforms? Or is it completely new games?

Yes. Those are games that already exist, that exist on mobile that make good enough money there and the developers are looking to make incremental revenue, and we believe that they can make good incremental revenue that makes sense for them to port these games over to G5 Store.

So, the good thing here is that the timeline of bringing this game to G5 Store is way, way shorter than developing a game from scratch, which can last years. In this case, we are talking months. And then the -- it's not as capital intensive, obviously, compared to creating a game from scratch from 0.

So, we look forward to the first releases. We -- again, G5 Store continues growing. We see we are achieving amazing results like 25% for our games on average, 25% of revenue is coming from G5 Store, any developer out there would like to generate 25% extra incremental revenue, right? Wouldn't they? Even if this extra 25% are shared with the distributor, it's still an amazing deal in the market where it's difficult to find new users. It's difficult to find growth.

And so, all this incremental revenue basically becomes also your incremental margin. So, I think it's a great opportunity for developers and for us. And again, the first games are coming to G5 Store relatively quickly. So, we'll see how it works out, but we're optimistic.

[Operator Instructions] We have 2 questions another popping into the Q&A.

We have 3 now.

Now, we have 3.

Okay. Let's start from the top. So, [indiscernible] is asking sales and marketing, excluding user acquisition, decreased to SEK 9.7 million from SEK 15 million. Why did the costs come down? Is the new lower level the new normal? We should expect to continue going forward.

Stefan, can you remind me, does that increase -- does that line include the staff also?

Yes.

It does. Yes. So, we've done -- so user acquisition expenses went up year-over-year, 19% to 21%. But in absolute terms, I think they actually declined by 7% or so, right, because the revenue is smaller. So, user acquisition was larger last year, not as a percentage of revenue, but as an absolute number, at least in SEK. That's what I saw on the first page. I think it was minus 7%. But Stefan, correct me if I'm wrong.

And then another important thing that has changed year-over-year is that we've done the rightsizing of marketing somewhere between Q1 and Q3. I think we finished with that this year. Obviously, the company has seen times where we were much larger, so we needed more people to manage this complexity.

And with the decline of top line over several years, we thought that it's a good time to rightsize marketing and also with the change of management to sort of make it more efficient, more focused, more energetic. And I think it worked out given the results in Q3. But the -- yes, that basically explains the numbers, right?

Stefan, am I missing?

No, I can only concur with that. And those changes that Vlad mentioned on kind of rightsizing the team occurred primarily in Q1 and Q2. We saw some effect in Q2, but the full effect is kind of seen in Q3. So that's why it's kind of on a lower run rate. And I think, yes, you should expect these levels rather than anything else going forward.

That's right. Okay. Let's move on to the next one. This is from Erik. And the question is on the G5 Store, obviously, gross margins are favorable, but do you see any difference in KPIs versus the traditional platforms in terms of user retention, ARPU or other?

Yes, we do. I think we mentioned that the metrics of G5 Store across the board are way better than on mobile platforms. We have higher revenue per user. Even the difference in the processing fee does not explain the difference. So, like the gross amount is also higher. And then we retain a larger portion of that. We see higher retention rates as well.

And those are 2 main things for us, right? The -- how much people are paying the average check and how well they are retained by the game. And that's why we are deriving quite a substantial revenue from G5 Store, having substantially smaller number of people actually playing through G5 Store.

There seems to be a double effect here. There's obviously some selection effect where we feel that -- and we can track that some users who are very loyal to G5 games, they may begin playing on other platforms, but eventually, they will settle on G5 Store, and we make sure to incentivize players to transition to G5 Store as much as we can because it makes sense for us to have this direct connection to the player.

Not everyone does it, but people who do it, they seem to be the most trusting and the most loyal customers of the company. And therefore, it's natural that they sort of inflate the overall metrics. But there also seems to be conversion of our earlier users into G5 Store by means of ways that we cannot even track. We just noticed that players were playing some time ago on other platforms and some other games and then they have decided to try and download from G5 Store.

We also see people -- we also see new players converting to G5 Store. But another thing that we see is that even accounting for that, the metrics still seem to be higher. And this is where we continue to have the explanation is that our games, the type of games that we make, these very high-quality, high-resolution games with a lot of stuff happening on the screen, they appeal to older demographic and older demographic or more mature demographic, however you put it. And they, on average, prefer to enjoy this game on a large screen.

It's a more premium feeling. You have more justification for spending money. You enjoy it way more. And this is really -- large screens is really where our games shine and where they are really competitive as an experience compared to games made for mobile with the scale down, let's use the word more primitive graphics. It's really a different experience on a large screen. And so, there's -- we think that this premium effect explains the difference in monetization and retention as well.

So, the next question is, you mentioned in the report that Jewel's family of games likely need 6, 8 months to refresh the product. Is this something that is required before you can scale UA for the franchise?

Well, nothing will prevent us from trying to scale UA for the franchise in the meantime. But the effect of that would be most pronounced if we were able to implement the changes in the game that would be -- that will improve the metrics.

One of the challenges that we have is that in order to be able to conduct multiple tests and measurements, you need enough users, and you need enough players. And with this trend towards smaller number of high-paying players, we need larger cohorts of these to make conclusive decision whether or not the change in the game was positive.

Or I would just say that we will be able to do these changes, iterations in a more educated and faster way if we had enough inflow of new users. So, we might actually increase user acquisition spend on these games sort of ahead of the improvements in our efforts to make the iterations and have measurable results faster.

Okay. We have next question from [indiscernible] again. If you release a game on G5 Store, will you own the customer data? Will the gamer be able to transfer progress to mobile? Or will he or she lose progress if he or she switched to mobile?

So, look, we're getting into the details of our contracts with the developers. I wouldn't like to do that. They're confidential, but we obviously are thinking about these questions, and we're trying to make a fair deal here, which would make sense for us as the party bringing users to the table, but as well to the developer and their main interest is incremental revenue, really, not user data. So that's the way I see this should work, and we try to align the agreements in accordance to these principles.

And once again, I think the -- if you think of smaller developers, it's great to have that business, but it's also not so great in the sense that you have to -- you are very dependent on Apple or Google or any distribution stores, but you're also very dependent on advertising companies and incremental revenue is very hard to find. So, they really want that incremental revenue, and we can give it to them. And I think that's an important point in the discussion when we have it with them.

The next question is, is the company focused on releasing in U.S. and Europe? Or are there any plans to translate and release current and future games to Asia, Japan and China?

So, first of all, all our games are localized in Japanese and in Mandarin and Cantonese. So, they're not unavailable there. They are available. Historically, we had some big successes in Japan. Unfortunately, we were not able to replicate them later on. We are working on bringing our games to China. And hopefully, there will be some announcements in the coming quarters, but there's not much that I can say now.

Yes, that's the end of the list. No more hands, no more questions. I think that's it.

I think that's it.

All right.

Okay. Well, then, any final remarks before we wrap up?

No. Thank you, everyone, for spending your morning with us. And thank you for following G5. We'll talk soon.

Thank you. Bye.