Enthusiast Gaming Holdings Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Enthusiast Gaming Holdings, Inc. First Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to J.B. Elliott, Chief Strategy Officer and General Counsel. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Enthusiast Gaming First Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. I'm J.B. Elliott, Chief Strategy Officer and General Counsel. With me today is Interim Chief Executive Officer Adrian Montgomery, and our Chief Financial Officer, Alex McDonald. We'll begin with some prepared remarks and then open the floor to questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation contains forward-looking information that involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events to differ materially from current expectations. These statements should not be read as assurances of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. A more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing the company appears in the company's management discussion and analysis for the three months ended March 31, 2025, which are available under the company's profile on CDAR+, as well as on the company's website at enthusiastgaming.com. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this presentation. The company disclaims any intention or obligation except to the extent required by law to update and revise any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events, or for any other reason. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Adrian Montgomery. Adrian, the call is yours.

Thanks, JB. And thank you to everyone joining us today for Enthusiast Gaming's first quarter of earnings call. We began the year with a renewed and streamlined structure. We're operating leaner and more effectively monetizing our owned and operated properties than ever before. We've laid the groundwork for direct sales to rebound, and we continue to invest across our portfolio with focus and discipline. Our strategy is simple. Focus on what we own, operate it efficiently, and extract more value from every user and and every engagement. Our goal for 2025 and beyond is to spend more time with more gamers. This mantra informs everything we do, from product development to content strategy to how we engage advertisers. We serve gamers anytime and anywhere through communities, content, creators, and experiences. These four pillars form the foundation of our ecosystems. And with a leaner and more effective monetization model in place, deepening engagement across our properties is our clearest path to long-term value. This goal is underpinned by a much more efficient business model. We've made meaningful progress across all revenue streams, higher yield in our programmatic business, growing subscriber bases, an expanding events footprint, and a re-energized direct sales team now regaining momentum. While revenue was lower year over year, the quality of our earnings has materially improved. Our core operations are more profitable, and our refined cost structure has fundamentally reshaped our financial profile. In Q1, cash-based operating expenses were down over $3 million year over year, a direct result of disciplined cost control and our focused operating model. Let us now turn to our key assets. where we continue to focus our investments and growth initiatives. Icy Veins continued its exceptional performance in Q1, emerging as one of our strongest contributors across both traffic and profitability, despite the lack of any significant macro-level events or releases in the quarter. Overall yield on Icy Veins has improved by more than 100% year-over-year, driven by a combination of strategic ad tech optimizations, and expanded coverage of new high-demand titles such as Monster Hunter Wilds and Path of Exile 2, additions which were carefully selected to align with existing user interests while capturing new segments of the gaming community. We also broadened the site's editorial footprint to cover general gaming news and tools, an initiative that has helped increase session length and repeat visits. With its trusted brand, high SEO authority, and rapidly growing reach, Icy Veins is well-positioned to remain a cornerstone of our content strategy in 2025 and beyond. The Sims resource delivered another strong quarter. TSR grew both subscription revenue and paid subscriber counts quarter over quarter, while also improving the quality of its subscriber base. The past year has focused on an intentional shift towards premium annual subscriptions, which carry better retention and significantly higher lifetime value, the results of which have created a stable and growing base of high-value subscribers serving as the cornerstone of the company's subscription offering. Looking ahead, we're preparing to launch a major product update that we believe will redefine the user experience. a feature that we are calling Dress to Impress. This new feature allows users to try on custom Sims content, clothing, hair, and more in browser with real-time 3D rendering, giving players the ability to engage directly with our library of over 5 million pieces of content, all while increasing time on-site and driving conversions. We expect to launch this in Q2 or Q3 of this year. With respect to UGG, Q1 marked the beginning of a new phase of growth as we accelerate its evolution from a leading League of Legends platform to a broader category-defining destination for gamers across the gaming ecosystem. We launched support for Marvel Rivals, NetEase's new competitive team shooter, that surpassed 600,000 peak concurrent players during Q1, with UGG now providing Marvel Rivals players with essential gameplay analytics, bringing the same level of performance optimization and meta analysis that has made our platform a staple in League of Legends. We also expanded into Rainbow Six Siege, launching global leaderboards, detailed player profiles, and match history analytics for one of Ubisoft's most iconic tactical shooters prior to the game's shift to a free-to-play model this summer. We plan to launch support for several additional high-interest titles in the months ahead and remain focused on expanding both our audience and our high-engagement desktop app experience where user retention and monetization are particularly strong. We continue to see strong momentum across both consumer and and event sides of the Pocket Gamer brand. Pocketgamer.com more than doubled its audience year over year in Q1 and has significantly improved session times and engagement. The site has become a trusted authority in mobile gaming news, tier lists, and guides, and is rapidly scaling as a leading destination for mobile-first players. On the event side, Pocket Gamer Connects hosted two major events in Q1, PGC London in January, which was our largest and most successful event to date by every relevant metric, and PGC San Francisco in March, the 50th event in PGC history, which ran alongside GDC and delivered strong year-over-year growth in attendance, sponsorship, and revenue. We also announced a major international expansion of the Pocket Gamer Connect series, with new events scheduled in Barcelona in June and Shanghai in July, and Bangkok later this year. With over 55,000 industry professionals having attended PGC events globally to date, we believe this franchise has only begun to realize its full potential. In addition to our core O&O properties, our direct sales team continues to recover and strengthen. While Q1 revenue was impacted by a lower count of fully ramped sellers, Total closed dollars grew to $2.4 million, up from $2.1 in Q4, and our 12-week trailing book dollars began to climb again in February, marking a key trend reversal. We're onboarding new sellers, increasing RFP activity, and converting deals from both new and returning clients. Notable campaigns in Q1 included new campaigns with Ford and a multi-phase launch for SNK's Fatal Fury, City of the Wolves. in partnership with Petrol Advertising, as well as repeat business from major brands, including Amazon, State Farm, Paramount, Lego, Nintendo, Samsung, and Disney. Additionally, our Rising Stars campaign continues to deliver high-impact results. The 2025 edition generated over 500 million livestream banner impressions, engaged over 5,800 community members in its first week, and produced thousands of organic creator posts, all while serving as a compelling sponsorship vehicle, securing deals from the likes of Elgato, Cash App, Corsair, and many others. It's a perfect example of our ability to execute complex, creator-led campaigns efficiently and at scale, and a formula we intend to repeat through our Luminosity branded events and programs, as well as through our partnerships like NHL Puck and Play, slated to launch this fall. As we move through 2025, our priorities are clear. One, grow our audience through SEO, referral partnerships, new product features, and user flow optimization. Two, increase monetization yield through product innovation, ad tech optimizations, and promoting our most profitable offerings like our desktop applications. Three, continuing to build on the momentum of our rebuilt direct sales team to deliver bespoke campaigns to the world's largest brands. Four, expand our Pocket Gamer Connect event series into new geographies and markets. Five, maintain our cost discipline while unlocking further efficiencies. And six, scale our subscription and e-commerce offerings, particularly across TSR and our other owned properties. We have the model, the properties, and the right team in place. And while external pressures remain, the foundation we've built is strong and it's getting stronger. Thank you to our shareholders, our partners, and our team of dedicated enthusiasts for your continued support. I will now hand the call over to Alex for a deeper dive into the financials.