Frontier Devs Plc Ord

So welcome to our interim results call. Thanks everyone for making the time to join us this evening, this evening, this morning. If you could stay muted and keep your camera off until we get to questions, that would be appreciated. So I will pass over to Jo to introduce herself and then we'll run through some of the numbers. So over to you Jo.

Thank you, Alex. I hope everybody can hear me. Well, welcome everybody. And this is my first time talking to you as CEO. So I thought it'd be good to give you a little bit of background into my experience, both in the games industry, but also at Frontier. So 30 plus, I don't like to say the number, but I started in the games industry working on magazines, which at the time were the only way that people could communicate with players. In fact, developers were still printing code so that people in their bedrooms could play games by typing them in. I've always been player first. In that time, the players used to send in bags of posts in order for us to know what they really think about the games that we were talking about. In the early days, the first games I worked on were IP games, so games like Terminator 2, Robocop, The Simpsons, and actually the first Jurassic Park game, which is a nice full circle for me. But those games, the emphasis was on the IP, and it was only when I moved to Maxis, which was one of the first developers of... of creative sim games or management sims as they were at the time. That's when developer input and understanding what the players wanted and feeding that back into the game to improve on the game became a really essential part of my job, even so far as getting people to create cities and send us in floppy disks so that we can use them to share content. And that's sort of the early stages of my massive interest in working in developers, not just within publishers. Over the time, the industry went through so many changes, which I experienced in publishers, developers, and NDs, multiple formats, loads of different... At one time, we were doing eight different formats on games, which is quite complex. Now we have... digital distribution, which has really enabled us to build relationships with players rather than being at the mercy of a retailer deciding how many units to take. And we're in a good place for that. So that gives you a bit of background of my kind of industry experience. I've always been active in the industry. I was on the Yuki board. I've twice been nominated and recognised as industry by one of the top women in games. So a little bit of flag waving about me there. But when it comes to Frontier, this may be a new role, but I'm not new to Frontier. I played a big role in bringing Frontier direct to players when we launched Elite Dangerous, which is what attracted me to Frontier in the first place. We had 50,000 players, 50,000 interested Kickstarters, and we had to do something with them. And that was the start of our publishing team. I built the best in class I thought at the time, and I really still believe it, publishing team, engaging directly with them in new ways. And we created our first early influencer creator programs. um when frontier is at its best and at its most successful it's when we invest in those relationships that help us make makes much better games so i will be doubling down on this in the future and you'll probably get bored of me saying the word player but i will keep doing it because that at the end of the day is how we make our money um i returned in the summer uh cmo And what we did was reignited that importance. And that has played a critical role in the launch of JWE3, which we'll be talking about as we go on. So a bit about me. I'm happy to take questions at the end if there's anything more that you need to know.

Thanks, Jo. Back to you for some headlines.

Yeah, okay, so I'm going to recap on the strategy on the next slide. Johnny reset the strategy, but the top headline here is that it's working. I'm committed to delivering against that strategy. We will continue to do so. We're in a really strong position to continue to grow. JWE3 has played big part in our results today with H1 revenue up at 26% and adjusted operating profit at 76%. So we've raised our guidance to around 100 million of revenue and adjusted profit of 11 million. When we announced we were working on a sequel to Planet 2, which is part of our continued CMS strategy, sorry, to Planet Zoo, we did it with a video that celebrated our players. This is to set the scene for how we're going to engage with those players going forward. They responded in kind, returning to the game. I think we saw a 10% increase on the previous three weeks average of gameplay. And the speculation has been really important for us to be able to work out Give us a chance to add things into the game of just what we're doing and refine our game going forward, which is exactly what we did with Jurassic World Evolution 3 in the summer. Our studio in Canada is busy working on another game to be released in FY27. And we have an unannounced CMS game scheduled for 28, which will help us continue with this strategy. So we're in a good position financially. Alex will talk about all this later. He likes to talk about the numbers and I like to talk about the players. So that's how you should see us. But we have our costs under control and we have money in the bank. I just want to end this slide with some fun facts. In 2025, the number of players playing Frontier titles was up by 34% year on year. So we must be doing something right to excite them. And the number of hours players bar games was up by 25% year on year. So that to us is, aside from all these great numbers, it's a recognition that we're doing the right thing. So next slide. So I'm just going to read through this slide because I want to absolutely emphasize what we've already said, and Johnny has said it a lot in the last few calls, but our strategy is delivering. Select, develop, launch, nurture is what we're doing. So one major launch per year. We're going to develop those games over longer time periods. That gives us time to listen to players, to look at what we're doing and make sure we're doing the right thing. We're prioritizing the CMS genre, creative management, sims. And also importantly is to nurture what we have. We have strong franchises. You'll see that from the numbers as we go through it. But we want to continue to nurture those franchises, which gives us a lot more certainty in what we're doing. It gives us a lot more confidence in what we're doing because we keep engaging with those players and we're able to monetize. over a longer period of time. Our PDLC is clearly working. We're seeing some really good numbers from what we're doing with Planet Costa 2 and what we're doing with Jurassic franchise overall. And we continue to have good relations with the platform holders, so subscriptions, promotions, all of those things are working in our favor right now. Next slide. Okay. I've said it before, but Elite Dangerous was the reason why I joined Frontier. And here we are now, since 2014, we now have 5.8 million units sold and 141 million in revenue. It started with 50,000 highly engaged players who kickstarted the game. And we needed to build a publishing team, a marketing team off the back of it. And those players helped to shape the game that we have today. It's a really good example of nurturing and monetizing. In the last 12 months, we've started selling ships. This has allowed our players to reignite with the game. The franchise is delivering revenue growth of over 50% versus H1 last year. We've also continued to release free content, and we've grown the narrative. We're constantly talking about that narrative, which is what keeps people playing the game. Sentiment and player engagement has grown as well. Monetization, we'll continue to look at things and see what works. In December, we have the record-breaking month for ARX, which is the currency that people buy in order to spend in-game. And Elite Dangerous is well-positioned for the future. It's a great brand, and there's a lot of brand equity there that we can continue to take advantage of. Planet Coaster, that's the second game I launched at Frontier, actually, in November 26. Absolutely loved this game. It was, as I've said before, I have a love of creative management games. And With that, we really focused on how can we get players to create content, which is why Steam Workshop was installed in the game at the time. I initiated in the summer a return to thinking about what players are doing. We had poster heads in 2016. A lot of them continue to engage with us now. the launch of Planet Coaster 2, we have released eight free major updates. All of those have been improvements in the game and things that the players have wanted, focusing on what they're requesting. We've also released three PDICs, The Sorcery Pack was released in September and the Toy Pack in December. Both of them had great attachment rate and actually both those PDLCs have higher attachment rate than those that we released with Planet Coaster 1 after 30 days. But what's really important is that the review sentiment has improved. Our overall ratings are at 71%, but we're now at 80% for most recent reviews. So we're seeing a lot of momentum with Planet Coaster 2. Jurassic World Evolution, well, the sales speak for themselves, but the important thing here is to know how our players responded to the game. One of the things that we did a little bit differently was to expose this game early so that we could work out whether we were doing something right. Quite often, with a game release, there's a lot of uncertainty about how it's going to be received on day of launch, and you go in there with everything crossed and worried. We did an event a couple of months out of our release, and at that event, we invited all our key stakeholders so we could measure and see how they played the games and we could see whether there was anything, give ourselves a chance to make any changes before launch. We had 500 members of the public, so 500 players, sitting, playing the game for an hour and a half. We also had press and we had influencers. So watching them over that hour and a half gives a really good idea of what to expect on day of release. And that was great comfort taking us into that time. And we were able to speak to our platform holders and talk to them about that. And I think that helped us with gaining really valuable promotional featuring. So the pay reaction has been extremely positive. 93% positive rating on Steam. We've got a Metacritic Steam score of 81%. So our strongest engagement of building these relationships with creators has resulted in so much organic content, which has been very good for us because that is high engagement content. and low cost. The franchise has had such a good start to overall, the whole franchise to H2, February 26, so where we are now, through the promotional period at Christmas. And we've also launched Wetlands, which is the first PDLC. Plus, we had really, really good, strong sales on Jurassic World 2 over the summer through all the promotions. So we're in a good place with that franchise. We're very pleased about it and we're very excited for the future. Now, Planet Zoo, sales have now exceeded over 150 million, which is our highest selling franchise, our highest selling game, actually. And that still remains a 91% positive review on Steam. We continue to sell. It's achieved an excellent sustain rate of 82% versus H1 of last year. And that's even... That's not even including any additional PDLC. We haven't released any additional PDLC this year. Planet Zoo is, for us, a benchmark of how we want to move forward. It's how we see CMS franchises in the future, and there's so much to build on. We're constantly enhancing the player experience, and that has been a really big part of its success today. So a couple of nice player stats for you. Over 200 million hours have been played in Planet Zoo, and that is 3.3 billion animals born in the game, and 8.6 million franchise zoos created, and 505 million animals released. That all adds up to just a huge amount of enjoyment for our players, and the sequel to Planet Zoo has already been announced. and we're going to be releasing that in FY27. That is going to help us build on this best-selling game, and I really think it's going to be an exciting year for us. So finally, FY28, we have another CMS in development. We won't be saying anything more about it, but that also is something that we're already working on. Over to you, Alex.

Thanks, Jo. So just picking up some of the points that Joe made, this is a nice pie chart showing the half one revenue split. So you can see there just how strong that Jurassic World Evolution franchise was, just over 60% of total revenue. As Joe mentioned, Jurassic World Evolution 3 has done incredibly well, very pleased with its performance in half one and over Christmas actually in December as well. In the summer last year, we had really strong performance with Jurassic World Evolution 2 in prize promotions. So as Joe's already said, the Jurassic World Evolution franchise is in great shape. Planet Zoo was the next biggest franchise with 15%. So bear in mind there, as Joe says, we had actually a PDLC right at the start of the financial year. But in terms of new content, it's quite limited. So to achieve an 80% plus staying rate is a great performance. I'm very pleased with where Planet Zoo is and obviously very much looking forward to the sequel. And then Planet Coast are there at 11%. So if you look at those three CMS franchises altogether, they actually represented about 90% of total revenue. So you can see the strength from the strategy that we reset a couple of years ago. Elite Dangerous, although it's 6% there, you know, small revenue, but pretty mighty in terms of its profit contribution and also its brand status, as Joe mentioned. So very pleased to see that growing. The ship monetization has proved to be a big hit. We grew half one to half one by over 50% with that franchise. So really pleased with that performance. Just then turning to a few more stats on Jurassic World Evolution 3, I thought it was helpful to show a revenue chart for each of the three games. And this is cumulative revenue for the first full 12 months. So the green line is the first game, launched back in June 2018. The blue line is the second game, launched ahead of the movie in 21. And then Jurassic 3 launched behind the movie. The movie came out in June. Each of those periods is a little bit different. Jurassic World Evolution 2 and Jurassic World Evolution 3, quite similar in terms of an autumn launch. But the first three months for Jurassic World Evolution 2 a november december and january so january being you know the end of the uh the often the steam winter sale and maybe the start of some other promotions in january tends to be quite a strong month so we we do expect that jurassic world evolution three uh by month four will be clear of jurassic world evolution two you know it's a great start to the franchise as you might have seen from the stats if you look back at the stats that we could we um we said for the second game We've actually generated more revenue with fewer units, and we've been a bit more cautious with the amount of price discounting we did at Christmas. So really pleased with how that franchise is doing. The second game did benefit from a game pass deal and obviously the film. So that's the blue sort of tick up you see in month two. month six, month seven, month eight. We are obviously talking to all the platforms about deals, as you'd expect, nothing to announce at this stage. But we fully expect that by the end of the financial year, Jurassic World Evolution 3 should be north of 40 million, maybe even mid 40 millions in terms of cumulative revenue. So great performance. Looking then at our overall revenue franchise performance. And again, this is adding up all of the revenue across the multiple games in each franchise from the very start of the first launch. So you can see there the strength of that uptick for Jurassic World Evolution 3. You can also see that nice Christmas performance for Planet Zoo. We did a 90% discount on Steam, what we sort of term a mega sale on Steam. They give us lots of featuring in return for that discount, and that's proved to be really popular. We did that for Jurassic World Evolution 2 a couple of times, and that worked really well for Zoo over Christmas to bring more people in. You also see the Christmas uptick for Planet Coaster and Elite Dangerous. That uptick over time has been very good for monetisation. So all of the franchises are in really good shape there. Moving then to look at a cash profit performance. So this is deducting all of the costs as they're incurred. We retrospectively, since Jurassic World Evolution 3 came out, put all the costs back in. So you might remember that we didn't put any costs in until that launch happened. So that's why it sort of flattened out as we were investing in the game. Then we launch and you see such a strong tick up in the cash there. That's obviously very pleasing to see. So getting on for 140 million of cash profit for the franchise across the three games. Joe already mentioned just how strong the performance is on a revenue basis for Planet Zoo. On a cash profit basis, it's even more startling in terms of the contribution that single game has made. over £90 million of cash profit now from that single game, launching first on PC and then coming to console. Planet Coaster 2, you can see the tick up there, and this is a great illustration of the drop-through we get from revenue from our own games in particular, in terms of that profitability. And then Elite Dangerous also ticking up nicely. You can see the profit that we're able to build in from a relatively small team working on that game, building monetization and doing free updates. So cash profit, again, on a franchise basis, looking to be in really, really good shape. Just zipping then through some of the numbers on the income statement, we're focusing on the adjusted operating profit measure, just a reminder of how that works. So we look at total OPEX, but we take out capitalisation, we take out amortisation, we take out share charges to get back to a sort of cash spend type of number. We also within the R&D adjust for the benefit of the tax credits that we expect to see. So we don't do that on a cash basis, we do it on an expenditure basis. So if we expect to get say 5 million pounds for this spend that we are investing in R&D this year, we'll record that in this year against this particular measure. So it gets back to what we think is a nice clean cash profitability measure for the company. So starting at the top then, we've got revenue of almost 60. With a guidance of around 100, it means 40 for the second half. Having delivered a really nice December performance over those Christmas sales, we think it is achievable for us to now beat that 100 or be around that 100. We'd be pretty disappointed if we didn't just go north of that 100 number. But the guidance we've put out today is around 100. Gross margin in half won at 64%. That reflects the success of that Jurassic game because we have royalties within cost of sales as well as distribution costs to people like Steam, Microsoft and Sony. So second half, we'll see that reverse a little bit more as the sort of franchises balance out. I think for full year, we're probably expecting maybe 65%, maybe slightly higher than that for the full year in terms of gross profit margin number. OPEX in the first half sales and marketing a little bit higher because of course we launched Jurassic World Evolution 3 general admin that includes the bonus accrual with the guidance here that adjusted op profit for the year will be around 11 million we've obviously banked almost 10 of that in the first half and we accrue the cash profit dual staff cash profit cash bonus sorry plan against that profitability so we'll see sales and marketing and general admin probably reduced a little bit in the second half. So I expect OPEX to be on this basis around maybe mid-50s. So that's how we're feeling about the numbers. Obviously a very good performance versus last year. Looking then at cash flow, we started the period at 42.5. You can see on there the 10 million of buyback plus small number of fees, so just over 10 million pounds for the buyback. We finished at just over 40. We ended the calendar year at the end of December at just over 43, so in a great cash position. The adjusted operating measure that we have flows pretty nicely through to cash. We've got some working capital build in the first half because, of course, we launched Jurassic World Evolution 3 towards the end of that period. But very pleased with where we are with the cash position. I think the response to the buyback was very positive. We may well have excess cash that we may well do a buyback again maybe in the summer, but nothing to announce right now on that. But certainly the feedback we received on that process was very positive.

Back to you, Joe, to wrap up. Oh, you're on mute. Rookie mistake. Forgive me.

We can say it again. Jurassic World Evolution has been a big success for us. We're really pleased with that, and it gives us a lot of confidence in our franchise management and our CMS strategy going forward. That is delivering. So we are in a good position to achieve sustainable growth. And we've upgraded our financial guidance, revenue of around 100 million and adjusted operating profit of around 11 million. So with that, any questions?

Yeah, I think let's move to questions. I'm just going to stop sharing the presentation. We can always zip back into it if we need to. And if you want to ask a question, please put your hand up. And we'll go to Andrew Renton first, please, if you can unmute and turn your camera on if you like.

Yeah, thanks both.

Really good presentation. So a couple questions from me. First is around the Jurassic World movies and just how much visibility you get. around them sort of making new movies and sort of helping keep that franchise going. And do you see any risks around sort of cinema attendance and stuff like that? And then second question is just around sort of trends you're seeing across the different consoles and, in particular, what your approach is to the Switch 2. Anything you're seeing there in terms of things you would like to release for that?

Okay, do you want me to take that Alex? Jurassic World, well, the movies. So we probably get less information early on. So, you know, obviously Universal have movies take a long time to create and they don't always know what they're going to be doing a long time in advance. But we've experienced releasing games before a movie, after a movie, at the same time of the movie. Jurassic World, Evolution 3 was after the movie. And there are plenty of opportunities for us to take advantage of that movie tie-in with PDLC. We've got PDLC for Rebirth coming up. What... What we found with JWE3 is actually we kind of transcended the movie in terms of people going to the movie. The franchise is very strong. And we found that a lot of people were actually playing the game for the sake of the game. The franchise is very strong and it does attract our players, but so does the franchise itself. So it's a very sort of symbiotic relationship, if you like, but it's not necessarily needs to be tied to that movie release at that particular time, based on the experience that we've had with the whole franchise so far.

Yeah, I think just to jump in and add to that, the first game we really felt needed a big IP event. With the second and the third game, we're selling to a game audience rather than trying to sell to kind of everyone. So it's quite interesting to see how strong it's been launching after the movie instead of Before the movie. So as Jo said, with the three games, we've tried out all the models. The important thing, as Jo keeps saying, is listening to the player, understanding the player, delivering to the player. So I think the timing of movies versus timing of the games is important. is less important, but clearly having IP events where you've got a big IP is pretty useful.

It's great for player speculation as well because, you know, there's the whole law around it and then all the things are introduced at every game event and movie event. So that is an interesting conversation to have with our players. To answer your second question, trends against console. Well, you know, we really want to reach as many players as we can. and go to meet them where they are playing. So I'll be a bit vague about this simply because we will be looking at Switch 2, we look at every platform. The important thing is, where are they playing? And that's where we will do our best to meet them.

Okay, great. Thank you. Thanks, Andrea. So we've got Will Larwood coming up next. Yeah, thanks very much both for the presentation.

I guess, firstly, just in terms of if you could provide some comments on sort of the market, the competitiveness and sort of pricing, particularly interested as we look to Planet Zoo SQL, whether you thought about, you know, your pricing strategy there. um secondly is just in terms of you know r d spend you know going forward particularly with you know complex game and also that fy28 uh release do you expect the r d spend to sort of increase and take up from these levels and then and then finally joe just sort of you know the areas where you think you can sort of add or Obviously, I understand the CMS strategy isn't going to necessarily change, but where do you think there's sort of the greatest things that you can change relatively easily or look to change?

Alex, do you want to take the first two?

Yeah, yeah, I'll take the first two. So competitive, there's some pricing. We've always got to have an eye on what other people are doing, particularly if there's a big game sucking the oxygen out of the room like a GTA. But what we really like about the CMS strategy is we can never be complacent, but we're sort of protected from from above and below. And what I mean by that is the CMS genre is not big enough and interesting enough for the really big companies. But for the small companies, it's hard for them to get in because you do need to invest time and you do need to have that experience. So, as I said, we can never be complacent. We've got to deliver to the players. But we feel like we can own this CMS space. Now, what that means in terms of pricing and competition is is we talked about it before, we almost go as high as you dare with the deluxe price. We want to make sure we capture as much value as we can at the start of a launch around people that are really keen to engage early and having really meaningful, interesting deluxe content is a key element there. The ability for us to tick up sort of base game price over time, you know, has come through. If you look at the pricing for Planet Coaster 2 versus Planet Coaster and almost certainly, you know, the sequel to Planet Zoo versus the original game, we do have the ability to move price up over time. But we've got to be really careful. You know, Joe's very focused on the player, as you keep hearing. So that's number one priority for us. if we just look at Christmas and the performance there, there's a few stats around saying it was a pretty good performance on Steam. There's quite a lot of people really engaging. And certainly across the portfolio, we saw really good engagement. But I'd say a lot of that is down to the strategy that we had there, the way that we engage with influencers, the way we engage with players with new content, rather than anything sort of sector-wise that's going on. So we always have an eye for the sector, but focus very much is the player. Second question was about R&D spend. So in terms of total R&D spend on a company basis, we're likely to have a pretty similar level, I think, half two to half one. We're not looking to grow the R&D at this point. You know, it might be a bit of wage inflation over time. But having gone through the vein a couple of years ago of resetting the cost base, you know, we're going to be very cautious there. And what's encouraging is we feel we're really right now being able to do more with less. You know, we did have to cut the headcount, but we think that the people that we have are really delivering. So we think it's working really, really well. In terms of individual budgets, Jurassic World Evolution 3 actually, the dev budget for that ended up being around about 12 million, and that's because of some of the changes we need to do to the roadmap to support Universal with the film. If you go back to Andrew's questions earlier about our visibility, the film team within Universal will obviously be pretty secretive about some of those dates and some of that information. So the team have done an amazing job here turning that game around in such a short time and delivering a really great performance. I think overall for CMS Games, in the range of sort of 12 to 15 million pounds um for complexes games something around half of that i think uh just in terms of the scale so give you some idea of what we're looking at in terms of r d budgets and then the last one so um well firstly i i really think we need to play to our strengths you know we've got a strategy we know what we're doing but i think

more robust planning and a slight rearrangement around how we manage our franchises. So that gives us a much longer tail and gives us more confidence in what we can deliver over a longer period of time. If we focus on our strengths, that gives us the differentiator. And I think that's really important going back to your competitive question. We need to be really doubling down on what we're good at so people recognize that and we need to be able to finesse that over time so that we can repeat it on every franchise that we have and I'm also really keen to look at wider monetization which goes back to the earlier question around around switch or around any platform we want to go and make sure that we can deliver our brilliant game experiences to as many players as possible. And that means looking at other opportunities to develop on different formats. There are a host of things that we can be looking at that will help us expand our IP portfolio beyond just releasing the individual games as we do.

Okay. Thanks, Will. Ross is up next.

Yeah, good morning. Morning, Alex. Nice to meet you, Joe. Just a quick one. Will's taken half my questions. Well done, Will. But let me ask you a slightly different one. Many, many games companies over the last year or so have been talking about rediscovering the relationship with the player. And I'm really interested in your perspective, particularly your background, on... doing that within the CMS segment, you know what I mean? Is it easier, is it harder, is it different? I'm just interested to get your reflections on that.

All right, well, I'll give you an anecdote then because I think that that might help. So when I came back in the summer, Johnny had said to me, you know, a bit worried about what we're doing in Planet Coaster 2, we need to, you know, we need to reignite with the players and We've had a few hiccups, but we've got a really good plan going forward. And the industry, the marketing side of influencer marketing and creator marketing has kind of veered a lot more to paid content. So it's become an acquisition tool. It's actually become a media platform. But that's not engaging with players. That's buying players. So I just said, what about all the people that we used to speak to? And let's just phone them up. Let's start talking to them. And let's get them into the office. So we reengaged some of them I already knew from when we launched Planet Coaster. Others were new and had great, fantastic audiences. We brought them into the studio. We put them in front of the dev team. We gave them access to all areas to what we were doing. We were prepared to listen to the criticism that they had had around the game and actually had publicly had around the game. And we had them playing the game and taking their feedback and using them as a sort of a micro-user research platform. We also let them record some of the sounds in the game, which is really nice because they could then go away and talk about that. But what was really, really useful, given the fact that with this particular group of people, they're influencing millions of players to understand really what how passionate they are about the game, and what really bugs them about what we're doing, but also what they would like to see. So having done that, it gave us a little microcosm of what I really feel that we should be doing in a wider scale. I think we should be mapping our customer journey and finding where are all the different areas that we can re-engage with players. If players give us their data, if they sign up to an email, we should be talking to them. And we should, you know, they're investing us as a value exchange. We need to invest in them. So we have various different cohorts. We have those big influencers who are great because they give us fantastic, hold nothing back in their criticism. And we have to embrace that and not just hide under a rock about it. But also we speak to them correctly and we engage with them the right way. they will tell all other more passive engaged players what we're doing, what they think is good, what they think is bad for games. So it has been working. It's also good from a cost point of view because we're not spending all that. It's better to talk to players you've already got than have to pay so much money to try and acquire players who are not fully engaged. They're just listening to somebody on a YouTube channel. So with that in mind, and actually that's exactly what we did, and it's exactly what I did on Elite Dangerous. Elite Dangerous players helped shape the game in the early days. Our current Planet Coaster players are helping us shape the game. Our players on Jurassic World Evolution helped us release the game because we made quite a few changes. And in some cases, we're even showing those players stuff behind closed doors. And before we've even put an update out, they've told us this bug or this is wrong or we catch something that doesn't seem quite right. I hope that's an answer to your question.

Yeah, thank you. And do you think it's possible to develop a deeper player relationship with a CMS player than it is with... Yeah.

Yeah, I do. Having worked on lots of different games, the fact is they play for many more hours. They're much, much more engaged. They are very creative and it's so much easier to talk to them. Honestly, those stats I talked about with Planet Zoo, you look at those numbers and those players have been playing for six years.

Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks, Ross. Patrick, is that next? Thanks, Alex. Yeah, a couple of questions. Maybe I'll start on JW3. If you have a sense of, you know, the current space between console and PC, and secondly around that, kind of any changes in the... demographic of the player base globally from JW2. For instance, like the amount of players that bought JW2 that are buying JW3. And then just looking kind of longer term beyond kind of 27, you talked about a release in 28. Looks like that won't be within the existing IP stack. Admittedly, that is probably organic. Just looking at kind of the CMS category and the cash balance increasing, would you consider IP opportunities within the category to acquire proven IP? And just the last one maybe for Joe, you've just talked a lot about CMS, et cetera. How applicable do you think this is for, I guess, roadblocks in terms of future thinking of where the IP goes and sort of any collaborations you might have there in the future? Thanks.

Okay, why don't I start with the console PC split for Jurassic World Evolution 3. It's pretty similar to previous games that we've seen, so on digital it's about a 50-50 split between PC and console. When you add in the physical product, the discs, it sort of makes it maybe a 45 PC, 55 console. The split between the consoles is about two-thirds PlayStation, one-third Xbox, which is pretty typical. I know, Patrick, you do a bunch of work on other companies, so PlayStation tends to be stronger now, with Game Pass having had an impact on Xbox. So pretty similar in terms of the console split. In terms of player stats from two to three, Jo, I think you had some stats on that.

Yeah, I can tell you that. So for... JWE3, 60% of our current players have bought either JWE1 or 2. 40% of them are new players, which is really encouraging because we've got great retention, but we are acquiring new players as we go through. To go, IP opportunities, that question, if I get the question right, are we exploring other opportunities?

Yeah, to acquire really just in terms of, like, obviously you've got the organic, but would you look to acquire within CMS to bring the IP?

I think it would be very much dependent on what's available. We are leading the charge on CMS games, so I think we'd have to think very carefully whether we can achieve the same level of game with a third-party IP.

Yeah, obviously Jurassic is the biggest CMS franchise that we have. So, you know, all we've said for FY28's game is that it's a CMS. We haven't said whether it's own IP or licensed IP. Patrick, you anticipate maybe it's a new IP. If you think of the three CMS franchises that we have, You can probably rule out Planet Zoo because why would we do Planet Zoo as equal to Planet Zoo and then another sequel to Planet Zoo? Jurassic, it would mean a two-year tick between Jurassic World Evolution 3 and another Jurassic game. So it kind of leaves you thinking, well, if it's not Planet Coaster 3, it's going to be a new franchise. So, you know, nothing to announce at this stage, but you can kind of work out what we might be thinking for FY28. And clearly having a new franchise at some point is an important thing for us. We can't just have three CMS franchises. I think three years for a sequel is too early. So looking to grow franchises over time is a very important part of our strategy.

But, sorry, I misinterpreted your question, Patrick. Did you mean an existing CMS game that's out there for acquisition?

Yeah, there might be sequel opportunities, basically, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I would say we've started – we're in development for that game, and we haven't announced that we've sort of bought anything, so that might tell you.

And Roblox opportunities. Well, Roblox is really interesting because – When you think about particularly CMS games, Roblox, Minecraft, they're very creative platforms. And I see them in many ways as a sandbox in the real sense of the word, a playground for young players to develop their interest in creative games like that before they mature and grow up and then look to a different gaming experience that still sits within that creative environment. So it's definitely... that we've had about how can we look to those audiences and bring them up through, as they mature, bring them and attract them to our games.

Thanks very much. Just one last one. On the expansion of the... That seems like a big number of new players. Like, what did you do differently to bring in that new category of players into JWA3? Just curious.

Yeah. So... The people talking about it, one, the game is absolutely excellent. And I think that the peer-to-peer recommendations have made a really big difference. Our player reviews are really high. They're up in the 90s. So there's a lot of interest in people going, I might have a go at that for a change. The other thing that we did, and Johnny gets the credit for this because it was so important, is we improved the onboarding of the game. So the first hour and a half is really critical, as you're probably well aware of any game, to make sure that you're able to get people understanding how to play but also draw them into a deeper gameplay experience. And we spent quite a bit of time changing that and making sure that the game was so accessible to new players. And that's played out in the numbers. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Patrick.

Sean, I think you're up next. Morning, everybody. I've got quite a few, but I'm going to restrict myself so I don't have to subject everyone on the call to sound my voice for too long. They're not all about tax, are they? Don't worry, Alex. I've got all those questions out of the way now. So first one, I think you've hinted pretty strongly there that the FY28 game may or may not be a new IP, but certainly over the longer term you want to expand franchises. I think for me, I think we've discussed previously that you've got some fairly different audiences across the portfolio, right? Just sort of open question, are there some pockets of potential audiences out there that you think you could build a game to appeal to? Should we think that maybe some of these games will appeal to similar audiences that your existing games already do? Just open question, would love to hear your thoughts. Second game, again, very broadly, and I think you've sort of touched on this with Patrick's question as well. Obviously, you've had enormous success with Dress Up World over a significant period of time, which is obviously a licensed IP, without sort of wanting to prejudge, and I know you won't say, about FY28. Is that the sort of thing you'd look to do again? I know, Joe, you mentioned your long experience of sort of starting out working with IP games. Do you guys have, like, a plan to do more of that in the future? Do you think that's sort of, you know, maybe for the next 10 years where the business might go? Just really interested to hear any questions on that.

And then to find out. We'll chip in and answer those ones and then we'll do the next one. So, Sean, you're on a bit of a fishing expedition there. So you've chucked plenty of bait into the water, I think. We don't really want to say too much about FY28's CMS. You know, we've hinted there that it could well be a new franchise. And as I said earlier, having a sequel every three years is probably too short a period. So if we want to do a game a year... over time we probably need to expand and get to four but maybe five franchises i think would be ideal so having a new one does make a lot of sense um i don't really want to answer any questions about what that might be or not be or is it this audience or the other audience because uh it's far too early for that so uh i don't really want to say us to say too much more at this stage

In which case, I've got just one more. Could you remind us, you've mentioned, I think, that you've got potential, you're in conversations with all the major platforms about subscriptions. Could you just remind us which of those tend to be most material and therefore what we should sort of be looking out for when we see it appear, or should we see it appear? Sure.

So, you know, PlayStation have been actually a really, really valuable partner for us on Jurassic World Evolution 3. They gave us a lot of extra promotion and featuring. In terms of the size of the subscription deals, it's the Microsoft deals that tend to be bigger. If you look at just the number of millions of dollars that you receive for PlayStation Plus, obviously on PlayStation versus Game Pass. So we are talking to... So all the platforms, as you'd expect, those two platforms about deals, there are deals around, you know, and we do expect those in the future. But we'd much rather that they were upside rather than being baked into numbers. So I think the guidance we've given, I think, is very sensible. to be around 100 this year to be growing next year clearly the year after that depending on what you assume for FY28 it might be sensible to assume we sort of move backwards before we move forwards but I want deals over the over those two to three years to be to be upside so we're gonna we're gonna stay quiet until until we've got say something to say So I'm not answering any of your questions, Sean. I'm sorry. Have you got any questions that we can answer?

I didn't expect any answers. Don't worry, guys. More just thinking long-term on the first two. But, yeah, that's brilliant. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you.

Who's next? Katie is next.

Thank you. Yeah, you touched on it earlier in terms of the crossover of players on Jurassic World, but more thinking around the Planet Coaster crossover to Planet Coaster 2 and how then that works into your marketing strategy for Planet Zoo. And are you trying to transfer a lot of those existing players to the new sequel or are you focusing on more getting a new layout of players?

Okay, I'll go for that one. And actually, it probably gives Sean a little bit of hope that we do look at the players across all our portfolio. And the portfolio management is really important because we want to move people from one game to another. But let me put it in this context. So when I talked earlier about – to Ross's question around – influencers and who's playing the game and how we get them engaged. We have quite a big crossover between Planet Coaster and Zoo on those players who are very vocal about the game. And in fact, when we were talking to those players at that time, we were in the process of doing all our launch planning for JWE3. And we're able to kind of sneak peek them a little bit of content and whatever. And we found that they are willing to jump from one franchise to another. They are willing to go, because it's a similar gameplay, it's the kind of things they like doing. Some may prefer animals more than they like dinosaurs. But the gameplay mechanics are often similar through our different games. So we are finding that we're getting players who have tried one game, they're willing to try another one. And I think that really helps as we go through our sales promotions. You know, as people own one game and they see another game at a price that makes it an easier decision to make, they're making that decision. We definitely saw with JWE3, those new players, a lot of them were players that were influenced by our zoo and planet coaster activities.

Thank you, that's helpful. Let's have a look. I can see, Ross, have you got your hand up again? Do you have another question? Maybe, maybe not.

I think Oliver has his question up.

Ah, Oliver. In terms of the markets or labour market, how are you finding it? Because obviously it went crazy during COVID and then it sort of retracted loads. Those people have been made redundant. Are you finding it easy to find talent? What's your churn rate looking like? Is everyone very happy with just focusing on CMSs?

Yeah, the churn rate has certainly settled down. I think it's around about 8% to 10%, I think, which is pretty typical. The key thing for us in this environment is making sure that people are happy and that they're here for the right reasons, not just because maybe they can't jump to another company somewhere else, as we saw a few years ago during COVID. So I think with Joe stepping up, there's a great opportunity to refresh how we do things internally in terms of internal comms and engagements. So we are sharing a bit more information internally now with people, trying to get people a bit more excited internally. Clearly, it's not everyone's dream to work on CMS games for their whole career. But we want to make sure that people are as engaged as they can be. And if it's not something that they're really passionate about, then perhaps we're not the company for them. So it's just trying to get all those. All those things, right. In terms of wage inflation, during COVID there were some pretty chunky numbers. We had like a 10% plus pay rise for a couple of years, I think. It has settled down at more sustainable levels. But clearly with things like the national living wage and national insurance changes haven't exactly helped on the wage bill for us. But we're managing those things. We don't expect to increase our operating costs very much at all, staying pretty flat.

Brandon, thank you very much. Cheers, bud.

We've still got hands up for Ross and for Patrick. I don't know whether you guys have got a follow-up question or whether you just haven't.

Maybe I'll just jump in. Just one quick one. On the Complex Game launch next year, how should we think about that pricing, potential revenue base, IP segment? I know you've said it's unannounced, but it's clear they have a strong relationship with Games Workshop, so I assume it could come in that category. Yeah.

Thanks, Patrick. You know, we said back in the annual report last year and maybe a couple of times before that, that they're building on their experience and success. So it's not hard to guess what they might be working on. We haven't got anything to formally announce right now, but you will hear more from us in the coming months and looking forward to getting that game out. I think there was a question earlier about budgets. So in terms of the expectation for revenue contribution and the budget that we spend in terms of development, it is smaller than the CMS game. The first, the Chaos Gate game that they did for us, back under Foundry in its first 12 months did about 10 million. So I think it's sensible to put something maybe similar, but probably a little bit lower into numbers for that. And obviously it's just better on the timing of the launch as well. That was a full 12-month revenue. Great, thank you. But just to add, you know, very happy with that team. You know, they're a great, great bunch.

And, you know, we fully expect them to deliver a really good game. Thank you. Okay, I can't see any more hands up, so I'm just going to... Oh, Palumbo's jumped in there.

Sorry, back with one last one. So I know, obviously, in the past, so Chaos Gate is something very different to what you've done. It kind of stemmed out of your Frontier Foundry experience. I guess, whatever that was, gamble. If we're looking at uses for your cash, would you consider buying just an existing studio with a couple of existing titles to diversify your revenue streams a little bit? Is that something you still want to do in the medium term? Because that was the thinking behind releasing different types of games, right, and doing your Frontier Foundry label as well.

Yeah, I think if anything... The last few years have shown how hard it is to run one studio, let alone multiple studios. And clearly Embrace had a roll-up model at one point and quite a... an independent type of model where they just wouldn't try and consolidate, but then you don't get the benefits. So I think we need to really focus on ourselves and what we're doing. That's not to completely rule out M&A, but I think almost certainly it's going to mean that we just focus on our model, our CMS games, our studio. So in terms of use of cash, as I hinted earlier, I think the buyback went down pretty well. We could have $45 million in the bank by the end of May. So that could be something that's on the cards for us again. Brilliant. Thanks, Ollie. I'm assuming that no one else is going to sneak in with a question at the end, so it's just left to me to say thank you very much for joining us this morning. Great to be posting such good results and to have such positive things to say about the future. If you do have any follow-ups, feel free to reach out. We're going to be on the roadshow in the next few days talking to people, but just let us know if you want to re-engage and have any questions answered. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone.