Paradox Interactive AB (publ)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Paradox Q1 2023 quarterly report stream. I'm Alex Bricka. I'm the CFO of the company, and I am today alone in the studio, but with me nevertheless, I have Fred, our CEO. How are you doing, Fred?

I'm doing really well and it's always great to be with you, even if it's on link and it's always great to present our reports, even if both you and I are in agreement that we probably can do better than this and that people should expect more. But let's go with what we have for this quarter so we can take the next slide. That's me. We see this as a warm-up to a very exciting and challenging year. We have already announced a range of titles. Lamplighters League, Life by You and The City Skylines 2. They're going to come later on this year. And we have gotten really, really good reception of the games so far. A lot of people expect a lot from us and we like that. We also have a strong lineup of upcoming DLCs. If you can see May, we have a really full May with releases almost every week, including a release from Paradox Arc there as well. If you summarize this quarter, you could say that we're somehow happy with the top line, but it's a very unexciting bottom line. It's due to normal release volatility, of course. I mean, we're comparing to a quarter that is fairly strong. We had last year the first big DLC for Crusader Kings 3 released, Royal Court. And this year we didn't have any big DLCs per se. Some... some amortizations and write downs as well on projects that hasn't worked so well. We've been blessed to have no write offs in the last 12 months, but we have in this quarter. So it's obviously hitting the bottom line. The monthly active users for this period is very steadily at the upper 5 to 6 million range. So we're really looking forward to when we can say that we, in a stable way, have more than 6 million monthly active users. It's going to happen sooner or later, but we'll see exactly when that happens. We'll move on to the next slide. Oh, there you go. As you can see here, not a lot of releases. You have Stellaris First Contact and one console release for Stellaris as well, Overlord. We did a remaster of Cities Guidelines and a couple of minor DLCs. Rebirth for Surviving the Abdomen and Jungle Pack for Prison Architect was the major releases that we had in this quarter. So a fairly soft release quarter for us, as I've said before. Pernod's Ark released as Surviving the Abyss and Knights of Pen and Paper, who unfortunately did not perform as well as we hoped. And maybe those were games that were in the portfolio a year and a half ago when we did a big... re-evaluation of all the titles and closed games for more than 130 million SEC and maybe these games should have been closed as well at that time, but with a new depreciation model as well, it hits very hard this quarter and then it's basically done. So we have a very clean balance sheet going forward. Across the Obelisk is doing really well. We announced and released the first DLC, Wolf Wars, and we're looking forward to having this game follow us for many years to come. Hopefully, in the coming five to ten years period, we're going to see a lot of releases for this franchise as well. Game announcements in the quarter. It's a bit more there. A couple of heavy hitters. We have Cities Skylines 2, which is obviously the sequel to our best-selling game of all time. Life by You, a live simulator developed by our development team in Berkeley in California. Age of Wonders 4, that is releasing on Tuesday next week. It's a brilliant game. I think you should all play it. If you don't like it, I'll make sure to refund you personally. I guarantee it. And we have the Lamplighters League developed by Harebrained Schemes in Seattle. And of course, we announced also Mecha Bellum from Paradox Arc that you can see down there. And it's going to release also in May. Like I said, May is going to be busy, so don't book anything, don't plan anything. It's full of games and DLCs from Paradox. And after the quarter, what has happened? We've been busy, actually, with Europe Internationalist 4 Domination being released and quite well received as well. We announced Delarius Galactic Paragon, which is going to be released, you know it, in May. Victoria 3, Voice of the People announced as well, first DLC for Victoria 3. It's going to be released in May. Crusader Games 3 Tourism Tournament got a release date, and it's, like I said before, it's in May. And the same goes also for Cities Skylines Hotels and Retreats, which we announced today, actually. So May is looking super exciting, to be honest. And not only in a gaming perspective because we're also going to invite you to the first paradox deep dive as we call it where we present the company it's a capital event it's taking place in stockholm on may 23 i'm going to be presenting i think alex is going to be presenting a couple of other people from paradox because you see me and alex a lot but you don't always see the people who actually make the games or make the games happen and They're going to be there as well. So we're going to present how we make games, how we see the future, and what you can expect from Paradox in the coming couple of years. So it's going to be really exciting to meet you all. Alex, are we going to live stream the event?

Yes, we are. So everyone is invited. Existing shareholders, potential new shareholders, everyone else.