Paradox Interactive AB (publ)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Paradox Interactive Q1 live stream with me, Fred.

I'm Alex. Welcome, everyone.

And we're going to take you through some of the things that has happened this quarter and obviously the numbers of the quarter as well. So we might just as well jump right into it. And that's my name right there. To summarize where the company is, not only this quarter, but in general, our core business has really good momentum. We can see that our underlying sales are really good. So if you compare to Q1 last year, it was basically the same in terms of sales numbers, gross sales. But this year, we didn't have any revenue from subscription services, for example, which accounted to zero. At least some revenue last year. I don't remember how much. It's an undisclosed amount, but it was significant. It was a significant amount. We are also, as an industry, experiencing probably the most turbulent period that I've seen since I joined almost 21 years ago into this industry. And we have a very good position with no debt. money in the bank, good cash flow, and really good delivery on our key IPs. So a lot of opportunities will present itself in a market like this, and we hope to be able to take advantage of at least a few of those. And obviously, I mean, we have a clear area of improvement for the future, and it's increasing the quality of what we do in all delivery across the whole company. So quality, if we talk about that specifically, on some of the recent releases, technical quality has been a bit below what we are to be expected. Our first rule here at the company is to give service to our gamers. It's the rule that we live by and the first thing that people hear when they enter Paradox as well as employees. And we strive always to have a good and consistent quality in what we do. We failed a couple of times, as I mentioned recently, but we have a pretty good idea on how to get back on track. And there is obviously no silver bullet, no one thing that we can do. But checking the game, how we check and work with quality control late in the projects is one of those key things where we think are going to lift the quality level to where we can expect to be and where we want, where we do expect to be, I would say. A couple of effects that this has had is the delay of Prison Architect 2 slated for early September release and also a small postponement of Victoria 3's Sphere of Influence DLC that is now releasing in June instead of in May. so if we move into uh there's been a couple of questions about city skylines too so i might just as well do a preemptive strike and take that right away up front so when it released in october last year it didn't live up to player expectations and we have started the journey with a game to take it to the level where it should be it's most notably it has been on the performance side Therefore, we have delayed the DLC bridge and ports to 2025 to ensure proper time to actually improve the base game in the meanwhile. We have not yet committed to a console release window, so we want to ensure that we have the quality right before we actually set a date so the console players can enjoy a really great experience with the game. And as we've said before, Cities Skylines and Cities Skylines 2 are both long-term engagements for us. It's an important franchise for Paradox, and we look forward to working with this game for a long time. Releases in the quarter, the 4X game Millenia was released, Trial of Legions for Hearts of Iron 4, Primal Fury for Age of Wonders 4, and the first DLC in Chapter 3 for Crusader Kings 3, namely Legends of the Dead, with more to come later on this year. Also a smaller content creator pack called North African Attire. On the management side, we released Beach Properties that we later gave away for free to all gamers, considering as... some sort of a gift for the game not really living up to the expectations so far. Worth mentioning as well is the release of Across the Obelisk on Nintendo Switch, which marks our absolute first Nintendo Switch release from the company on the publishing side. We have had Cities Skylines before on Switch, but it was through Nintendo, so it wasn't through our own publishing efforts. So that's a small but not insignificant milestone for the company. So after the quarter, what happened? Prison Architect 2 delayed, as I said, to September. Foundry is releasing early access now in May. It's just a couple of weeks from now. Left By You releasing an early access in June. We really look forward to seeing that releasing. We also announced a couple of DLCs for our main games. Machine Aids for Stellaris, Sphere of Influence for Victoria 3, and Winds of Change for Europa Universalis 4. All to be released within quarter two. Exciting. A lot of releases coming up. And over to you, Alex. Let's go through the numbers.