Rapport för Star idag:
CEO BO ANDERSSON KLINT GIVES HIS COMMENT
Starbreeze On Track
Closing Starbreeze first quarter of its new financial year 2015/16 I can yet
again conclude that the group continues to deliver both strong growth and a
healthy profit. We have now repeated this four quarters in a row - two years
post the launch of PAYDAY 2.
During Starbreeze first quarter the group deliver significant financial
performance with net sales reaching 49.9 MSEK an increase by 66 per cent
compared to Q1 last year. Our best selling franchise, PAYDAY 2, continues to
delivers exceptional growth at an all time high 71 per cent reaching 48.4 MSEK.
The running costs for the new organization and brands have stabilized. That
said, we'll continue the tight supervision and control of our operating expenses
by being both cautions and selective on how we invest. The run rate for our
operating expenses has decreased with 13 MSEK vs. the previous quarter.
EBITDA reached 8.4 MSEK which is at the same level as the corresponding quarter
last year despite a period where we're building out the business to generate
revenues from multiple IPs and products. During the years to come we'll continue
to grow our organization and expand our business simultaneously as we deliver
growing revenues and an improved EBITDA margin.
During the quarter Starbreeze has strengthened its cash position through a
strong cash flow from its own operations and the group is ending the quarter
with cash balance north of 120 MSEK.
As Starbreeze now moves into the new fiscal year, we're focusing on capitalizing
on the many new and exciting opportunities that has arisen since E3 and the
reveal of our Virtual Reality (VR) headset, StarVR. There's currently an amazing
drive in the global VR community and its exhilarating for us to participate in
the shaping of how the second generation of VR technology will evolve.
Our VR bus, the Overkill's The Walking Dead mobile VR-experience has been
touring the US with Walker Stalker Con since it's premiere at Comic Con San
Diego in July. We've had an amazing time connecting with The Walking Dead-fans
across the continent and at the same time had a wealth of feedback during the
tour. We'll make the last Walker Stalker stop for this leg of the journey in New
York in December. The VR bus will then be re-purposed and re-shaped for new VR
adventures in the next year.
In august we announced the collaboration with Tobii, where we will work together
to integrate their amazing eye-tracking technology into StarVR. These type of
collaborations will be key in our strategy and ambition to provide high end
world class VR experiences where we can learn and develop together with other
world leading tech-companies. The road forward for VR in the different areas of
the entertainment industry is still in early development but our agile
organization, software development strategy and the opportunistic way of making
business makes us well geared to quickly make tactical and strategic decisions
where needed to keep in the fore front.
In this, relative to our fourth quarter calmer period, the biggest news for our
community has no doubt been the game changer we implemented into PAYDAY 2. With
the Black Market Update, we introduced Steam Economy, the possibility to utilize
trading between users of in-game items and the limited use of uniform micro
transactions in the game to acquire those items.
All players can now be awarded an item in the game, a safe, that can contain
certain cosmetic and feature enhancing items. To gain access to these optional
items, the safe must be opened with a drill that can be awarded in the game for
free as part of the normal game mechanic, or optionally acquired through the
Steam Marketplace if the user wants it faster or simply more items. Any player
not wanting to invest in a drill, can either gift or sell the safe on the
marketplace and thereby participate and benefit from it.
The decision has by some been perceived as a controversial option for PAYDAY and
we expected this to be a well discussed feature.
All in all, we are content with the development we're seeing so far. It is
important to note that our approach is the same as other Steam games such as
Counter Strike GO and DOTA 2 that are hugely successful due to this and live on
for years fueled by the Steam Market. This is by no means something that will
change our revenues immediately but something Starbreeze needs to learn and
monitor for the future.
We have already seen some positive and interesting outcomes:
* Peak amount of players in September were around 25 000. The number has been
surpassed almost all days since the Steam Economy was launched in PAYDAY.
* The weekly play time of the active average player is for the last 30 days up
by a incredible 40 percent which is the highest number in the past 7 months.
* The Steam Marketplace has so far seen items traded from 3 cents up to 300
USD. The game economy underneath is working and is balanced.
* Almost 100 000 new members have joined the PAYDAY 2 Steam Community during
the Crimefest activities this year. It now hosts more than 3.3 million
members.
We also managed to update and patch the long standing problem with PAYDAY
matchmaking on XboxOne, having to switch to Microsoft's new matchmaking system,
which was released on the console just after our release of PAYDAY 2: Crimewave
Edition. It is now finally deployed to users and is working as intended. We're
now working hard on getting up to speed with the next generation DLC plan for
the consoles.
PAYDAY remains strong and is frequently played among the top 10 games on Steam.
Our objective is to remain in this position for the full year of 2016 and the
game will see a lot of new interesting content and features to keep our players
entertained.
Having recently hosted our first global internal Producers Summit where all our
producers presented the current state of their projects to each other, I'm
really confident when I see the progress were making. Moving into the colder
months of the year, we're eagerly looking forward to the Lionsgate John Wick VR
launch and our Canadian colleagues first preview of Dead by Daylight. It'll
definitely give you and your friends a good scare. With Geminose and our other
projects on track, 2016 couldn't come sooner.
Let's keep doing it!
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