A diversified portfolio with strong franchises
Stillfront has a diversified active portfolio of more than 70 games that generate stable revenues every day. The active portfolio is divided into three product areas: Strategy; Simulation, RPG & Action; and Casual & Mash-up. The portfolio includes large, established franchises, as well as smaller, niche products. The portfolio mix enables diversified revenue streams, high margins, and strong cash flows, without having to depend heavily on the success of a few specific titles. The breadth of the portfolio also enables efficient user acquisition investments with sustained high returns.
Stillfront’s established game franchises have large user bases, strong brands and are evenly distributed over Stillfront’s three product areas. Stillfront’s franchises benefit from partly diverse branding for optimized marketing and a wide array of addressable audiences.
Stillfront’s value creation model
We are guided in all business decisions by our mission to make a positive impact in our gamers’ everyday lives, through creating a social, entertaining, and affordable gaming experience. Stillfront’s active portfolio mostly consists of free-to-play (F2P) games that are played on mobile devices and PCs. Stillfront’s game studios design, develop and publish the games for a global audience. F2P games allow players to try the games without paying for them, which makes the games accessible for a broad audience. By year-end 2022, Stillfront had more than 60 million players that played our games every month.
The free-to-play model differs from so called premium games model as F2P games can be developed and tested on players at a much earlier stage compared to premium games. Stillfront’s studios typically first develop a minimum viable product that is tested in an early phase on actual players, which is called a soft launch. Depending on the initial data and KPIs gathered from the soft launch, the studios can continue to do further market testing and optimize the game based on the gathered input and data. As most of our games are developed, tested, iterated and optimized in close cooperation with our users, the games have strong communities that are loyal to the games.
Stillfront’s 23 studios typically develop and publish games in-house or in cooperation with other studios in the group. By doing both development and publishing in-house, Stillfront’s studios can take full responsibility for a game’s entire lifecycle while ensuring high profitability. Stillfront’s studios are spread across the world, and all have significant knowledge of their markets. Having multiple studios that work together in different geographies and in different genres enable cross-studio publishing synergies where two or more Stillfront studios can release adapted versions of existing game franchises in multiple markets.
Stillfront’s high platform and marketing channel diversification paired with its broad game portfolio allows for dynamic allocation of user acquisition. As Stillfront’s studios have games in different genres and in different markets, Stillfront can work actively with its allocation of marketing spend across the group to make sure that investments are made in the games and the marketing channels that are yielding the best returns at any given point in time. As a result, Stillfront has been able to keep a high and stable level of spending on marketing for several years, without compromising on its strict payback requirements.
The Stillops platform
Stillfront has developed a unique operating model over several years. The operating model is called Stillops and is utilized by all Stillfront’s game studios. The operating model ensures that studios that join Stillfront maintain their unique identities and retain operational autonomy, while getting access to a vast amount of resources, data, knowledge and tools generated from across the group’s studios.
Stillops is build on three main pillars: Collaborations; Hubs; and Tech & Data.
Studio-to-studio collaborations is a key pillar of the Stillops platform and one of the main synergy drivers in Stillfront. Studios across Stillfront work together on a large number of projects, including everything from sharing best practice to developing new games together. Stillfront has more than 100 synergy projects across its 23 studios.
The second pillar in the Stillops model is Hubs, which is how Stillfront has built knowledge centers at specific studios that provide expertise and services to the rest of the group. By utilizing and enhancing existing resources across the group, Stillfront can leverage the scale benefits of the group but without building large central functions that drive costs and increase lead times. The largest hubs today are the Stillfront Marketing Hub in Hamburg (Germany) and the Stillfront Finance Hubs in Hamburg (Germany) and Victoria (Canada).
The Stillops model’s third pillar is Tech & Data. Stillfront has built a leading data and analytics team that works globally across Stillfront to ensure that every single studio has access to group data and can benchmark KPIs from across the group. Stillfront’s scale and size also enables smaller studios that join the group to lower costs and become more efficient thanks to its central group procurement systems.
