tinyBuild Annual Report: Losses Exceed $67 Million, Focus on Developing Games with 1,000 Hours of Gameplay Without AAA Budgets
tinyBuild published its financial report for 2023. Its revenue was significantly lower than in 2022. The company also failed to achieve operating profit.
Kingmakers
Main figures from the report:
- tinyBuild's annual revenue dropped by 29% to $44.6 million. The revenue of the publisher Versus Evil, closed in December 2023, fell by 60% due to game delays;
- 92% of tinyBuild's revenue came from back-catalog games. Hello Neighbor 2 and Potion Craft performed particularly well. The company's own IPs accounted for 68% of the revenue;
- tinyBuild's operating losses amounted to $63.75 million. For comparison, the company reported a profit of $15.9 million in 2022;
- The adjusted EBITDA was negative—minus $7.1 million. A year ago, the figure exceeded $24.35 million;
- The company attributed the decline in revenue to the difficult situation in the gaming market, reduced revenue from major deals with platforms and developers, the devaluation of several assets, and legal disputes with the founder of Versus Evil;
- As of December 31, 2023, tinyBuild had only $2.5 million on hand—10.5 times less than at the end of 2022;
- After the financial year ended, the company raised $12.3 million by issuing new shares.
The company's revenue and adjusted EBITDA from 2017-2023
In the report, tinyBuild's CEO and founder Alex Nichiporchik stated that his company is actively trying to adapt to changes in the industry. They've decided to focus more on so-called "1,000-hour games"—these are projects like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, and World of Warcraft, which users play for years and spend several hours on each day.
Nichiporchik noted that the simplest way to create such games is to have thousands of developers consistently produce vast amounts of new content. tinyBuild cannot afford to spend AAA budgets on this, so they've chosen a different approach. The company is focusing not on the amount of content, but on working with user interaction systems. Nichiporchik included crafting, looting, farming simulation, and social mechanics in these systems. In games featuring such systems, users can set their own goals and develop progression.
tinyBuild hopes that its next hits could potentially be two games—a medieval shooter with knights and modern weapons, Kingmakers, and a PvP horror, Level Zero: Extraction.
Following the release of the report, tinyBuild's stock price dropped by 16.67%. At the time of writing, they are trading at 5 pence ($0.06) per share.
How the price of tinyBuild's shares has changed over the last five days
