Stephen Hood: Sure. Well, the real key is when the first piece of content arrives, and we’re looking to coincide that with the Le Mans event in June. So next month is not far away at all. But that for us is the next stepping-stone in the progress and the roadmap of Le Mans Ultimate experience. Where you’ve heard me reference, it has the 2023 season content in there. Understandably, our audience is saying, well, we’re watching the 24 season now. We want the product to be as current as possible, especially as there are new cars and manufacturers coming to sport, driver changes and whatnot that people are looking to see reflected, the calendar around the circuits and whatnot. So, the first piece of content comes online in June, and then perhaps pretty much every two or three months we’re looking to launch additional content, ideally in packs.
So, there may be new car arriving in June, after that we’re looking at new circuits and then we start to update the content to make it more current to the 24 season with the different categories of cars that are online. So, for us, it’s really about trying to conclude this year and ensure that by the end of 2024, we have the entirety of the 2024 calendar, the circuit and the cars incorporated in the product. So, that really gives them six months to be rolling this out. And we think, there’s no great urgency in that because we have the entirety of the ‘23 seasons. It’s not as if we came out as a very, very thin game with very limited content. There’s an enormous amount of content in terms of the tracks and the cars and the variety on offer for established players and new people coming in over time.
But June is when it really starts. So, we’re about five weeks away from the start of that.
Michael Kupinski: Gotcha. And when do you anticipate the subscription service to be launched?
Stephen Hood: Subscription service, I think, is a case of post Le Mans. We’re starting to talk about it now. It tends to be a very sensitive subject in the racing space for some odd reason. For us, this is not really kind of pushing the audience to spend unnecessarily. We know that as we own the ecosystem and we’ve poured enormous resources into building this ecosystem, so that we have to gain, we have the online funnel in race control, and we have the services and the features being plugged into that ecosystem experience so that you and your friends can really feel as though you’re a part of a story, you feel like we’re superstars in this. Those features do come in at a fixed expense, and we’re looking for players to invest in this journey with us. So, the subscription is probably all being well coming online around July or August this year.
Michael Kupinski: Got you. And then I know there generally is a bell curve to sales. I was just wondering; can you give us a sense of how long the tail has been for the sale of Le Mans into the second quarter?
Stephen Hood: Well, look, Le Mans, we knew that out of the gate as an early access title, we’d have, originally, we thought it would be a hard sell, an early access title, not an existing franchise, based on a sport that hasn’t had a video game in place for many, many years. But actually, out of the gate it just stormed away. It was superb for us. Now we’re expecting and understand that those sales dip as we’re heading to Le Mans. So, we see that being the next peak. Out of the [Technical Difficulty] it drops off over time because we haven’t been injecting the product with new content. But what we have been doing is injecting fixes and improvements and occasionally new features. That really ramps up next month. So, we expect the next spike and that’s going to be critical for us in terms of marketing visibility, the player update, the numbers coming into the product and the general vibe around that experience at Le Mans is going to be enormously beneficial to us, we expect.
Michael Kupinski: And then my final question, do racing games offer themselves to modifications by user content creators? I was just wondering if mods are an opportunity for you.
Stephen Hood: Yes, good question. Mods in the racing space, for some titles you can consider it to be the lifeblood of titles, but typically, the titles that have been left dormant for a while by the original developers, i.e., they move on to the next shiny thing and, they need the pricing as Le Mans. Users tend to fill that gap, and there are a lot of talented people out there that make amazing content for legacy titles. Because we’re so new, there really isn’t any mod content for the Mon Ultimate. Not a path that we’re proactively trying to encourage, primarily because it’s new. But also, you’ve got to understand we have the rFactor 2 platform in our portfolio that has a lot of user generated content, much of which gets sold through the theme store or free modifications available elsewhere.
And that’s a fertile ground. It’s got a long history of this. Le Mans Ultimate is built to be much cleaner. And I talk about the ecosystem, but really, it’s about the experience being much cleaner and fresh for users. Because in rFactor 2 that’s been around for a long, long time, the quality can vary massively, massively in terms of the user generated content and some probably way past its sell by date for some users. But Le Mans Ultimate is a shiny new thing that has a far higher kind of standard and we’re really selling that as a premium product. And that experience has to be first rate, and that means we curate that content. And all of that content right now comes from within the multiple games team.
Michael Kupinski: Gotcha. Well, good luck. Thank you.
Stephen Hood: Thank you, Michael.
Operator: Thank you. We have no further questions in the queue at this time. I will turn the program back over to Mr. Hood for any additional remarks.
Stephen Hood: Thank you. I’d just like to close by offering my thanks to everybody attending this call. It’s much appreciated. We are feeling very positive about this Q1. We do see it as a steppingstone, and I’d like to thank you again for your time.
Operator: This does conclude today’s program. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time and have a wonderful day.
