Dmitry Kozko
Analyst · The Benchmark, please proceed with your question
Thank you. And hello, everyone. I'd like to start today by recognizing our development team, some of whom are in Moscow in the midst of this on excusable and challenging situation. Our hearts are with the people in Ukraine and all of those impacted by the war. Specifically, personal issue for me as I'm half Ukrainian myself. I have been in constant communication with our Moscow team and they share a concern and profound desire for peace and security. While it is challenging working through the complexity of the work, here's what we have done over the past months, we're assured that we continue to build out our product road-map with minimal disruption. First, we have always been able to switch the remote work if need be. During the pandemic, especially during the peak COVID outbreaks where we saw lock-downs and other hurdles, we managed to scale our development capabilities and temporary transition to remote work. We do not foresee any issues within the transition, and some of our team members to remote work again because we have the infrastructure and process in place to be able to remain flexible. Second, we have a great partnership with various outsourced developers and studios. Especially over the last year, we have built great relationships with several outsource studio we are assisting us with a new product development. These development studios consist of professional and highly experienced teams that worked with many different leading gaming companies. We're currently having conversations with additional development studios, and will be ready to engage them if necessary to assure our development pipeline does not experienced significant delays. Third, we have offered our Moscow staff a possibility to relocate if they choose, and able to do so. As I mentioned earlier, we have the advantage of being flexible. Earlier this month, when I had the conversation with that team, I gave them the opportunity to relocate to one of our other global offices. While we acknowledge and appreciate the complexity of such relocation and corresponding immigration implications, our offices in Netherlands, U.K., Australia, and the U.S. would welcome those folks with open arms. Now, let's move on to our product road map and development. Our goal remains to build a portfolio of top racing games across world-class IP, and across all platforms. We have a strong list of IP, being the official video game license holder of NASCAR, Indycar, ETTC, WEC, and 24-hour Lamar. This list of IP gives us an opportunity to build official racing games. And enables us to provide these captivating experiences to our audiences all over the world. Here's an update on where we are today. On Ignition. Since the launch of NASCAR 21 Ignition in October 2021, we have been working diligently to provide patches and updates for continuous improvements. So far we have released 8 updates, and continue to provide quality of life improvements to the game. We continue striving to make sure that the next NASCAR release, and all future products, be bringing excitement and satisfying gaming experiences to our customers. We also launched our NASCAR gaming franchise on Nintendo Switch platform for the first time in November 19th and we named it NASCAR Heat Ultimate Edition +. We are happy to report that this game has met our expectations and delivered smiles to our fans while currently being rated as above 4.6 out of five stars on Amazon. On KartKraft, we're happy to report that in January this year, we released a full-version of KartKraft, our realistic carting simulation game. On Steam we currently hold a rating of a Very Positive with over 1700 reviews. KartKraft is a game that has the potential to generate meaningful revenue for us in the future. Let's touch on our rFactor 2 gaming [Indiscernible] platform. We have been working to implement one of the most requested features by band, which is the new user interface update. We were able to release this ahead of our internal release schedule, in January of this year. As monitored for user feedback on various social networks, it's been welcome and very much appreciated by the community. And we were also able to reorganize our content release schedule on our rFactor 2 and trying to offer our fans more content on a predictable quarterly release schedule. Our gaming and simulation platforms such as rFactor 2 continues to be recognized by the Motorsport industry as one of the leading go-to products of choice for drivers, leagues and partners. One new partner of ours is Kindred Concepts. Formula One, partnered with Kindred to create an immersive state-of-the-art F1 racing simulation experience made accessible to the mass audience. And Kindred has chosen our rFactor 2 as the simulation platforms to help them power their F1 racing simulation experience. With this partnership, we'll be virtually recreating some of the world-famous Formula One tracks, cars, and most recent deliveries, powering the authentic F1 experience to the visitors. Another example that within this week, we announced that rFactor 2 is now an official sim racing platform of Formula Heat. As we switch gears in 2022, our focus remains on improving and expanding our NASCAR gaming franchise, as we work to expand our portfolio of overall games. In 2022, we plan to update our NASCAR game for major consoles and PC, bringing the excitement of the next-generation cars from the 2022 NASCAR season to the masses. As well as launching our new 2022 version of our NASCAR games for Nintendo Switch platform. Additionally, we're currently still intend to soft launch our first hyper-casual mobile category game with our NASCAR match three title sometime in 2022. The NASCAR gaming franchise continues to be an important foundation to our gaming franchises that we have under license, which includes BTC, Indycar, and Le Mans. And our learnings from NASCAR 21 Ignition launch are already being integrated into a Motorsport Games engine, that we continue to evolve internally, to assure that our next gaming franchises, together with NASCAR, continue to improve as we build on top of our previous releases. Just as we set out on our vision from the beginning, we continue to move towards the goal where we have multiple franchises in market, with multiple games on multiple platforms. And we believe we are on target for 2023, to be that year for us. On to development. With the help of our experienced leadership team, I've taken full responsibility for overseeing our production studios and development teams. Additionally, standardized global process and tools we have implemented, will allow greater clarity for my decision-making role. We have also promoted technical experts to leadership positions. We believe that this new development management structure will greatly benefit our future games and product releases, as together with management, we will continue to monitor the progress of all our studios while we scale our capabilities. We also reorganized our QA processes and department to assure further checkpoints and efficiencies in locating future issues within our products, which we believe will improve our QA process for Q2 game releases. We continue to strive towards improving our processes and technology, building of the NASCAR 21 Ignition launch as we scale our company further to offer our customer multiple racing franchises across a variety of platforms. I would like to touch on our ESports segment. We believe our investment related to this area are really starting to pay off, continuing to leverage our rFactor two platform and building on the momentum we achieved with eSports in 2020, where we replaced certain Motorsport events with their virtual counterparts due to the COVID 19 pandemic. In 2021, we turned our 24-hour Lemon virtual hit into an annual series together with great partners such as Rolex, Goodyear, total energy, lego techniques, Algorand, and others that came along for the ride. And our 2021 into 2022, 24-hour Le Mans Virtual Series has been enjoyed by more than 81 million fans across digital and linear channels. These are the type of official eSports serious we'll look to replicate with all of our partners, such as BTCC, IndyCar, NASCAR, and others. And as we release our dedicated games for each one of these rates series, and we believe our eSports program will serve as a great marketing tool, showcasing exciting competitions, our games bring at the highest level. We have already started to scale our eSports program with inaugural INDYCAR eSports pro-challenge featuring almost the entire INDYCAR grid. Allow me to quickly add a reminder that our businesses organizing three important pillars, games, eSports and community. And we're constantly making progress in each of these pillars and look forward to showcasing this progress in our upcoming quarterly materials. Lastly, I'd like to address our liquidity. Currently, we're debt-free, and our 2021, year-end balance sheet illustrates that we've had approximately $17.8 million in available cash on hand. As of today, we have nearly $12 million of available cash on hand. While our 2021, Form 10-K indicates a doubt about our ability to continue as a growing concern, we're currently evaluating new sources of funding with different options on tables so that we have the resources to reach our goals. A year ago, we made a conscious decision to acquire assets to help us launch more products quicker. We have successfully utilized these acquisitions to get us closer to a portfolio that is diversified and that we believe is capable of achieving profitable revenues. And I remain committed to seeing this through and getting to 2023, when we plan to have multiple franchises, with multiple games, on multiple platforms in markets, each at different stages in their lifecycle as many with long-tail based on high-quality IP era. We also believe that we have a flexibility to hit the pause on some of those development initiatives in order to materially contract cash burn, if we decide that is in our best long-term interest. We expect these decisions will be made in upcoming months, after we finalize our financing decisions, and I intend to keep you all updated as we move through this process. Before I pass it on to Jon, I would like to reinforce the fact that we have long term licenses and partnerships to create great official racing games and new these sports, over a long period of time for captive audiences and beyond, while we cultivate a community, and become synonymous with virtual racing. With that, let me hand it over to Jon for a review of our financials.