Unity Software - Q4 2022
February 22, 2023
Transcript
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Welcome to Unity's 4th quarter, 2022 earnings call. After the closing of the market today, we issued our earnings press release and shareholders letter. These materials are now available on our investor website at investors.unity.com. Today, I'm joined by John Riccitiello, our CEO, President, and Chairman, and by Luis Visoso, our CFO. Before we begin, I want to note that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements, including statements about goals, business outlook, industry trends, market opportunities, expectations for future financial performance, and similar items, all of which are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. You can find more information about these risks and uncertainties in the Risk Factors section of our filings at sec.gov. Actual results may differ, and we take no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements. As in prior quarters, we are providing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures.
Unless otherwise noted, we will be speaking to the non-GAAP financial measures when describing our results. The shareholder letter and press release are available on the Unity Investor Relations tab, as well as SEC.gov, and includes full GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations. Great. Thank you very much. As you all have seen, we've published our shareholders letter this afternoon. Before we go into Q&A, we're gonna open it up to open Q&A, but before we get to that, we've gotten a handful of questions that we're getting from investors, and the first one is for you, John. You know, John, we've received a lot of questions about the macro environment, specifically in the mobile game market industries and digital twins side of our business.
Again, before we go into broader Q&A, maybe you could explain how you kinda see the macro environment playing out for Unity. Then I'll have one quick question for Luis as well.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Sure. Broadly, the macro environment remains surprisingly resilient. If you look at the gaming industry, we're seeing, you know, our developers are as productive as they've been before. They're producing a huge number of games. Their investment against game development is holding up well. We're seeing strong DAU Users on our network, suggestive of overall gameplay that remains strong. Then within the industry side, where we reported over 100% growth last year in digital twins, there continues to be very robust demand. So, there may be some elongated sales cycles where people take a little bit longer to decide, but we've got demand far in excess of our ability to supply. We're in a pretty good spot, and we're not feeling the pinch.
All in, the market seems stronger, and I'd offer than you might expect, especially when we're indexing against such unusual years, you know, the work-from-home or learn-from-home era. A couple of very specific points. The ads market is stabilized as of the middle of 2022 and continues to be stable now. What's actually happening is strong user engagement offset by weaker eCPMs than we've historically see, but again, it's been stable. At some point, that flips, and we're not expecting it to flip. We're using that in our models looking forward. We wanna be conservative. All in, the markets are solid. There's not a lot of concern here.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Great. Thanks very much. Luis, you know, the question that we get oftentimes for you would be, you know, how are you thinking about balancing growth and profitability and kinda how does that fit into the guidance that we issued today?
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Yeah. Thank you, Richard. What I would say is, on the revenue side, just like John just mentioned, we're taking a prudent assumption on the market, and that is reflected in our revenue guide. It is clearly better to plan this way in this environment. Now, on the cost side, we're taking very clear actions to improve profitability, and this includes things like the elimination of close to 300 roles that we announced before, being very selective in any future new hires that we add to the company. Being more focused in our investments and reducing the number of bets that we make at Unity.
Raising the bar on cost, we've been turning every stone once or twice and finding new opportunities in a few places, and that frankly includes reducing the number of shares that we grant as part of compensation. We're taking a very holistic view on cost and making sure that costs are adding value. As a result, you should expect to see costs relatively flat during the year as revenue grows quarter-over-quarter. What happens then is that we expect to significantly improve profitability in 2023. If you look at we had a loss of $90 million non-GAAP in 2022, and we expect adjusted EBITDA to be about, you know, somewhere in the range of $230 million-$300 million in 2023. A very significant swing from one year to another.
What's interesting is in 2022, we were only profitable in Q4. In 2023, we expect obviously to be profitable every single quarter. One more point I would like to make is that the profitability improvement that you see year-over-year comes about 50/50 from Create and Grow. We're making progress across the board. We're taking, as John said, more conservative assumptions on the market and being very proactive on cost with decisive actions to improve profitability in this environment.
Great. Thank you very much. Well, now we can open it up to questions from the analysts on the call. As before, what you need to do is raise your virtual hand and we'll answer questions until we run out, and we appreciate your interest. There we go. First question from Matt Cost at Morgan Stanley.
Matt Cost (Executive Director of Equity Research)
Hi, everybody. Can you hear me?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Yep.
Matt Cost (Executive Director of Equity Research)
Yeah. Great, great. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just one thing in the letter, you mentioned the drivers of Create revenue growth being pricing, China and digital twins. Should we assume that seat growth is kind of gonna be under pressure or stable this year, you know, because of some of the issues going on in just the, you know, in your customer base, in the mobile gaming market? That's the first question. The second question is just when we look at the ramp in EBITDA, I think the guidance for the first quarter is $7 million-$12 million. The full year number is $230 million-$300 million. That's a pretty significant, you know, step up in just dollars of EBITDA as we move through the year.
What should we think about as the drivers of that? Thank you.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Luis, you wanna start with this one?
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Yeah. On the second part of your question, Matt, as I just said, we expect cost to be relatively flat during the year. As you know, we have a very healthy gross margin, and as you get the revenue growth quarter-over-quarter, you get into those profitability levels. That is basically the assumption and we're working against. Very importantly, Matt, some of the actions that we've taken on costs don't fully impact Q1. They only impact Q1 partially, and they obviously have a full quarter impact in Q2, Q3, and Q4.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
In terms of seats, we don't normally and haven't been guiding to seats, so we don't call it out in particular. You know, what our intent going forward obviously is increase the number of users. Game industry continue to be strong, and our shares across every platform continued to be very strong. We called out in particular pricing China, because those are important drivers of our sequential growth, Matt. One of the areas I expect to see strong growth over time around seats is professional artistry as. We can talk a little bit more about that. You know how tools like Weta and Ziva and the things that we've acquired are coming to market in the coming year, and with that, you know, new customers, new seats, et cetera.
We don't feel like there's any issue around the seat side. It's really we're calling out particular growth drivers.
Matt Cost (Executive Director of Equity Research)
Great. Thank you.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Jason Bazinet from Citi.
Jason Bazinet (Equity Research Analyst)
I just had a simple question. Just maybe this is for Luis. Sequentially, new Create grew about $9 million, and I think old Create grew about $13 million, which implies either strategic partnerships or UGS maybe contracted a bit. Is there anything that is noteworthy there or anything that you'd call out?
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Yeah, Jason, good point. You may remember in Q3, we had a very strong strategic partnerships business. We actually commented on that in this call. That is a business that will have ups and downs just based on when deals are signed. That's why I think it's super important to look at the Create numbers on a standalone basis where you actually see, as you just mentioned, an acceleration from Q3 to Q4 in terms of number of dollars added Q over Q.
Jason Bazinet (Equity Research Analyst)
Okay.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
That's the way I would think about it, Jason. That's the view, the clean view, apples to apples.
Jason Bazinet (Equity Research Analyst)
Okay. Do you mind if I ask one follow-up?
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Of course.
Jason Bazinet (Equity Research Analyst)
It just seems like the tensions with China, whether it's them sort of advising not to use the big four accounting firms or some of the changes that we made, related to chip exports are sort of increasing. I know China isn't the biggest business geographically for you, but is that a concern investors should have, or do you think it's sort of ring-fenced to chip manufacturing and big four accounting firms?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Let me take the top of that one, Luis.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Yeah.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
China's the biggest gaming market in the world. Let's just start with that. The second thing, we're the market leader in China in the businesses we operate there. It is important to us. Apologies, getting over a cold, guys. Third observation I'd make for you, we have made a change in our structure in China that we think better, if you will, sets us up for long-term growth in China versus the structure we had previously. Luis can get into that in a minute. Fourth, China, after, I don't know, nearly a year and a half not issuing new licenses, has started to issue licenses again. Lastly, we're seeing a lot of interest and demand on digital twins. To us, China's important, and we've set ourselves up for long-term growth there. Great.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
I think the next call should be from, Goldman Sachs. Are you guys on? Let's check to see if it's Kash Rangan, if we don't have it. All right, well, let's go to Brent for the moment. Brent Thill at Jefferies, please.
Brent Thill (Equity Research Analyst)
Great. Can you hear me okay?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Yeah.
Brent Thill (Equity Research Analyst)
Perfect. I guess, John, maybe we'll start with you. I mean, mediation was one of those missing pieces of the Unity Gaming Services offering, I think that you addressed with ironSource. What have you learned so far in kinda Q4 as you Think about some of the functionality they bring to the services and kind of maybe give us a sneak peek into what mediation can help with as you think about the ad market, in 2023 here.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Thank you for asking that question because it allows me to address something I wanted to say on the call. What we're seeing is that there's strong interest in the combined offering that we have with the collection tools like LevelPlay and the two ad networks. We are seeing market share growth. We're picking up customers onto our mediation platform, and of course, that drives increased share of wallet. Now, these things are not instantaneous. You come to an agreement to do these things. It takes some engineering time and effort to bring them onto our platform, and then it's typically phased.
There's not a significant impact in our Q1, you know, from the market share gains we're seeing, but we are expecting to gain market share in Q1 and throughout the year, which is why we were confident in predicting growth for the business for the year. It's essentially what we're trying to say is we're seeing, starting in the middle of last year, a stable market for the advertising business. We do expect that to pick up at some point. Luis and I made a hard call a while back to say, "No matter what anybody tells us, we're not gonna predict a recovery in 2023," even though there's a fair amount of folks that would argue there should be by this, by the end of this year. We've chosen not to do that because it put a...
enables to put a stronger focus on cost and get the EBIT leverage that comes from that. within that stable market, we're predicting market share growth, and we're seeing it already in the marketplace, and we expect to see that throughout the year. all in all, the integration, ironSource Unity is going well. As an example, we haven't lost a single executive. That is typically not the case in these things. you know, there's a lot of work that Omer on the growth side and Mark on the create side are working to drive synergies between the platforms in terms of how we go to market and how we bring customers onto our platform. We think that's gonna pay a lot of dividends over time.
The word synergy, you guys are gonna get sick of it over the next several quarters as we talk about how we're generating, better outcomes for our customers and better outcomes for us as a combination of a singular end-to-end platform. We talked about that in the shareholder letter. It's going to be a theme song for us because we got exactly what we were looking for. If you will, a hand-in-glove combination of tools and services that make the entire platform much stronger than just the additive combination of the two businesses. Market share growth through the year, heavy emphasis on synergy going forward. With that, the EBIT leverage that, Luis talks about.
Brent Thill (Equity Research Analyst)
Helpful color. Just one quick follow-up for Luis here. If I look at the net retention number ex ironSource, it downticked a little bit this quarter versus last quarter. What have you baked into the 2023 outlook, either on a combined basis or, you know, an ex ironSource basis? Just trying to think through what's contemplated from a net retention perspective in the guide.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Yeah. Now you want me to guide on the expansion rate. Hey, Brent-
Brent Thill (Equity Research Analyst)
You always want more, Luis.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
I think overall, I'll just repeat what John just said, which is we are expecting to expand market share both in Q1 and Q2. Now, what that would imply to me, Brent, is we should be seeing net expansion rate above 100% clearly for the year. I don't wanna give you a precise number unless, you know, with and without ironSource, but yeah, that's what it implies. You know, we expect to grow, to grow market share both in Q1 and for the year, and therefore, we should be seeing a positive number in net expansion rate.
Brent Thill (Equity Research Analyst)
Helpful color. Thank you so much.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Thanks, Brent.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Great. We should have. There we go. Gili, for Cash. I see you there. Goldman Sachs, are you guys ready? Okay. Do we have Thomas, do we have other people on the, on the. There we go. Dylan Becker at William Blair, please.
Dylan Becker (Analyst)
Awesome. Hey, hopefully you guys can hear me. John starting off, I think there was an announcement not too long ago. We've spent a good bit of time talking about what live and interactive games can look like for the industry. How important is that partnership you guys announced with Google in expanding the opportunity for UGS and maybe the ability to improve monetization for developers looking to capitalize there?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Look, I'd say that Google's one of our best partners. We partner with them on a number of fronts, you know, as we do with, you know, a number of the major mega caps. We're deeply partnered there, and it's super important to us. The second thing is we have massive faith in the long-term growth prospect for UGS. It is, you know, in the fullness of time, it is gonna be a very major business for us, and it's already a substantial business for us. It's an area where we're focused on for growth. We've got a really strong general management team. That's Jeff under Mark, and they're driving it for growth right now. We're working on bringing more customers onto the platform, and we feel good about the offering.
It is a very competitive offering in terms of high performance and a good cost equation to our customers.
Dylan Becker (Analyst)
Super helpful. Maybe if we can talk on, we haven't spent a ton of time on the Aura piece of the business as well. Maybe some near-term device headwinds there, but how do you guys think about the opportunity for global connectivity going forward and potential monetization opportunity and touch points being afforded by being embedded across a lot of a significant number of those devices as well? Thanks.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Aura for those of you who don't know, it's a very strategic business for us. It came along with the ironSource acquisition. It's a device management business. They operate at the carrier level, but around the App Store. You know, it's a business where we derive a great deal of data, but we also derive meaningful revenue from it. Our offering, we believe, is well-differentiated from the principal competitor in the space, Digital Turbine. It's another area where we can't get too specific because when we talk about winning market share, it's like winning a major national carrier. These deals are not like you pick up a half a point a day. Or half a point a quarter. These are material trades. We are confident that we're gaining here.
We have been prior to Unity's ownership. We expect to going forward. I would love to share you what our pipeline looks like. It would make you happy, I think, to hear what our pipeline looks like. It's something I can't get into, you know, further detail on, but we feel really good about that business. It's if you think about, you know, if you're Unity, if you take, for example, a mobile ecosystem, we love that we're the leading platform for creation on both the App Stores. We love that we're one of the leading monetization user acquisition platform across the entire industry. We love that we've got a meaningful device management business, those same devices.
We love that these things come together to create an end-to-end platform that makes what our customers do more successful when they use our platform. It's that end-to-end, highly synergistic platform that differentiates Unity from anyone and from everyone. We feel really good about our ability to bring all that together synergistically. Again, as I said, Luis and I are gonna be singing about synergies now for years to come. It is a, it's our theme song.
Dylan Becker (Analyst)
Super helpful. Thanks, John.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
We won't ask you to do a duet here, but maybe later. Gili at Goldman Sachs, I think we got you on there now.
Gili Naftalovich (Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah. Hi, everyone. It's Gili on for Kash. Thanks so much for circling back, and congrats on the strong 4Q. Can we just quickly touch on any customer behavior you are seeing now that you have Unity and ironSource under the same hood, and a decision to ultimately keep Supersonic in your growth category? Kind of what was the rationale behind that?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
I'm not sure I quite get the customers that we're getting because we're together?
Gili Naftalovich (Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah, or any synergies you're seeing between Create and Grow at this point, if the ironSource deal kind of helped you in getting customer synergies, just to, you know, utilize that word as well.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Okay. Let me give you this in a sort of a time phase way. In the present moment, we're winning customers in mediation place, which is a very lucrative outcome for us, an important driver of the EBIT performance we're gonna see through the year. That added market share and that added share of wallet yields a more profitable Unity. It's happening precisely right after the acquisition because what we are carrying to market is a message, and the message is the power of the combined data platform, the power that drives a better performance for our customers. These are things that are, if you will, they come about as a result of a presentation.
Now, the second thing we're doing now is we are engineering in, for example, Supersonic into our editor to make it an easy platform for our customers to take their products directly to market without ever leaving the environment. There's a lot of places where the tool set, whether it's Luna or it's Supersonic or it's parts of LevelPlay and the integration of where it shows up into the mix, where our customers are gonna take advantage of a more performant platform for them to create, to publish, user acquire or monetize directly. There's some things we can do there, which is more about engineering in, and that's what we're working on right now. That combination of we're a better story, they wanna be part of something that's bigger and better, is the starting point.
The second point is to engineer in the advantages that our customers need and want. It's more than just Supersonic and LevelPlay. It's the two networks, ironSource, et cetera. It's also all of the Create tools. For example, you know, whether it's Artistry, as we bring AI to the equation, as we bring simulation to the equation, things that they need for better content creation, more cost-efficient content creation. It's UGS, which is part of the platform, which is what's enabled us to find success in that space. Really what it's about, and I hate to, you know, wax on about synergy. Synergy is partly about the story, but it's more about engineering a simpler single source of truth, single source of opportunity, single platform for our customers to leverage to find a more successful business for themselves.
As I said, we'll be talking about this each and every quarter for probably years to come.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Great. Okay. Well, I'll mispronounce your name, Arsenjie, from Wolfe Research, but please ask your question. Thank you so much.
Arsenjie Matovic (Equity Research Analyst)
Hi. Can you guys hear me?
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Yes.
Arsenjie Matovic (Equity Research Analyst)
Hi. This is Arsenjie on for Gal. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask whether you could parse out roughly what the growth of non-gaming create was, excluding Weta and UGS, in 4Q, and then I had a quick follow-up.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Luis, you have that or you wanna take that?
Luis Visoso (CFO)
We're, yeah, we're not providing it by quarter, right? As we put in the note, you see very strong growth. Now 118% is the exact number for the year. For non-gaming, that includes the Weta growth which we isolated before. We told you at the beginning of the year that would be about $70 million. The other thing you saw is an increase as a percentage of our business. You know, on a comparable basis, we went from 40% that we announced six months ago to about 41%. That would be on a comparable basis based on the old structure that we've been reporting before. We're clearly seeing an acceleration in that business, and we expect that to continue into 2023.
Arsenjie Matovic (Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you. That's helpful. Just quickly on one of the metrics in terms of customers over 100K and the contribution from ironSource. I believe that the last published number for ironSource for customers contributing over 100K was 446, and that number is now 284 backing that out. Is that just due to the revenue recognition for ironSource due to the timing of the acquisition, or was there some kind of churn that happened in ironSource relative to what they last published into Q22? Thank you.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
No, it's not, it's not that. What happens is, obviously, some of their larger customers were also large customers for us, so you cannot just add the numbers. Some customers just became even larger for us, but they were already counted in our customers above $100,000. You see that?
Arsenjie Matovic (Equity Research Analyst)
Got it. Yep, perfect. Thank you. Makes sense.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Which is a good combination, right? Because basically what it does is we acquire new customers, which is terrific, but we also penetrated some customers even more, which is also very helpful. We had a healthy combination of both.
Arsenjie Matovic (Equity Research Analyst)
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Great. Do we have any other questions from folks in the audience? Mario from Barclays.
Mario Lu (Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I just have one on the seasonality of the joint business now. In terms of, you know, what we saw in the fourth quarter, you guys said it was $518 on the combined financials versus the guidance of one Q $475. Just curious, is that sequential step down mostly from the Create side of the business, or is it on the Grow Solutions segment? Thanks.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Yeah. Do you want me to take that, John?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
By all means, yeah.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Mario, It's very difficult to talk about seasonality over the last few years, given all the factors that John explained, right? I mean, COVID, the economy, I mean, just name it. to answer your question, yes, we are taking a prudent view on the market and, it's for both businesses, you know, but particularly for the Growth Business. That's where we are being even more conservative on the business. I don't want to give you a forecast for each of them for Q1, yeah, we are being prudent there on the assumptions in the market.
You will see normally in Q4 kind of a strong professional services business, that will be one thing to always watch in Q4, then seasonality driven by the other factors that we mentioned. That's the way to think about it, Mario.
Mario Lu (Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Great.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
The seasonality right now, just in terms of speaking to it, is I've continued to say today that we've seen stabilization in the ads business starting in the middle of last year. The beginning of last year was exceptionally strong. We had the second wave of COVID. You know, people returned home or went home from school. We had very elevated Q ones in the industry. It's very hard to read seasonality. In a normal year, you'd say across the Growth side of the business, Q four is the strongest quarter, Q one is the second strongest quarter, essentially, staying a little bit elevated after the Christmas holidays, and then a little bit of growth as you go to Q two to Q three.
Within the Games side of the business, you'd say it's a business that is similar with Q4 as the strongest, although in mobile it tends to be more even, but there is increased consumption in the fourth quarter. That's been true for many, many years. Through this fairly subtle world of seasonality, where the fourth quarter can be 10% and 15% higher than the third quarter, you know, that type of outcome. What we did is we drove a truck through it like three different ways. You know, COVID, work from home, issues around a recession. It's made it very hard to read the underlying signal. Again, which is why we're emphasizing right now, what we're seeing is really strong consumer engagement in Games, really strong pipeline outside of Games and Create.
Stabilization in the ads business based on strong consumer engagement and slightly weaker eCPMs, which is typical of a recessionary period, around which we recover at some point. We've been trying to give you as much of that understanding as we can. We see a lot of data, we model the heck out of it, and we understand it, we think, pretty darn well. It is definitely a challenging time to sort of be an econometrics type person in this space.
Mario Lu (Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Great. That's very helpful. Maybe just a quick follow-up. In terms of the commentary, you know, of the game as market being approximately down 10% this year-over-year, you know, that's, you know, some other companies are saying it's stabilizing to improving, but is your point just the first half is just a very tough comp?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Precisely. You've got that right. We've added more color than others. Yes, it stabilized the middle of last year. The beginning of last year was exceptionally strong, and so the market in the first quarter of last year was up in the mid-20s in terms of growth, in terms of sort of served advertising business in the first quarter across the industry. When we're looking at stabilization from the middle of last year, what it is in the first half of 2023 was we're lapping a stronger period. Even though it's stable, we're lapping a stronger period. In the second half of this year, we're not forecasting recovery. We're gonna be comparing to the second half of 2022, which was flatter. It wasn't as strong. We're gonna get...
If you wanna think about it, the first half of the year, call it down, and the second half of the year, call it flat. That's where we get the -10 in aggregate if you're modeling the whole year. We're saying exactly the same thing. The market has stabilized. We're adding the added color that the year-over-year indexes for total served ads will be down in the first and second quarter.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Yeah.
Mario Lu (Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Thank you.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Year-over-year versus a quarter-over-quarter view, Mario.
Mario Lu (Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Yep, it's very helpful. Thank you, guys.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Great.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Hey, Parker Lane.
Parker Lane (Equity Research Analyst)
Great. Thanks for taking the question, guys. Luis, circling back to net expansion rates for a moment, I was wondering if you can give us a qualitative sense of how Grow is compared to Create recently. If I look at the non-gaming segment in particular, what impact and future impact do you expect from the introduction of new pricing initiatives and perhaps consumption models on the non-gaming side? How much of a tailwind can that be to expansion going forward?
Luis Visoso (CFO)
If I look at the Create side, the net expansion rate has been fairly stable and very healthy, right? The reductions that you've seen over the last two quarters have gone mainly from the Grow side. You know, we talked that before in the last quarter, and what we're seeing in this quarter is fairly consistent with that. The pricing that we've taken to your second question, the pricing that we're taking is mostly on the game side, right? The non-gaming side of the business has really different business models, different monetization models, and we keep on improving how we monetize each of our customers. The pricing plans that we've talked in the last calls have mainly focused on the gaming side, on the number of seats.
You're gonna see another effort on the non-gaming, where we're really trying to monetize our customers much better, and that includes subscription businesses, that includes consumption business models, and really better getting more of the value that we're creating for our customers.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Wanna just add a little color to that. It may seem counterintuitive that we increased price last year in the game sector, but we expect that to drive sequential quarter-to-quarter growth through 2020, 2023. We honor existing contracts at the price that the existing contracts were signed. As existing contracts, you know, reach their termination date and we renew our customers, they renew at a higher price. Pricing is one of the things that's driving growth for us this year, despite the fact that pricing was taken last year, because of when our customers come onto it. Second thing, and I think it was in the third quarter call, I framed up our digital twin platform, which at that point has just gone into general availability.
What that is it's a ratable use space platform, for our digital twins. We've got lots of customers coming onto that, and that is incremental, ratable revenue that we expect is gonna be a major business with for us in the quarters and years to come. There's additive in that way too. I hope that gets to a little what you were asking, a little more insight.
Parker Lane (Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah. Thanks for the color, guys. Appreciate it.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Okay. Stephen Ju over at Credit Suisse.
Stephen Ju (Equity Research Analyst)
All right. Thank you. I was wondering if you can give us the latest in terms of expectations on the timeline for the productization of Weta. I guess, you know, video gaming, I guess, media sectors will probably be the first adopters, but, you know, which additional sectors can you see that you can onboard here who you might not have seen before? You know, also directionally, I think this is a product that's had a client base of one. You know, from a pricing perspective, go-to-market sales motion, if you can just add a little bit there. Maybe it's a little bit too early to talk about that now, but just sort of initial, sort of, commentary that you might be able to offer as you think about going to market with what will be a productized Weta. Thanks.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
I can take part of that, Luis. You might wanna add, but when we're talking about productizing professional artistry, we mean more than just Weta, although Weta is obviously the substantial portion of it, but also tools like Ziva and SpeedTree add to our portfolio of professional artistry. Second point is, there's a number of the products that we've been talking about, Mark talked about a couple calls ago, within the Weta portfolio that we are commercializing this year, and we're already in customer conversations. The most interest right now is a combination of the film industry and the game industry. Big surprise. That's where you'd expect it to be.
What I won't do for you on this call is in conversations that are in flight to close around those products this year, to tell you who we're talking to, but it's the likely suspects that you would expect, but we don't pre-announce deals that we're now in the process of negotiating. We see, at least according to our own internal plan, we're tracking well. The products are coming to commercial opportunity in the timeframe we'd anticipated, if not a tad bit earlier. We're finding good interest in the primary markets that we had anticipated. In a word I'd say, or in a short sentence, it's going as we anticipated when we made the announcement around Weta, we announced to acquire them, and it feels good to us right now. Luis, would you wanna add anything?
Luis Visoso (CFO)
No. I would just say, John, that it's 100% consistent with what we said before. It would take us two years. It's a lot of work to bring the tools to the cloud and make them available to many customers from one, and we're making the progress that we expected, so you should hear news about this business soon.
Stephen Ju (Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Great. I think we have another four or five minutes, but, Tim Nollen.
Tim Nollen (Equity Research Analyst)
Great. Thanks. Can you guys hear me?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Yep.
Tim Nollen (Equity Research Analyst)
Welcome on. Thanks. I got a two or three quick ones on the ironSource deal. I wonder, maybe first off, could you give us a bit more color on the integration effort? I know you said that it's all going well and the synergies all look good. I just wonder, you know, things like, will you keep a couple of DSPs separately, or will you combine them in terms of any technology integration issues that may come up? Anything you can give us in terms of color, because I can imagine it's not necessarily easy to always do these sorts of things. Relatedly, you did, I think, mention the data ingestion issues from last year at one point. Are those completely gone now? Do we need to know anything more about that?
Did ironSource help in any way with that, or was that after the fact? Lastly, maybe one more on Aura, I guess, is maybe where this comes in. You know, you and ironSource both are very heavily into the gaming sector. You have a lot of non-gaming businesses on the Create side. I guess ironSource is mainly gaming, but are there opportunities now to expand your ad tech services given the broader client base that you can offer, as well as what Aura could bring in, given the other sectors that it touches?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
First off, you get credit for a 12-part question, so.
Tim Nollen (Equity Research Analyst)
Three parts.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
... we'll do our best to remember it all as we respond. The first one to get out of the way is the data issue was out of the way before we completed our merger, in fact, before we announced it. That was in the rearview mirror. The second thing on integration, we've already, you know, largely integrated teams. Omer, by way of example, is, you know, essentially the Chief Revenue Officer for Grow. We consolidated two sales organizations under him. He's providing able leadership. We also consolidated product and engineering under Ingrid and Eyal on that team. We brought teams together to achieve, you know, singular focus on delivering the right outcomes for our customers.
The engineering teams are working together, the product teams are working together, the sales teams are working together. In terms of engineering and data, we've already accomplished essentially the primary data merge, so that can yield better outcomes for our customers there, because essentially more data, you know, around the same questions around user acquisition yields a better outcome for our customers. We've achieved that's part of what we've already done, and we're now starting to see situations where we're applying a tool that might have been in the Unity ad network to the ironSource network or a practice or an approach technically that was in the ironSource network to the Unity network.
I won't get into the specifics of that because first off, it would take me five minutes to define most of what these tools do, and that seems like an unnecessary way into this conversation. Just this morning, I was going through one tool in particular that we expect to have a favorable you know, favorable outcome for our combined ad network based on bringing a tool from 1 side of the equation to the other side of the equation. Beyond that, Create to Grow, they're doing the exact same thing at a higher level. That's happening. Aura. You talk about Aura relative to non-gaming. For those of you that don't know, part of what Aura does is it drives installs of game and non-game applications on Android devices around the world based on carrier relationships.
That essentially puts us in the ads business outside of gaming. I believe you're absolutely right to point out that driving installs outside of gaming represents a significant opportunity for Unity, and some of those are gonna be our Create customers. That is something that we don't have a specific plan for today, although we've certainly talked about it. We've been focusing on the very obvious and most important synergies for that end-to-end platform. There's a few things that are sort of next quarter's conversation, and that particular one is more of next quarter's conversation internally to Unity.
Tim Nollen (Equity Research Analyst)
Excellent. Thanks for that.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Okay. We're going to try to slip in two more and finish it up. First we'll start with Jonathan, and then we'll conclude with Franco.
Speaker 14
Yeah. Great. Can you hear me?
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Yes.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Yeah.
Speaker 14
Great. Thanks for letting me get in here and ask my questions. Actually, most of them have already been answered. Just wanted to ask the rationale behind combining strategic partnerships into Create. I mean, it would make sense that you would have, you know, Create add some of the stuff from Operate and Operate would become Grow, but why would you and not leave strategic partnerships separate like you have before? Thanks.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
The majority of the revenue is very Create-centric. Pretty simple. These are often deals where revenue is derived from a platform holder to enable Create to work better for their platform. It was more pattern matching here. It was like, this is very much like a Create business. We'd held it out separately because it had a different sales cadence and a very different type of deal structure. When we tried to figure out where to put all the different pieces post-merger, this was the obvious place for it. Luis, you might want to add to that.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
Yeah, I totally agree, John. We manage the teams together, and that's because of the synergies, because one drives the other. We thought that would be the most natural thing to do, Jonathan. We'll be transparent as I was at the beginning of this call on where we see volatility driven by strategic partnerships that we need to call out.
Speaker 14
Okay. Great. Thank you.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
All right. Not the least, but if the last, Franco, why don't you tee it up for finish this up.
Speaker 15
All right. Thanks, Richard. Yeah, John, on LevelPlay, you talked about some of the strengths you have and, you know, you rightfully noted the variability in the lead times. Can you speak to whether this is from developers that are new, brand new to the market or are you leveraging, you know, the relationships on the ironSource side and getting someone that is perhaps a bigger scale, more mature players? I guess, what is your strategy to gain business from some of the large publishers that are currently in other platforms?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
For some reason, that broke up a lot for me on my end of hearing that, there's like half the words. Richard, did you catch the question and can summarize it back?
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Franco, why don't you summarize again, 'cause I lost the same thing, so.
Speaker 15
Okay. Well, I need to get a new headset. The question was really around LevelPlay. Are the customers brand new to the market or are they more mature, bigger in scale? What is your strategy to gain big publishers from other platforms?
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
What is the strategy for other platforms relative to LevelPlay? Again, I'm not fully grokking your question, so I apologize if I don't answer it correctly. But I'd mention a couple of things. One is that prior to the merger, you could argue that LevelPlay was more richly successful with smaller, more independent players, and Unity had relative strength with the larger players. What we're now doing is closing more of the larger players. That feels like somewhat of a synergy with LevelPlay. If you're thinking about the synergy of Create to LevelPlay, integrating LevelPlay into Unity is a winning strategy, 'cause remember, 70 odd % of, you know, mobile games are built in Unity. That's a very obvious thing to do.
It was very evident at one of their launch events last year in September. I was there speaking to, you know, many hundreds of LevelPlay customers. You know, one of the things they've never done is said, "How many of you are Unity customers?" It turned out when I asked for a show of hands, 100% of them in the room were Unity customers. There's big synergy in that direction as well because it. Not. They all weren't yet LevelPlay customers. They were there shopping at LevelPlay, but they were all already Unity customers. Does that get to what you were asking me about, though? 'Cause again, we might have a network issue here. I got a bit of a garbled version of your question.
Speaker 15
Yeah, no worries. I could take it offline. Appreciate it, though.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
I think, Franco, if your question is why do we expect LevelPlay to grow market shares, frankly, we believe that it's the better mediation out there in the market. That's what you saw before all, everything changed in the market, and we continue to believe it's the best performing, and that will attract our customers back. That's.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Luis and I just did a portfolio review with the team yesterday, and by name, by customer, we're seeing customers coming to the platform. We're not believing it. We think it's better. Our market share will grow, although we think that's why. We're looking at the exact customers coming over and our migrations that our engineering teams are implementing, that for us is proof that they're coming to our platform for those reasons.
Luis Visoso (CFO)
That's why we can talk about market share gains both in Q1 and for the year.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
All right. Kash pinged in from the top of Level Black Diamond slope, we, you, Kash, you got maybe a second question.
Kash Rangan (Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Wouldn't miss the Unity call for anything. Thanks so much. Congrats on the quarter. I'd like for Giles' comments. John, as you take a step back, now you're indexed to the opportunities in Weta. You're a little bit over-indexed to the big companies in the advertising markets through the acquisition of ironSource. You're also indexed to what's going on in the Create side with the digital twins. How should we think about how you as CEO are prioritizing your investments, so you get the best bang for the buck in each of these markets, depending upon their relative importance and what that could mean for what really drives Unity in the future? Thank you.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
look, first off, if you wanna know what drives me as a CEO towards prioritization. At this company, it's a very rich conversation between Luis and me and the principal C-level officers looking at the opportunity in front of us. One of the things that have been frustrating as we've shifted from a go-go market to a tough recessionary environment and the market correction that's taken place, is there were programs that we liked in a different economic environment that are no longer funded. An example of that is, you know, what we were doing with sports and live entertainment. It's a beautiful technology that customers want, but we deprioritized that in a different economic environment, and there were several other things that we did that were like that.
We didn't deprioritize Weta because there's already a meaningful revenue stream there, and there's a meaningful and a very great opportunity for that around professional artistry to grow a bigger and better business. Remember, most creators in the world are not coders, they're artists. They want those artist tools. That made the cut for us. In general, I would tell you that if you look at our two businesses, right, Create and Grow is a business where the engineering cycles for product development are typically inside a couple of quarters and certainly inside of a year. Many times on the Create side, the creation cycle for meaningful new technology can be multiple years, certainly multiple quarters.
For example, when we created the digital twin platform that will allow us to generate ratable revenue, cloud-based revenue for our digital twins, that was 18 months in process. We have to look at them through a different lens in terms of ROI timeframe. Now, the reason we invested in the cloud platform for digital twins and the very similar thing around UGS for games is because we believe in the fullness of time, the best way to drive revenue for Unity on Create is through the addition of ratable revenue streams based on usage. We're already paid by the seat for people creating things. We were looking for a second revenue stream and in solving a major problem for our customers.
When we look at our businesses today, you know, things like LevelPlay and our ad networks are profitable, our core games businesses, a lot of things are very profitable for us. Some remain net investment, and we prioritize them based on what we believe to be strong IR-ROI thresholds. Now personally, I'm from the gaming industry. I've spent decades in the gaming industry. I am intellectually in love with digital twins. I'm emotionally connected to games. Our resource allocation isn't based on emotion, it's based on math. We look hard at it in this environment to make sure we're making the right investments for the right ROI, which is how and why we're reporting, even with modest revenue growth, really strong profit growth year-over-year. We think that's important. We prioritize that, and we're gonna deliver that.
Richard Davis (VP of Investor Relation)
Great. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you so much. We got done a little bit late, but that was pretty quick and efficient. Thank you all, and we'll hope to see you on the road or at various conferences. Thanks a lot.
John Riccitiello (President, CEO, and Chairman)
Thanks, all.
Speaker 15
Recor-
