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Mar. 19, 2026 at 1 p.m. ET
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Snail (NASDAQ:SNAL) highlighted sequential revenue and bookings growth, driven largely by rising ARK franchise sales and content launches. The company emphasized its multi-year ASA pipeline, and a trio of upcoming AAA titles as long-term growth engines, supported by a pivot to Unreal Engine 5.7 to address prior technical gaps. Management disclosed a first U.S. deal stablecoin initiative, and a scaling interactive films division diversifying business activity beyond games.
Peter Kang, Senior Vice President, Director of Business Development and Operations of Snail. Sir, please proceed.
Peter Kang: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to review our financial and operational results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2025. The fourth quarter capped a pivotal year for Snail and the ARK franchise. We closed 2025 with several key milestones, including the successful launch of ARK: Lost Colony DLC, the debut of a robust multiyear content pipeline for ASA and meaningful advances across our broader portfolio and initiatives. Since ASA's launch in 2023, the remastered title primarily focused on updates, which centered on introducing targeted features, improving game stability and ongoing polishing.
While these enhancements in the release of ARK Astraeos and ARK: Bob's Tall Tales strengthened the foundation and experience of the game, we have not yet released a full-scale expansion pack that truly brought into the narrative, game play depth or overall scope of the ASA experience to fully realize its long-term engagement potential. ARK: Lost Colony changed that trajectory. Released last December, Lost Colony represents the first of many major stand-alone DLCs designed specifically to expand the ASA universe and deliver the kind of immersive content-rich experience our global community has been anticipating.
We were very encouraged by the early response of the DLC with presale demand exceeding our internal projections and reinforcing the consumer appetite for deeper ASA content. More broadly, 2025 was a momentum-building year for ASA. Since launch, the title surpassed 4 million units sold, supported in part by a meaningful acceleration in Steam, PlayStation and Xbox downloads during the second quarter of the past year. Taken together, the traction we see across our titles and the sustained levels of player engagement continue to reinforce the durability and long-term strength of the ARK franchise. During the fourth quarter, ASA delivered strong performance with approximately 692,000 units sold, an average DAU of over 91,000 and a peak DAU of over 147,000.
ASE also remained a consistent contributor with approximately 580,000 units sold in the quarter, average DAU of roughly 105,000 and peak DAU of about 137,000. Meanwhile, ARK Mobile surpassed a major milestone of 10 million cumulative downloads and sustained an average DAU of approximately 130,000. Building on the strength of ASA's fourth quarter performance and the steady consistent result from both ASE and ARK Mobile, we are entering a content-rich and strategically important period for the ARK franchise, with ASA at the center of this next phase. During our December 2025 Investor Day, we outlined the next chapter of ASA's growth trajectory.
The event featured Studio Wildcard Co-Founder, Jeremy Stieglitz, who unveiled a comprehensive multiyear content road map for ASA that includes a robust slate of DLCs and content expansions designed to deepen the ASA universe, elevate engagement and support durable long-term growth for the franchise. Beginning in 2026, we plan to release 4 major DLCs and content updates, including the ARK: Survival of the Fittest remake followed by ARK: World Creator, ARK: Bob's True Tales - Tides of Fortune and ARK: Dragontopia to close out the year. Looking ahead in 2027, we plan to launch ARK: Atlantis, ARK: Bob's True Tales - Galaxy Wars and ARK: Legacy of Santiago.
In total, these 7 significant releases represent one of the most ambitious expansion cycles ever planned for ASA and provide snow with meaningful revenue visibility through 2027. Just last week, during the 2026 Game Developers Conference, we held a private invite-only event to provide additional insights into the timing of some of these upcoming content releases. Jeremy Stieglitz has kicked off the event with new details on ARK: World Creator, Bob's True Tales - Tides of Fortune and Dragontopia. ARK: World Creator is a brand-new in-game content creation tool for ASA that will support both console and PC players. Up till now, user-generated content in ARK was largely limited to PC players using external tools.
World Creator removes this barrier and broadens the accessibility of user-generated content to console players as well. While this is not a paid for DLC or expansion pack, ARK: World Creator introduces a wealth of new personalized content tailored to each player's preference, and we hope to further drive long-term engagement on ASA. We are targeting a May release for this new feature. Following that is the launch of ARK: Bob's True Tales - Tides of Fortune DLC scheduled for June, along with the free revamped Genesis Part 1 map for ASA.
We also debuted an event exclusive trailer highlighting the renewed look for ARK survival of the finish and provided details around the upcoming ARK: Dragontopia scheduled for December 2026. Separate from ASA, we were pleased to introduce PixARK Worlds, a new title and development featuring advanced user-generated content designed to expand the ARK universe onto Nintendo Switch 2 console. Needless to say, we are thrilled about the opportunities 2026 presents Snail as we continue to elevate the ARK franchise globally for players across both PC and consoles. Beyond ARK, we also announced several updates across our broader gaming portfolio. Starting with our indie portfolio, we unveiled a brand-new title, Gobby Gang, during the GDC.
Additional indie titles in the pipeline include Stoneguard, Above The Snow and Survivor Mercs, to name a few. We also recently celebrated Bellwright surpassing 1 million units sold. In 2026, we will be launching Bellwright's console ports to Xbox and PlayStation, while we're working towards the eventual 1.0 release. We will also see Honeycomb in 2026 for a full 1.0 launch across PC and console platforms. Lastly, we are pleased to announce the significant progress made across 3 developing titles For The Stars, Nine Yin Sutra: Immortal, and Nine Yin Sutra: Wushu.
These 3 titles are all AAA projects, meaning they are high budget, high-profile games designed to deliver expansive worlds cutting-edge visuals and strong marketing campaigns that far exceed typical games we have launched and licensed. As a reference, ARK is considered a AAA game as well. While the 3 games I mentioned are smaller in scale than ARK, these titles offer immense upside potential. We have invested considerable time and resources into each game, and they are now in the final stages of their development cycle. We believe we are approaching the point where our long-term investment can fully realize its potential, and we look forward to sharing updates as we make progress throughout the year and into 2027.
At GDC, we shared an event exclusive trailer and early concept ARK: For The Stars, providing a deeper look at the title's open universe exploration, player-driven research systems and evolving frontier civilization themes. We believe Snail is well positioned for meaningful upside over the next 2 years with ARK remaining the cornerstone of Snail, supported by a rich pipeline of content, continued investment in our indie titles and 3 upcoming AAA games with substantial upside. We are excited about our trajectory and remain committed to delivering consistent long-term results. With that, I will now turn the call over to Heidy to discuss our financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2025. Heidy?
Heidy Kingwan Chow: Thank you, Peter, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today as I review our financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2025. Net revenue for the fourth quarter was $25.1 million compared to $26.2 million in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to a decrease of deferred revenues that were recognized during 2025 of $3.5 million that were partially offset by our increased sales of the ARK franchise of $1.3 million and our Bellwright franchise of $1.2 million. On a sequential basis, we are pleased to see Q4 net revenue increased 82% compared to $13.8 million in Q3 2025.
Net revenues for the full year ended December 31, 2025, were $81.2 million compared to $84.5 million in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to a decrease in recognition of deferred revenue of $15.5 million related to the ARK franchise, decrease in Bellwright and Myth of Empire sales of $1.5 million and $1.3 million, respectively, offset by an increase in ASA sales of $11.3 million, ARK Mobile sales of $2.4 million and revenue generated from SaltyTV app of $800,000. Net loss for the fourth quarter was $900,000 compared to a net income of $1.1 million in the same period last year.
The decrease was primarily due to a decrease in gross profit of $1.7 million and an increase in operating expenses of $2.8 million, partially offset by an increase in other income of $2 million and a benefit from income taxes of $500,000. On a sequential basis, net loss improved significantly compared to the $7.9 million net loss in Q3 2025.
Net loss for the full year ended December 31, 2025, was $27.2 million compared to net income of $1.8 million in the same period last year, primarily due to a noncash tax expenses related to the full valuation of our deferred tax assets of $10.1 million, increase in general and administrative expenses of $5.2 million, increase in research and development of $2.9 million, increase in advertising and marketing of $3.7 million and impairment expenses of $1.5 million. EBITDA for the fourth quarter was loss $1.3 million compared to $1.6 million in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to the increase in operating expenses of $2.8 million.
EBITDA for the full year ended December 31, 2025, was lost $16.8 million compared to $3.2 million in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to the increase in general and administrative expenses of $5.2 million, increase in research and development of $2.9 million, increase in advertising and marketing of $3.7 million and impairment expenses of $1.5 million. While we experienced some one-off nonrecurring headwinds during Q2 and Q3, we continue to reaffirm the strong fundamentals of the small business. For the year, total units sold increased 32.7% to $6.3 million compared to 4.7 million units in the same period last year.
This growth was primarily driven by an increase of 1.7 million units sold across the ARK franchise, partially offset by a combined decrease of approximately 100,000 units in Bellwright and West Hunt sales. Bookings for the fourth quarter increased to $20.8 million compared to $17 million in the same period last year. The increase was primarily driven by a lower portion of our sales deferred in 2025. Changes in deferred revenue decreased by $4.9 million, while our net revenue decreased of $1.1 million. Bookings for the full year ended December 31, 2025, increased 16.2% to $87.8 million compared to $75.7 million in the same period last year.
The increase was primarily due to an increase of ASA sales driven by the launch of ARK: Lost Colony, ARK: Astraeos and ASE's first sales event in June 2025 since the price drop in August 2023. Especially with the robust ARK content pipeline for the next 2 years, we do expect bookings to continue growing on a quarterly basis while adjusting for gradual content launches coming off the backlog. Lastly, as of December 31, 2025, unrestricted cash was $8.6 million compared to $7.3 million as of December 31, 2024. To review our detailed financial statements, please refer to the earnings press release and the Form 10-K filed with the SEC.
To close out the call, I would like to reiterate a few of the points Peter highlighted surrounding the significant momentum we carried out of 2025. As Peter mentioned, the latter half of 2025 was an especially exciting period for Snail and our ARK franchise. The increased visibility of the ARK pipeline, we have provided put us in a strong position to deliver consistent annual results over the next 2 years. We also remain strategic and committed to expanding our broader game portfolio. We continue to invest in smaller titles such as Bellwright, Honeycomb and our indie games, while also advancing our international films business. As of Q4 end, SaltyTV had released over 100 short-film dramas.
Interactive films also expanded beyond short-form content into narrative-driven game development, which is a direction we expect to continue moving forward. Importantly, our 3 upcoming AAA titles have reached the final stages of their development cycle. We believe these projects offer tremendous upside for the company, and we have dedicated as much time and resources to meet the potential these games hold. We expect profit margins to remain meaningful, higher than what we typically see with external license titles. Additionally, the expensive content for each title supports a strong overall game lifespan. Beyond our gaming business, we also minted the first official U.S. deal stablecoin during our December Investor Day event.
We are currently working towards a potential partnership opportunity tied directly to our stablecoin business, and we look forward to share more details later this year. 2026 and 2027 represent an exciting period for Snail as we further prove our standing in the broader digital entertainment ecosystem. The time and resources invested across many of our projects and initiatives are beginning to bear fruit, and we remain focused on executing our strategy to drive long-term sustainable growth. Thank you all for joining us today. We will now open the line for Q&A. Operator?
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Michael Kupinski with NOBLE Capital Markets.
Michael Kupinski: I have a couple of quick questions. What is the deferred revenue balance in the quarter? Could you just give me that number? If you have it, Heidy.
Heidy Kingwan Chow: Thank you, Michael. Our deferred revenue number, I think, is stated on our 10-K, I think, around $30 million.
Michael Kupinski: Okay. And I was wondering if you could give us an update. I know that we talked about this in the past about the technology gap. Is that still persistent? Are they -- or have there been some changes there?
Heidy Kingwan Chow: Good question, Michael. I'll defer this question to our CEO, Mr. Hai Shi. He will answer that in Chinese, and I will have a translator as well.
Shi Hai: [Interpreted] Mr. Shi stated that he became full-time CEO at Snail Inc. in 2024. And the main goal for Mr. Shi was to make sure that he could revamp the overall system for Snail as a publicly listed company so that Snail's main focus could shift from a company that mainly publishes external games to have its own production pipelines, especially for game development side. So to answer your question, out of the entire Snail system, one of the important projects is For The Stars or FTS. And initially, we're using our internal proprietary game engine is called Flexi Engine to develop that game.
And the advantage of Flexi Engine includes its server management processing capabilities for big data as well as data security. However, compared to Unreal Engine, we can see that there's disadvantages for Flexi Engine for rendering as well as efficiency. So as a result, we upgraded our engine to Unreal at the end of 2024. So now we're still using Flexi Engine to support the server side. And for the client side, since we really want to create the secure shaped planets in games and also want to make sure that we have different mobile terrains, which for Unreal, there's not yet enough mature plug-ins to support that kind of goals.
So right now, we're overusing Unreal Engine and it's working very well for us, especially that we have a very good server support and client-side support and also we can guarantee efficiency in development. And there recently, we have fully upgraded to Unreal Engine 5.7. So right now, we don't see any technology -- technical gap in game development anymore.
Michael Kupinski: Terrific. If I could slip in just a couple of quick ones. Do you have a launch window for your AAA games at this point?
Heidy Kingwan Chow: Thank you, Michael. I'll defer that to our CEO, Mr. Hai Shi.
Shi Hai: [Interpreted] So actually, our internal development system has been fully transformed and built in the past 2 years. So right now, it's a great timing for us. So before, Snail only had 1 internal development studio. However, now we already have 4 development studios. And out of these 4, 3 of them are working on their own in-house projects. And for one of the studios, because the revenue trend is very positive. So it's looking like we will be able to double the revenues of last year. So we are doing a very successful job at studio development. And then we have this ambitious goals for the internal -- 3 internal in-house titles that we're working on right now.
We are looking at about tens of millions of revenues here. So all of these 3 in-house IPs will be immense IPs. We are aiming to achieve $5 million -- $500 million in overall revenues for each IP. So the first IP is For The Stars. This is a space-themed game. So For The Stars, if for any mature gaming companies, if they're able to achieve a game of this size, then they will be able to also gain great revenues out of the projects. For example, we have Starfield, No Man's Sky and Star Citizen. We have spent 3 years on the development of For The Stars and now we are folding in on the development cycle.
The core development team is based in the U.S. Some of the production tasks are taken over by the Poland studio. [indiscernible] and some of the tasks were outsourced to our Chinese teams. So the development cycle of this game includes 8 sprints in total. By the end of this year, we are anticipating that we will start external testing or public testing of the game. Actually, we have initially showcased the game at GDC, and we will show more in-game capture in the later half of this year. And For The Stars, we're able to achieve all the streams of all the players who are passionate about space games.
So actually, the other 2 IPs were based off of the successful IP that we have released in the past in China. In the IP's name is Nine Sutra. This is coming from the Chinese culture. And in the past dozen of years, the IP has generated more than or about USD 800 million in revenue. So for these 2 IPs, the first one is Nine Sutra Immortal. We are seeing that there is still great market potential market to tap into, especially because this is a new genre for the gaming industry because so far, there's no real cultivation or cultivation games yet out on the market.
We want to put in just the same efforts as we used to -- just like how we develop the Chinese Nine Sutra games. For the second IP under Nine Sutra, it's called Nine Sutra Wushu. So in the past, for the Chinese IP Age of Wushu, there were not major changes or innovative changes in the original framework. However, now with Nine Sutra Wushu, we can consider it almost as a sequel of the original Chinese IP. We have implemented many different changes, and we are hoping that we can impress all the players. That's why we are very ambitious with this IP.
For both of these IPs -- for both of the Nine Sutra IPs, we will start testing this year. We have also confirmed that we will showcase all these IPs -- or both of these Nine Sutra IPs in 3 major gaming events this year. They include [indiscernible], ChinaJoy and Gamescom, which means that we will have the campaign running of the full -- the entire year for these IPs.
Michael Kupinski: Terrific. I really appreciate it. If I can slip one more question in. You have a very strong release road map through 2027. And I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the impact to margins, particularly as it relates to R&D and marketing spend. So if you could just talk a little bit about the marketing spend cadence around the upcoming launches.
Heidy Kingwan Chow: Thank you, Michael. I'll defer the question for Mr. Shi to continue to answer the question.
Shi Hai: [Interpreted] As Mr. Shi mentioned earlier, all of these 3 IPs are -- will be the main revenue drivers of our company, and they're all big IPs that we're working on. And to be more specific, we're hoping that the minimum we can have at least $60 million to $80 million in revenues from each IP. So that's why we also don't want to fully release the games until they're definitely ready, and then we have big hopes for the revenues of [ these IPs ]. So for our revenue growth in 2026, we're looking -- mainly looking at several different projects. The first one is Bellwright developed by Donkey Crew in Poland.
So, so far, the revenues of Bellwright is performing quite well. And this year, we're going to release the console version of Bellwright. So -- and this genre is actually not yet present on consoles yet. And then based on the revenues in the first quarter, our projections is that the revenues after a console release can at least double the revenues of last year. All right. So it looks like -- based on the current performance of the rights, we can expect $12 million in revenues from Donkey Crew. The second one is Studio Sirens who worked on Aquatica last year. The product itself is quite decent.
However, there were certain issues that might not be fully resolved in terms of the technologies, which might have caused concerns among the communities. But through developing this game, Studio Sirens is now more mature with their capabilities overall. And this year, they will work on ARK: Survival of the Fittest, which is the eSports game. And we're hoping that this game can bring a new peak to the ARK players and then also increase the revenues. So other than building our development teams in the public company, we also want to include more IPs into our company, which includes PixARK. We want Studio Sirens to take over the development for PixARK, which has made over $2 million last year.
We have great hopes for Studio Sirens to work on this project because based on the past experience, they might go through a similar trajectory like Donkey Crew and can create millions of revenues in the future. Of course, Studio Sirens also has other plans and other projects to work on. But overall, we will not be at a loss with the studio anymore. The third studio is Matryoshka games. So in the past, Matryoshka games was involved in the combat development for Nine Sutra Immortal. Now this year, they are also working on their own project, which was announced at Gobby Gang. We have great hope for this project as well.
Gobby Gang is more of a fastly-iterated project similar to Peak is under the friendslop genre. And then we have -- we are hoping that the game can perform very well on the market. If the game's performance is only medium, maybe we can at least sell about 1 million units. However, if you're able to actually achieve the expectations of the development team, then it should be easy for us to exceed the 1 million units target. We can probably even sell 10 million units. The fourth studio that we have is [indiscernible], which is based in Poland. Right now, they're helping with the -- For The Stars project, so they don't have their own projects to develop.
And we have another company called Interactive Films. And then this year, we will also work on a lot more short dramas with this company. So last year, interactive films already produced over 100 short dramas. And then this year, we will add another additional 700 to 800 short drama projects. And then this year, interactive films will also come out with this interactive game that is [indiscernible] genre. And our goal for that interactive game is to sell around 5 million to 6 million units. However, we don't really have a successful experience in this field yet, so we cannot really guarantee that success.
So our revenue growth for this year mainly comes from the previous mentioned areas and also from the games that we are publishing. And so basically, in general, the revenue will have a 20% to 30% of growth compared to last year. So you said that you're interested in the plan for 2027. However, most of the major actions will probably happen by then. And we hope that we can achieve something very great by the end of this year. If not, it will happen in 2027.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm showing no further questions in the queue. At this time, this concludes Snail Inc.'s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Conference Call. If your question was not taken, please contact Snail Inc.'s IR team at snal@gateway-grp.com. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. [Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]
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