Zynga, Inc. (ZNGA) Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Zynga, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA) Q4 2020 earnings call dated Feb. 10, 2021

Corporate Participants:

Rebecca Lau — Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Analysts:

Colin Sebastian — Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. — Analyst

Mario Lu — Barclays Capital, Inc. — Analyst

Drew Crum — Stifel Nicolaus — Analyst

Matthew Cost — Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC — Analyst

Michael Ng — Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC — Analyst

Mike Hickey — The Benchmark Company, LLC — Analyst

David Beckel — Berenberg Capital Markets — Analyst

Matthew Thornton — Truist Securities — Analyst

Eric Handler — MKM Partners LLC — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Zynga’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Financial Results Conference call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rebecca Lau, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead, ma’am.

Rebecca Lau — Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance

Thank you, Josh, and welcome, everyone, to Zynga’s fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings call. On the call with me today are Frank Gibeau, our Chief Executive Officer; and Ger Griffin, our Chief Financial Officer. Shortly, we will open up the call for live questions. Before we cover the safe harbor, please note that in effort to keep our team members healthy, each member on today’s call is dialed in remotely. We appreciate your understanding during the call and hope that everyone is staying safe during this time. During the course of today’s call, we will make forward-looking statements related to our business plan and strategy as well as expectations for our future performance.

Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted. Please review the risk factors in our most recently filed Form 10-Q as well as elsewhere in our SEC filings for further clarification. In addition, we will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Our earnings letter, earnings slides and when filed, our 10-K, will include reconciliations of our GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Please be sure to look at these reconciliations as the non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for or superior to our GAAP results. This conference call is being webcasted and will be available for audio replay on our Investor Relations website in a few hours.

Now, I’ll turn over the call to Frank for his opening remarks.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Thank you, Rebecca. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q4 earnings call. 2020 was an unprecedented year of uncertainty, loss and change. It was also the year when more people than ever before turned to games for entertainment, social connection and a sense of community. I could not be more proud of how Zynga has responded to the challenges of the global pandemic with focused execution, strong teamwork and delivering high-quality live services to our players. Our team seamlessly transitioned to work from home in early March and continued to deliver on our mission to connect the world through games while achieving one of the strongest performances in Zynga history.

Our execution in Q4 and throughout 2020 has added meaningful scale to our live services platform, expanded our global footprint and strengthened our position as one of the leading mobile game publishers in the world. Q4 capped off a truly transformational year for Zynga. In the quarter, we achieved our highest revenue of $616 million, up 52% year-over-year and record bookings of $699 million, up 61% year-over-year. Our results were well ahead of guidance across all key financial measures, led by an all-time best revenue and bookings quarter for Words With Friends. In addition, we delivered record Q4 performances by Empires & Puzzles and CSR2, as well as our Social Slots and Casual Cards portfolios.

Building upon its successful launch in September, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells continued to gain momentum as players engage with its highly social and innovative gameplay. Advertising in Q4 was also a key growth contributor, driven by strong seasonality and advertising yields as well as an excellent performance from Rollic in its first full quarter at Zynga. In 2020, strong organic growth across our live services, coupled with contributions from our acquisitions of Peak and Rollic drove our highest annual revenue of $1.97 billion, up 49% year-over-year and record bookings of $2.27 billion, up 45% year-over-year. We also generated our best ever annual operating cash flow of $429 million, up 63% year-over-year and added $794 million in net proceeds through a convertible notes offering in December, ending the year with approximately $1.57 billion of cash and investments.

Execution of our multiyear growth strategy has driven our tremendous results to-date, while providing strong momentum for additional growth ahead. In 2021 and beyond, we are focused on continuing to drive recurring growth from our live services foundation and launching new titles from our exciting new game pipeline. In addition, we are investing in new transformational growth opportunities based on key megatrends within interactive entertainment. These initiatives include our investments in hyper-casual games, cross-platform play, international expansion, and building an advertising network, all of which have the ability to meaningfully increase Zynga’s total addressable market while adding new capabilities to further grow our business.

First, we are continuing to drive recurring growth from our live services foundation. One of Zynga’s core competitive advantages is our ability to create Forever Franchises that are highly engaging and can predictably deliver sustainable growth over long periods of time. A great example of this is Words With

Friends. In 2020 the franchise delivered its best-ever annual revenue and bookings performance in more than 11 years since its launch in 2009. A key driver of this performance was our steady release of new bold beats, including an innovative rewards path, which gives players themed tabs to play and rewards to unlock. Looking ahead, we are entering 2021 with a much larger and more diverse portfolio of live services, now anchored by eight Forever Franchises, including CSR Racing, Empires & Puzzles, Merge Dragons!, Merge Magic!, Toon Blast, Toy Blast, Words With Friends and Zynga Poker.

We are focused on executing our bold beat strategy across our portfolio and are confident in our ability to drive recurring growth collectively across our live services. Second, we are launching new titles from our exciting new game pipeline. Our goal is to create new Forever Franchises to add to our live services portfolio and our latest release, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells is off to a great start and will be a meaningful growth contributor in 2021 and beyond. Coming up next from our new game pipeline, are Puzzle Combat and FarmVille 3. Both titles have been progressing well in soft launch and are on track to release worldwide in the first half of 2021.

We also expect our first Star Wars game to enter soft launch in early summer with the potential to release by the end of the year. Going forward, we expect new games to be a meaningful growth driver and have additional games in development at NaturalMotion, Gram Games, Small Giant, Peak and Zynga Studios. Third, we anticipate hyper-casual will be one of the fastest growth opportunities for Zynga. Hyper-casual games are highly accessible, driven by simple concepts that are easy to play and appeal to large and diverse audiences of players, many of whom may be first time mobile gamers. With our acquisition of Rollic, we ended 2020 with three of the top 50 downloaded U.S. iPhone games.

And so far, in Q1, two of our new hyper-casual titles, High Heels and Blob Runner 3D have already reached the number one and number two top downloaded U.S. game positions on Android and iOS. In 2021 and beyond, we will build on Rollic’s momentum and expect this new hyper-casual audience to supercharge Zynga’s live services platform by meaningfully expanding our user acquisition funnel, cross-promotion opportunities and advertising inventory. Fourth, we are actively developing cross-platform play games, which will further expand our total addressable market. Gamers have been excited to seamlessly play across mobile PCs and consoles for a long time and recent innovations in technology, including 5G, make this a reality.

Today, many of the largest interactive entertainment properties in the world are free-to-play cross-platform play experiences. Zynga is well-positioned to successfully enter this category because, one, we have iconic licenses and brands; two, our teams have strong multi-platform experience; three, we are already using proven cross-platform play tools and technologies such as Unity, Unreal and AWS; and four, we have over a decade of experience building and operating free-to-play live services. Executing on this opportunity has the potential to meaningfully increase our total addressable market and drive stronger top line and overall operating margins.

Fifth, we are expanding our live services portfolio in international markets and see this as a tremendous growth opportunity. In 2020, we grew our international revenue and bookings to their largest scale in Zynga history. A key driver of this performance was our growth in Asia, where we continue to enhance our ability to self-publish titles including Toon Blast, which was the most downloaded game in Japan on Android in 2020, and Empires & Puzzles, which continued to perform well throughout the year. More recently, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells is showing positive engagement in Japan and South Korea. Over the coming years, we see more opportunities to expand into international markets as we execute on our growth strategy.

Sixth, we are investing in new technologies and solutions to build an advertising network. At the core of Zynga’s live services platform is our first-party data network, which captures key insights about how our players are interacting with our games. We use this data to deliver highly engaging interactive experiences for our players, optimize our user acquisition and determine how best to monetize our games, including advertising. In Q4 2020, we more than doubled our average monthly mobile active users year-over-year to $134 million, significantly expanding our first-party data network and player insights. This increased audience scale coupled with our diversified portfolio of live services and best-in-class data science capabilities gives us every confidence in our ability to navigate upcoming privacy changes and to continue to grow our advertising business.

Furthermore, by building an advertising network, we will unlock more value from our portfolio games and capture more of the economics in the mobile advertising ecosystem. Overall, Zynga is uniquely positioned to capitalize on key megatrends in interactive entertainment. By executing on our growth initiatives of live services, new game development, hyper-casual games, cross-platform play, international expansion and building an advertising network, we see an organic opportunity to more than double the value of our company. Finally, we see more opportunities to acquire talented teams, technologies and franchises to further expand our capabilities and accelerate our growth.

We have a strong track record of executing accretive acquisitions, including Gram Games, Small Giant Games, Peak and Rollic, which have each strengthened our live services platform and demonstrated our ability to collectively grow faster together. Looking ahead, we see more opportunities to continue to be a leading consolidator and a destination of choice for developers in this dynamic, interactive entertainment industry. I am extremely excited for Zynga’s next phase of growth, and I’m confident in our ability to generate more value for our players, teams and shareholders over the long-term.

With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Ger to discuss our results in more detail as well as our outlook for the coming year.

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Frank. Q4 capped off a transformational year for Zynga as we delivered our highest quarterly and annual revenue, bookings and operating cash flow in Zynga history. Our Q4 results were well ahead of our guidance across all key financial measures, driven by strength in our live services, coupled with strong advertising results. Revenue was $616 million, up $52 million year-over-year, comprised of bookings of $699 million, up 61% year-over-year, offset by a net increase in deferred revenue of $83 million, up 187% year-over-year. Revenue was $46 million ahead of our guidance, driven by a $29 million better-than-expected bookings performance and an increase in deferred revenue of $17 million lower than expected.

Live services drove our record results with stronger-than-anticipated performances from Rollic’s hyper-casual portfolio, Empires & Puzzles, Words With Friends and Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells driving our top line beat versus guidance. We generated our highest ever user pay revenue of $499 million, up 54% year-over-year and user pay bookings of $582 million, up 64% year-over-year. We delivered record advertising revenue and bookings of $117 million, up 47% year-over-year. Our stellar advertising performance was driven by strong advertising seasonality and yields as well as an excellent performance from Rollic’s hyper-casual portfolio in its first quarter at Zynga. The primary drivers of our net increase in deferred revenue were bookings from Toon Blast, Toy Blast and Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells.

We ended the year with a deferred revenue balance of $748 million versus $434 million a year ago. Turning to our Q4 operating expenses, GAAP operating expenses were $393 million, up $135 million or 52% year-over-year. While non-GAAP operating expenses were $331 million, up $124 million or 60% year-over-year. The primary driver of the year-over-year increase in GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses is a step-up driven by incremental expenses from our recent acquisitions of Peak and Rollic. Outside of this step-up for investments — excuse me, for acquisitions, the other drivers were the launch marketing for Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells and a slight ramp in R&D investments in our new game pipeline. Year-over-year, GAAP operating expenses were broadly flat at 64% of revenue, and non-GAAP operating expenses decreased to 48% — from 48% to 47% of bookings.

For both GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses, we delivered stronger operating leverage from R&D and G&A, largely offset by higher marketing investments year-over-year. Our strong operating performance and lower-than-expected net increase in deferred revenue was the primary driver of our better-than-expected profitability, where we delivered a net loss of $53 million, $39 million better than our guidance and adjusted EBITDA of $90 million, $55 million better than our guidance. We generated record quarterly operating cash flow of $206 million, up 119% year-over-year. In December, we issued $875 million of convertible notes to strong investor demand, providing net cash proceeds of $794 million after the cost of the capped call transactions and the associated issuance fees.

We also entered into a new $425 million credit facility with an expanded syndicated banks, which replaced the existing $150 million facility. We ended the year with cash and investments of $1.57 billion, which we anticipate will be used primarily to fund future acquisitions and strategic investments to further accelerate our growth. Turning to guidance, we have developed our Q1 and full year ’21 guidance based on the information available to us today, February 10, 2021, and on a similar methodology to prior quarters. Given the higher level of volatility and uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic, there is the potential for a wider range of outcomes, both positive and negative as it relates to our ultimate business results.

That said 2021 guidance is as follows: revenue of $2.6 billion, up $625 million, or 32% year-over-year; a net increase in deferred revenue of $200 million, down $95 million, or 32% year-over-year; bookings of $2.8 billion, up $530 million or 23% year-over-year; a net loss of $150 million versus a net loss of $429 million in 2020; adjusted EBITDA of $450 million, up $184 million or 69% year-over-year. We expect live services to drive the vast majority of our top line performance. This will be driven primarily by full quarter contributions from Toon Blast, Toy Blast, Rollic’s hyper-casual portfolio and Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells as well as modest growth across the remainder of our live services. These gains will be partially offset by declines in older mobile and web titles.

Our guidance also assumes moderate initial top line contributions from Puzzle Combat and FarmVille 3, which are targeted to launch in the first half of 2021 as well as the potential launch of our first Star Wars game by the end of the year. From an advertising perspective, our guidance assumes that the upcoming changes to IDFA will create some pressure on advertising yields — we expect this impact to be short-lived. Our teams have multiple strategies that should more than offset this potential headwind, including yield optimizations and the opportunities to expand our advertising inventory. All-in, we expect to meaningfully grow our advertising revenue and bookings, driven by — primarily by a full year contribution from our hyper-casual titles as well as growth across the rest of our portfolio.

We anticipate an increase in our gross margins due to lower net increase in deferred revenue and higher mix of advertising versus user pay, partially offset by higher amortization expense for acquired intangible assets. In 2021, our ultimate operating leverage will primarily be a function of our live service performance, user pay versus advertising mix, level of investment against new growth initiatives, the timing of new game launches and the level of marketing investment applied to scale new titles and our live services. While we expect to deliver strong absolute year-on-year growth in profitability and expand our GAAP operating margins, we anticipate moderate compression to non-GAAP operating margins as we invest in launch marketing to scale new games launched in 2021, continue to invest in our new games in development and ramp investment in a number of key growth initiatives.

In particular, cross-platform play development, hyper-casual games as well as advertising technologies and solutions. With that said, we expect to see improvements in operating leverage from R&D and G&A, which will be more than offset by higher marketing investments. Our guidance also assumes that we will see higher operating margins in the second half of the year as greater top line scale provides stronger operating leverage. In absolute terms, we expect to deliver significant improvement in profitability, with a net loss of $150 million, $279 million better than a year ago, and adjusted EBITDA of $450 million, up $184 million or 69% year-over-year. Execution of our 2021 plan will deliver another year of double-digit growth.

It will also position us for continued growth in 2022, where we expect low double-digit top line organic growth as well as improved operating leverage from our live services, which will include full year contributions from our 2021 new game launches. Over the next several years, we expect to continue progressing towards achieving our longer-term operating margin goals while generating stronger operating cash flow. Now for Q1 guidance, which is as follows: revenue of $635 million, up $231 million or 57% year-over-year; a net increase in deferred revenue of $45 million versus $21 million a year ago; bookings of $680 million, up $255 million or 60% year-over-year; a net loss of $50 million versus a net loss of $104 million in the prior year quarter; adjusted EBITDA of $100 million, up $32 million or 46% year-over-year.

Our top line performance will be driven by continued strength collectively across our live services as well as year-over-year additions of Toon Blast, Toy Blast, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells as well as existing and new hyper-casual games from Rollic. These gains will be partially offset by declines in older mobile and web titles. Our top line guidance does not assume any meaningful contribution from our games currently in soft launch. We expect gross margins to be down year-over-year primarily due to higher amortization expense for acquired intangible assets and a net increase in deferred revenue partially offset by the impact of a higher advertising mix.

We expect our GAAP operating expenses as a percentage of revenue to significantly improve year-over-year primarily due to lower contingent consideration expense, partially offset by higher stock-based compensation. Outside of these factors, we expect improvements in year-over-year operating leverage in R&D and G&A, which should be more than offset by higher marketing expenses as we continue to invest in our live services, including growth marketing in Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells as well as investment against our existing and new hyper-casual games from Rollic.

We also plan to spend modest test marketing on our titles in soft launch. In absolute terms, we expect to deliver significant improvement in profitability with a net loss of $50 million, $54 million better than a year ago and adjusted EBITDA of $145 million, up $32 million or 46% year-over-year. In conclusion, we are very pleased with the progress we are making against all aspects of our multiyear growth strategy and look forward to continuing that momentum in 2021 with another year of double-digit top line growth and strong year-over-year growth in profitability.

With that, we will open the call to your questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Colin Sebastian with Baird. You may proceed with your question.

Colin Sebastian — Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. — Analyst

Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. Two questions for me, please. First off, on Harry Potter, you talked about the strong start to the game that it will be a meaningful contributor to growth in 2021. If you could perhaps expand a bit on the live services and what’s driving both usage and monetization in a way that gives you confidence in that outlook? And then secondly, on the investments in advertising, tech and solutions, are those internally developed initiatives or do you need to acquire some of that infrastructure? And in the meantime, Ger, how much of an impact from the pending Apple changes are you embedding in Q1 and full year outlook? Thanks.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Hey, Colin, this is Frank. I’ll take the first two questions. And I think the third point about the ad impact, Ger can finish up with. In terms of Harry Potter, what we’re seeing is inside the game service is very strong engagement and retention metrics and very good conversion and monetization. We have several features in the product that have really, really excited players and driven very high levels of interaction and competition. And we have a very strong calendar bold beats planned for the rest of the year. So based on the KPIs, the trends that we’re seeing, the way that the cohorts are acquiring and retaining, we feel very good about the start and the sustainability of that start for Harry Potter. We’re not yet calling it a Forever Franchise, but it’s certainly on trend in that direction.

In terms of the second question about how we’re going to build out our advertising network. Right now, we obviously have a very robust set of inventory inside of our games and an optimization layer for engagement. But as we look to build out from there, we’re going to be looking at key components of technology-related to the demand side, the supply side, the exchange, also looking at attribution. And some of these are going to be technologies that we build internally. Some of them are going to be off-the-shelf incorporation of existing technologies. But we’re also looking at acquisition as a potential opportunity to accelerate in key areas and also to potentially add additional scale to this initiative that we think will be a powerful growth driver for us in ’21 and beyond. Ger?

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. In terms of the impact from changes Apple is planning to roll out. In terms of Q1, there isn’t much impact in that quarter. As it relates to the rest of the year, we’re expecting modest pressure, but we do expect to grow our advertising business with or without Rollic. So from that point of view, it’s one of a number of dynamics going on in our business, both positive and negative, but it’s — we believe there’s modest pressure, but it’s something that we believe we can cover with all of the other levers we have at our beck and call.

Colin Sebastian — Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. — Analyst

Okay. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mario Lu with Barclays. You may proceed with your question.

Mario Lu — Barclays Capital, Inc. — Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. I have one on cross-platform and one on subscription. So for the first one on cross platform, you guys mentioned you guys are investing into it. So any particular studio at Zynga that are creating those games? And are they completely new games or existing Zynga titles that would be made cross platform? And then on subscription, more and more companies are implementing shared subscription models like Fortnite Crew and Roblox Premium. What are your thoughts on subscription overall? And do you think single titles like Empires & Puzzles can see something like this implemented? Thanks.

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Frank, it looks like you’re on mute.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Hi, Mario, this is a question on the cross platform. NaturalMotion is our lead studio for that effort. They are driving a lot of the development as we undertake a number of these projects. They’re very — they published games in Unity, Unreal. They have a very high percentage of the development community, having worked on console and PC games in the past. The titles that we’re contemplating here are new titles to Zynga. And we’ll be starting to look at those titles rolling out more towards the end of ’21 and then scaling up from there.

In terms of your second question about subscription, the place that we are experimenting a great deal is with season passes. The rewards path that you saw in Words With Friends that came out in Q4 and was a key driver of that success is the state of where we’re at on subscriptions. We think that eventually, subscriptions are possible in our business. But it’s one of the things that we’re easing into as we expand the number of season passes across our businesses, which was initially successful in Empires & Puzzles, and we’ve expanded it to Gram, Words With Friends, and we’re looking at future opportunities in addition to that.

Mario Lu — Barclays Capital, Inc. — Analyst

Great. Thanks Frank.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Drew Crum with Stifel. You may proceed with your question.

Drew Crum — Stifel Nicolaus — Analyst

Okay. Thanks, good afternoon. So Frank, you listed five separate studios, I think, that are working on new games. You haven’t revealed what any of those are. Does that suggest these are just very early stage hence, will not be part of the 2022 plan? And then any more detail you’re willing to provide on new Star Wars game? And then separately for Ger, the 2022 low-double-digit growth rate you’re forecasting, given all the investments you’re making in new initiatives on top of the eight Forever Franchises, is that low double-digits rate a reasonable longer-term notional model for the business? Thanks.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Thanks, Drew. For the first question, we did list the number of the studios that are working on titles. These are titles that are in various states of development. Until we have a firm fix on when we would be able to enter soft launch for those games, we typically don’t talk externally about them. But the idea really was to call out the fact that we have a multiyear new product pipeline. We’re really looking at not just the releases in ’21, but ’22, ’23 and ’24 and have starts in all of these different studios against that. Some of them are new brands. Some of them are brands that people would be familiar with. So it’s — we feel very good about the mix. And as we get closer to releasing some of these titles to soft launch and test, we’ll be more explicit about what those titles are and from where they’re coming. In terms of Star Wars, there’ll be more news on the Star Wars title as we progress into the first part of this year. But at this time, that’s about what we’re going to disclose.

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Drew, in terms of thinking about the out years, our ambition every year is to grow our live service and they’re in new games into that live service space over time based on what Frank just said in terms of the new game pipeline. So from an organic perspective, yes, the ambition each year would be to deliver double-digit growth for the foreseeable future, in particular, when you start layering in the potential also from hyper-casual cross-platform and international. So the way, we think about our business is we have a variety of fairly exciting levers to lean into in terms of driving top line growth. And ultimately expand margins as well. So that’s the game plan. We obviously do have the opportunity to use the balance sheet to go, bring some more talented teams to Zynga over time.

Drew Crum — Stifel Nicolaus — Analyst

Great. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley. You may proceed with your question.

Matthew Cost — Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC — Analyst

Hi, guys. Congrats on the quarter. Thanks for taking the question. Two, if I could. You mentioned in the letter, you expect modest growth on the remainder of the portfolio in ’21, that’s excluding Peak, Rollic and potter. Obviously, 2020 was such an incredibly strong year. It seems definitely for kind of that legacy portfolio and some of those core games that have been in there for a long time. How do you get comfortable thinking about the drivers of growth into ’21, given the comps that they’re against?

And how should we think about that? And then the second one is just on the international side, it was a great quarter with international at 57%. You guys have obviously made a lot of progress there in the past year or two. What are the key challenges that you’re still up against in Asia and sort of key execution points you feel you still need to negotiate to really have it be one of your main drivers of growth going forward? Thanks.

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Hi. This is Gerard. I’ll take the first question as it relates to growth across the live services. Absolutely, 2020 was a very strong year for Zynga and our live services, both from an execution on the bold beats, but obviously, with the shelter in place, as well. But as we think about next year, it was the same in Q4. And as we go into this year, our strategy since day one has been focused on the players and the games we have in the marketplace, focused on driving meaningful bold beats into those games and continue to innovate in those games. That’s fundamental to our strategy.

It effectively drove most of the growth outside of acquisitions for the first phase of our growth, and that’s going to be continuing to be the same situation going into next year. So while the baseline absolutely was raised based on some of the shelter in place dynamics. It was also raised based on our execution of bold beats. And each of our games has its own cadence and planned bold beats, and we take each of these games and each of these bold beats with the same focus in terms of talent and execution that we do against our new games. And so that’s why we feel good about being able to, obviously, hold serve and deliver growth into the core live business.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Yeah. Matthew, in terms of international, I think we tend to think of it in terms of opportunities. It’s really a function of getting the title in terms of the new game pipeline really in a position where they’re fully culturalized that we have a very specific go-to-market strategy for each country. And then the good news long-term is that a lot of the territories in Asia are moving to much more of a performance marketing model. So it’s a lot easier for a company like ourselves to come in and be able to acquire users and work with local partners to drive success. That’s what you’ve seen with the success that we had this year with the Peak titles in Japan as well as Empires & Puzzles and the good start that Harry — Harry Potter is starting to see.

Longer term, I think the opportunity is, we need a strategy for China. Right now, we do well in Japan and South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, understanding how and we’ll operate in China is really a function that I think long-term will be positive for us. In the short term, we’re just navigating the particular dynamics that are at play there. And then further out, as India continues to double its gaming market every year, we see that as a real opportunity for us to leverage our local studio there. We have almost 600 developers in India. That, I think, will give us a long-term edge in terms of being able to build out a business in India that will contribute to us.

Thinking further afield, we do see opportunities in the Middle East, in the Americas, as well as even budding markets in Africa, where long-term, this is part of the beauty of mobile is these are high-performance networks. You’re getting high performance, inexpensive smart devices going out, you’re seeing increased purchasing power. And we think that our brands and products long-term will succeed there, and it’s a matter of really creating the right go-to-market strategies and maximizing local conditions. So we’re very, very excited about the opportunity to grow further there.

Matthew Cost — Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC — Analyst

Great. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mike Ng with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed with your question.

Michael Ng — Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC — Analyst

Hi, good afternoon. Thank you very much for the question. I just wanted to ask about hyper-casual, which you cited as a transformational growth opportunity. Could you just talk about what you learned about the hyper-casual category, particularly in this last quarter that merits this additional investment? Is there something strategic about the category as it relates to either user acquisition or building out the advertising network that gets you excited about it? And then as a follow-up to that, is there an update for how much Rollic is pacing in terms of annualized revenue? Thank you.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Yeah, Mike, I’ll take the first question, and Gerard can take the second. In terms of what we like about hyper-casual, the team at Rollic is spectacular. They have an absolutely fantastic culture, great leadership. And their knowledge about the category is really phenomenal. We’ve learned a great deal from them, and they’ve been leveraging a lot of the systems and technologies that we have to even grow faster. Some of the things that we’ve learned about hyper-casual players that we really are excited about is that many of them are first-time players to mobile. So being able to acquire players into our network through a game like High Heels or Blob Runner 3D, and then over time, introducing them to other Zynga games, we think is a real opportunity.

The second thing is that these players play a lot of games, and they not just play hyper-casual titles, they’re also playing — I’m talking about different segment of players, they also play a lot of regular mobile games. So they’re high consumers of titles. They tend to be younger than the typical target that we have at Zynga, and we like that kind of incremental growth there as well. And as you think about the user acquisition funnel, these are players that are being acquired for pennies that are not sensitive to IDFA and are able to be brought into our network. And if you think about the arbitrage and the long-term nature of the relationship that we’re going to build with them, it’s a very positive thing for our company overall. So we — when we’ve been looking at this category for many years and a lot of folks thought that hyper-casual was fad early on.

And I honestly think it’s a new form of entertainment on the phones, they dominate the charts in terms of free-to-play games. They’re instantly on. They’re simple ideas. They’re fun to play. They work off of advertising. So they’re very accessible. Over time, I think they’ll evolve into bigger games, maybe games of IAP. They’ll expand internationally more so than they have, so we like the early indications here. We like the player profiles we’re seeing. We like the behaviors. It’s incremental. And I think when you start to think about our expansion of our advertising network, having this at the top of the funnel and being able to bring them through is a significant advantage for us versus not having a hyper-casual part of our portfolio. Ger?

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, in terms of — yeah, we’re very happy with the pacing — how Rollic is pacing. It obviously had a very good first quarter with the company. We don’t give out specific individual title or portfolio growth rates. But how I can answer your question is we expect the overall shape of the ’21 bookings to be 85% user pay and 15% advertising. And the majority of the advertising growth you’re going to see year-on-year is going to come from Rollic. We do expect to see some growth from the rest of the portfolio, but the majority is going to come from Rollic. That will give you a good indicator of its growth rate for the year.

Michael Ng — Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC — Analyst

Great. Thank you, Frank. Thank you, Ger.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Cheers.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mike Hickey with Benchmark Company. You may proceed with your question.

Mike Hickey — The Benchmark Company, LLC — Analyst

Hey, Frank, Ger, Rebecca, congrats guys on a quarter, great job. Two questions from me. First one within your sort of social Poker Slots business. Curious how that’s performing? And I know I’m zeroing in here, I apologize, but Michigan, assume Michigan just legalized online gaming went live January, February, just curious if you’re seeing sort of any impact from the RMG operators in that state on your social portfolio? And I guess, same question, if you guys have considered strategic alternatives to your Slots and Poker business? It seems like these are really compelling assets for the RMG operators in terms of user acquisition. Second question for me. If you will, curious your thoughts on Glu Mobile, I think, Frank you know Nick and his team really well. It seems like they’ve broke out a great culture, good portfolio of games, like casual games, the same GL cost synergies. So just curious why you wouldn’t compete for that asset? It seems to make a lot of sense. Thanks guys.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

Hey Mike, thanks for the questions and the comments. The first question about Social Casino and Poker. This year in 2020, we’ve seen very positive performance from the games that we provide there, whether it’s Game of Thrones or Hit it Rich. And in fact, our poker title has been coming on strong at late. So overall, that category has been performing very strong. We’re not seeing any impact from the expansion of Real Money Gambling in Michigan or in the other state. We typically find that the players of our Social Slots and Social Casino games enjoy the way that they play. They’re not really necessarily in it for the making of the money or the real money part of it, the social nature of it, the fun, game play, the engagement and the retention is really what’s driving a lot of their behavior.

So it’s more traditional game behavior than what you might have seen from an online gambling site, for example. So we think that, that is an enduring thing, if you look at where categories have had significant real money gaming in Europe, for example, in other regions, the social side of it, the free-to-play side of it has continued to be vibrant and very successful. So I think they can coexist and are, in some ways, somewhat complementary. With regards to looking at strategic alternatives, we’re very pleased with the performance of Zynga Poker and Social Casino as part of our portfolio. We’re very proud of the teams and the work that they do there. So that’s not something that we’re talking about in any great detail. As it relates to Glu, congratulations to Nick and the team, they’ve done a fantastic job with Glu over the years.

We’re very happy for them in this transition to being a part of Electronic Arts. We wish them well. They’ve been a great competitors and a big part of the industry. So it’s sad to see them go, but at the same time, we’re going to continue to keep competing with their franchises. As far as an asset goes, we look at all kinds of assets when we’re thinking about building our business inorganically. It just so happened that the way that Zynga is configured and where we’re going with our growth initiatives in advertising, hyper-casual, cross-platform play, the acquisitions that we had just executed with Rollic and Peak, the make — the combination of our two companies wasn’t something that really was something that we chased. It was a lot of it was timing and where we were going strategically. So again, wishing Nick and the gang well at Glu.

Mike Hickey — The Benchmark Company, LLC — Analyst

Thanks guys. Good luck.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from David Beckel with Berenberg Capital. You may proceed with your question.

David Beckel — Berenberg Capital Markets — Analyst

Hey. Thanks so much for the questions. I have two pertaining to the advertising side of the business. First, Ger, or Frank, whoever wants to take it. I was hoping you could expand a little bit on a comment you made about why you don’t expect IDFA to have a significant impact on your business? Not presuming it should necessarily, but you did mention yield optimization strategies. Would you consider these workarounds to what Apple has in mind for implementation or are they separate and apart sort of organic strategies that you’ve developed with your partners? If you could dive into that just a little bit. And then secondly, on the ad network side, I’m curious what portion of your total ad inventory, do you envision being sold, I’ll just use the term organically, for lack of a better word, through your own network? And what type of savings do you envision on that portion of the inventory? Thanks.

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

David, in terms of the strategies I was referring to, I know IDFA is getting a lot of air time both in the press and across the industry. But practically speaking, our industry always has puts and takes that we deal with. And from our vantage point, we just added this one to the puts and takes, and we’re continually working with our advertising partners to optimize yields to find different offerings that we can embed within our games that are player friendly, but also gives us new opportunities to deliver advertising bookings and revenue. And so from that point of view, definitely there’s been a lot more discussions with our partners and how we can operate in the post IDFA world.

But I have to say it’s been, for the most part, business as usual in terms of us looking to optimize and grow our business. So from that point of view, it’s not like there was a separate set of specific initiatives. What I will say is having such a strong and diverse audience base that we do have, from an advertising network point of view, in terms of our games and our player base is absolutely helping us to be a lot more resilient than if we were a single game are — we were a part of the ecosystem that’s purely focused on tracking and profiling. So from that point of view, we feel good that we’re obviously a diverse portfolio of games.

We’ve got a diverse audience base, and we’ve got probably some of the best-in-class data science and analytics in this area. And so we’re comfortable that we’ve got the strategies and the options to deal with IDFA and continue to grow the business. On the ad network side, we’re not at a point where we will declare what percentage of our business will go through the network. But obviously, our ambition is to is to have a significant part of our business go through our own network because, obviously, from our point of view, that makes a lot of sense given the size of our own audience base and the capabilities we can build in to expand our position in the ecosystem. And it obviously will help us to increase our share of economics on the full value chain.

David Beckel — Berenberg Capital Markets — Analyst

Great. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Thornton with Truist Securities. You may proceed with your question.

Matthew Thornton — Truist Securities — Analyst

Hey, good afternoon, Frank. Good afternoon, Ger. Most of my have been answered, but maybe just a couple of quick housekeeping questions and then one bigger picture one for Frank. Maybe, Ger, just housekeeping wise, the contribution from new titles in ’21, I apologize if I missed this, but are you able to maybe just quantify or maybe box in a little further what that means? Is that less than 5% of bookings or any color you can provide there?

Similarly, the long-term operating margin target. I’m just curious kind of how you’re thinking about that these days, whether that’s 30%, 35% or I don’t see why there’s a ceiling there, but any color there? And then Frank, just M&A landscape more broadly. Obviously, you talked about the deal earlier this week a little bit. We’ve had a couple of new specs come out. Probably more to come. I’m just curious how you’re feeling just about the opportunities out there as we go into ’21. Do you still see an attractive opportunity kind of landscape out there? Any color there would be great. Thanks guys.

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, this is Ger. I’ll answer the contribution. We’ve put a very small percentage in. It’s low single-digits as it relates to new games. Obviously, there’s a potential for that to be larger depending on the timing of those games and how they scale. But as in past years, we set up our guide for the year focusing on what we can have a stronger level of prediction against, i.e., live services and obviously, layering in some of the marketing that we’re targeting against these new game launches. And Matt, what was the second — I didn’t catch the second part of your two parter for me.

Matthew Thornton — Truist Securities — Analyst

The — and I don’t know this is you or Frank, but just long-term operating margin, just how you’re thinking about that target, you referred to kind of making progress towards that target. I’m just kind of curious how you’re thinking about what that target is and whether that’s changed at all given the scale you have?

Gerard Griffin — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. I think you used the operative word, it’s all about scale, and it’s about execution. And if you think about last year, we came off a year in 2019, where we delivered 21%. We had some really strong quarters in 2020. We started with 21%, then to 26%, and we ended with a 25%, and we came close to delivering 25% for the full fiscal which is actually — is the next sort of target zipcode for us is to get into that 25% operating range and then ultimately head towards 30%. How do you do that? It is fundamentally scaling your live services, i.e., either through organic growth off the core base or continuing to bring profitable new games into that mix and also expanding our advertising footprint, whether it be in hyper-casual or our core business.

And expanding into some of the new areas that Frank mentioned, whether it’s cross-platform, whether it’s into expanding our addressable market internationally, they are all additional levers. But as you’ve seen, the growth — we’ve taken the company from — was somewhere around $700 million and 2% flow through up to north of $2 billion and 25% last year. And this year, we’re showing some compression. We’re still looking to deliver at least 23% this year, but in a year where we’re launching — we plan to launch more new games. We plan to invest incrementally into some very exciting new areas. And if we execute against that, that obviously sets us up very nicely for ’22 and beyond. So that’s the game plan.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

And Matt, in terms of your question about the M&A environment, it’s obviously the growth in interactive entertainment saw in 2020 has really brought a lot of attention. The expansion in the capital market is certainly one factor. When we think about Zynga’s position in that overall context, we’ve been a successful consolidator over the last few years. And I think it really comes down to the position the company has in many ways. We like to look for companies that are — can grow faster as part of Zynga. We like to find companies that have compatible cultures that are looking for autonomy that are interested in independent yet being part of a company where they can really leverage the tools of our live services platform.

We think that those opportunities are still out there. There’s still a lot of great developers that are small, young, growing. We think that there’s going to be an opportunity for us to look further afield into capabilities related to cross-platform play, in terms of advertising, and then also the hyper-casual category is a place as it expands. There’s a lot of interesting companies there as well. So we believe in competition. We welcome it. When companies go public, we think it’s great. These are companies, we typically, compete against in the — they were private, we’re public, it’s now everybody is public. I think it’s good for investors, I think it’s good the company in the category.

I think it legitimizes to a greater degree, interactive entertainment. And as more of these companies come public, I think it’s a dynamic that will really create more growth and innovation overall. And I think within the M&A space, you’re seeing a lot of activity, but at the same time, we feel like we have a very strong organic growth strategy. And so that means we can be pretty selective about what we go after from an inorganic standpoint and make sure that we continue to do the right deals at the right time. We do not have fear of missing out. That is not a dynamic at our company. It’s really a function of focusing on growth, execution. And if we find a great team with a great culture, we’ll go for it.

Operator

Thank you. And we have time for one more question. Eric Handler, with MKM partners. You may proceed with your question.

Eric Handler — MKM Partners LLC — Analyst

Thank you much for fitting me in here. Two questions for you. First, as you think about your key revenue drivers, at least on the mobile online game bookings line, do you see this year being driven more by the increase in players or DAUs or more by the spending per player? And I have a follow-up.

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

I’ll take that question. It’s actually a little bit of both. We are seeing an expansion in audience. Clearly, you saw that in our numbers. A lot of those are players from hyper-casual. So they tend to be lower. They monetize less, their advertising base and the games are shorter in nature. If you go to our games like Empires & Puzzles or Harry Potter or Words With Friends, which now has a boost economy tied to IAP, we’re actually seeing very good increases in conversion and ARPDAU. So it’s just if you look at our overall mix, we have a lot of games now like hyper-casual that brings down some of the averages. But overall, we’re seeing growth in audience on hyper casual, but at the same time, in some of our traditional games, retention engagement is very strong. And over the course of 2020, conversion and monetization did rise.

Eric Handler — MKM Partners LLC — Analyst

Okay. And then now that you sort of reloaded your dry powder for M&A, and you’re also sort of investing in cross-platform opportunities. Are we thinking maybe too myopically about just looking at companies in the mobile game space? Would you take a look at a company that’s got maybe a good PC or console game and the ability to maybe take that to the mobile platform?

Frank Gibeau — Chief Executive Officer and Director

I think we’re an interactive entertainment company. We’re mobile-first, and we’ve built our business there. But as we look ahead, what we’re trying to signal to investors is that some of the biggest opportunities out there are in cross play style franchises. That’s where you see a lot of billion-dollar franchises. And they’re driven by free-to-play dynamics and live services, which we think we have a competitive advantage in. So if we’re able to find opportunities to partner with a development organization that might be on a different platform that we can combine with mobile we think that, that’s a rich opportunity to investigate. I don’t think you’d see us just doing a console game by itself or a PC game by itself. We’re really more interested in PC, console and mobile games that are cross play, that are seamless, that are or synchronous and all working together in a free-to-play live services environment. And that’s where we see the big win.

Eric Handler — MKM Partners LLC — Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]