Key Notes
- G5’s quarterly revenue fell 20% to $19.3 million, while monthly unique players declined 15% to 2.2 million.
- Operating profit rose 42% to $1.9 million as lower costs and direct sales lifted gross margin to a record 74.1%.
- Management expects staffing to settle near 450 by year-end and estimates annualized savings of $14 million from redundancies.
G5 Entertainment’s third-quarter revenue fell 20% to $19.3 million as its established games lost players and paying customers. The Swedish publisher nevertheless increased operating profit, helped by lower costs and a growing contribution from its own distribution and payment channels.
The company’s November 4 financial report shows the pressure on a portfolio that includes Hidden City, Sherlock and the Jewels of Rome family. Management expects its workforce to settle at around 450 by year-end as it shifts older games toward maintenance and seeks growth through the G5 Store.
Fewer Players and a Sharper Drop in Payers
Average monthly active users fell 14% year over year to 3.2 million during July–September. That measure counts someone playing two G5 games twice; the separate monthly unique-user figure, which removes that overlap, declined 15% to 2.2 million.
Paying customers fell faster. Average monthly unique payers dropped 24% to 84,600, while monthly gross revenue per paying user rose 6% to $75.20. Higher spending per payer therefore only partly offset the smaller customer base.
| Metric | Q3 2026 | Yearly Change |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users | 3.2 million | −14% |
| Monthly unique users | 2.2 million | −15% |
| Daily active users | 0.9 million | −15% |
| Monthly unique payers | 84,600 | −24% |
The weakness runs through G5’s major games. Revenue from the Jewels of Rome family fell 39% year over year and 11% from the preceding quarter. Sherlock declined 23% annually, while Hidden City fell 11%.
Those measures describe current activity, rather than lifetime reach. We covered Playrix’s nine-year Homescapes milestone of roughly 773.5 million downloads; that cumulative total cannot be compared directly with G5’s quarterly active-player averages.
Record Gross Margin Despite Lower Revenue
Gross profit declined 16% to $14.3 million, but gross margin reached a company record of 74.1%, up from 71.2%. G5 retained a larger share of each revenue dollar even as the total amount coming in decreased.
The company attributes that improvement to direct-to-consumer sales, advertising and mobile payments it processes itself. G5 Store gross revenue increased 15.7% year over year and 6.8% from the second quarter. Third-party game distribution through the store grew 41% sequentially, although management says it has lower margins than publishing G5-owned games.
Advertising accounted for 3.8% of quarterly revenue after growing 53% sequentially. Meanwhile, G5 directly processed 21% of revenue from mobile platforms, reducing its reliance on conventional storefront payment routes.
Operating profit, or EBIT, rose 42% to $1.9 million, and net profit increased to $2.3 million from $1.4 million. User-acquisition spending fell 31% to $3.4 million. The quarter also included $800,000 in severance costs, a $300,000 benefit from released social-security accruals and a $300,000 positive currency revaluation.
A Smaller Team and Less Investment in Older Games
CEO Vlad Suglobov says redundancies have produced an estimated $14 million in annualized savings, with staffing likely to stabilize near 450 by the end of 2026. That is management’s expectation, rather than a confirmed year-end headcount.
The scale follows an earlier reduction. In its August update, G5 said its workforce had fallen from about 830 at the beginning of the second quarter to around 550 in early August.
The Jewels family and The Secret Society entered G5’s “Harvest” category in September. The report defines these as owned games that are no longer profitable to operate as actively developed titles, with technical support provided by a central team. Suglobov describes the broader focus for older games as fine-tuning performance and sustaining long-term returns.
G5 is still iterating on an unnamed new game, including its longer-term player metrics, before moving further through its launch process. Management says strong early metrics need more testing against established competitors, leaving no confirmed global release date in this report.
