Image source: The Motley Fool.
Glu Mobile Inc (GLUU)
Q1Â 2019 Earnings Call
May. 06, 2019, 5:00 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to the First Quarter 2019 Glu Mobile Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Herman Singh, Vice President, Finance and Investor relations. You may begin sir.
Herman Singh -- Vice President-Finance and Investor relations
Thank you operator. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us on Glu Mobile's first quarter 2019 earnings conference call. On the call today are Nick Earl, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Eric Ludwig, COO and Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we will be making forward-looking-statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the Company. Any forward-looking-statements that we make today are based on assumptions that the Company believes to be reasonable as of this date. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of future events. We caution you to consider the important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking-statements in the press release and during this conference call. These risk factors are described more fully in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on Forms 10-k and 10-Q.
During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from a substitute for or superior to GAAP results. And we encourage investors to consider all measures before making any investment decisions. For complete information regarding our non-GAAP financial information, the most directly comparable GAAP measure and quantitative reconciliation of those figures, please refer to the supplemental presentation accompanying today's earnings call that can be accessed via our investor website, www.glu.com/investors.
As a reminder, consistent with our financial presentation and for all the information aside from bookings, whereas otherwise stated below, we will discuss results on a GAAP basis and refer you to changes in deferred revenue, the deferred cost of revenue and the non-GAAP operating expense totals in our financial tables. This data will be provided a GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation of the quarter's financial results based on the same methodology we've used in prior quarters. We're also providing a supplementary Excel file on our IR website to more easily aid in this reconciliation. Both the PowerPoint and Excel file are now accessible on the website. We encourage you to follow along with the slides during this earnings conference call. And with that, I would like to turn the call over to Nick.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Herman. Hello and thank you for joining us for Glu's first quarter 2019 earnings call. I will review highlights from a strong Q1 financial results and provide an update on our game development plans. Eric will then discuss our Q1 financial results in more detail as well as our second quarter and full-year guidance. Following a record year for bookings and adjusted EBITDA profitability, it was off to a strong start in 2019. Total bookings were $92.6 million, 7% over last year's first quarter. A solid top line performance drove the fifth consecutive quarter of increased adjusted EBITDA profitability year-over-year. In addition to reporting solid bookings increases in our three Growth Games, we have made great progress with WWE Universe, Diner DASH Adventures and Disney Sorcerer's Area, and we expect all three to be globally live by August. Design Home, Covet Fashion and Tap Sports Baseball franchise collectively grew 30% year-over-year and contributed 78% to total bookings, up from 64% a year ago. This consistent performance reflects our solid execution against Glu's long-term strategy to build a more predictable business based on titles that grow bookings year-over-year.
Let's take a closer look at each game performance compared to last year's first quarter. Design Home grew bookings 23% to $42.2 million. We introduced meta features in April. And while still on the early stages, we're off to a fantastic start. The strong KPIs that we saw for these features in beta testing indicate that the meta game is likely to drive increased long-term retention and in turn higher LTV. We are confident that the meta game roll-out, combined with our internationalization efforts and e-commerce partnership, will energize our player base and drive monetization. In addition, Roomage, an international version of Design Home developed by Cocone in Japan, were launched this quarter. More to come as we see as performance in the coming months.
Covet Fashion had an outstanding quarter, which included the top three grossing days of its almost six year life. Bookings grew 38% to $16.8 million, setting a new record. This growth was driven by a strong spring season launch, combined with several new merchandising strategies. We are enhancing the game experience with a new user flow and increased depth of play with the launch of the Prop Shop this quarter. Later this year, we will be adding subscriptions, merchandising improvements and an enhanced social layer.
Tap Sports Baseball produced better-than-expected results in a seasonally soft quarter as bookings grew 49% to $13.4 million. We launched Tap Sports Baseball '19 on March 27 with Mookie Betts as the new cover athlete. Updated features include new legends, more club events and subscriptions as well as improved technology to protect against exploits. We're seeing positive momentum through the first six weeks of the MLB season and on track to outperform last year's title.
Turning to our 2019 slate WWE Universe, Diner DASH Adventures and Disney Sorcerer's Area are all scheduled to launch globally in the May to August time frame as we previously announced. WWE Universe launched its fourth beta iteration with exceptionally encouraging CPIs, monetization and conversion metrics. In short, we believe we have found the fun with a new core mechanic and a rebalancing of the meta game. WWE is a great reflection of our successful creative process led by our studio heads, continually fine-tuning the game that meets the potential of a growth game. We have increased confidence that WWE has all of the elements to attract and retain a global audience year-round. We expect this title to globally launch in late May with a strong marketing campaign in conjunction with WWE set to kick off this summer.
Diner DASH Adventures's the latest addition to our original IP franchise, has shown very positive KPIs in all territories, including two key ones, Australia and Canada. Early metrics support our confidence as retention, monetization, CPIs and LTV have all been strong. We are particularly excited about this title given the accretive economics that original Glu IP provides. We expect this title to launch globally in July.
We continue to be extremely optimistic about Disney Sorcerer's Area based on positive user reception and feedback. This title has a complex elder game with a deep economy, key systems that require sophisticated tuning, but systems that we will what -- believe will drive long-term engage and retention.
We have a high degree of confidence in our proven team as we move toward an expected worldwide launch in August. Now that I've discussed our current live games and near-term launches, let me provide some context to our future development plans. Looking back, we made two transformative acquisitions that we have nurtured into our three growth franchises through Glu's disciplined investment and creative process, ultimately delivering increasing profitability and significant ROI.
The first was an aqua hire (ph) of a four-person studio that has built our Tap Sports Baseball franchise and since joining Glu, delivered lifetime bookings of a $185 million. The second acquisition was Crowdstar, which included a live version of Covet Fashion and a beta version of Design Home. The studio was acquired for $45 million in November of 2016 and has generated $422 million in lifetime bookings following the acquisition.
Over the last two and a half years, our focus has been on growing these franchises through new feature development, the introduction of deeper elder systems, more sophisticated monetization and applying our live ops best practices. In parallel, we have diligently followed our development of prototyping processes and greenlit through internally developed titles for 2019, all with Growth Game potential. We believe these next three titles put us in a great position to stack our bookings and scale our business. We're extremely excited to continue Glu's -- continue the Glu growth story with this next phase.
Looking into 2020 and beyond, we have further strengthened our pipeline with three additional titles that are currently in different phases of development. Our Toronto studio, the creators of our very successful Kim Kardashian Hollywood title, is developing an original IP. They first developed under Glu's Growth Game creative process. I'm very excited to announce today that we plan to have this title in beta ahead of our next earnings call. In addition, we have made great progress with the next generation of our Deer Hunter franchise, which includes deep meta, social gameplay and event-driven live ops.
We're excited about the potential of coupling this iconic Glu IP with our rigorous creative development process, and we expect to have it in beta by year-end. Our third title in our pipeline is a new original IP lifestyle game from a Crowdstar studio that is in the early stages of development. Stay tuned as we plan to discuss further details as we move through the year.
In closing, 2019 is off to an excellent start. Our first quarter results were driven by outstanding performance of our core Growth Games portfolio, our successful lives ops strategy and new features and systems. These initiatives all provide us with strong momentum heading into 2019. As we look ahead this year, our three new titles scheduled to launch by the end of August have all delivered positive beta results. We are excited to stack these new potential growth titles onto our already solid core business as we continue making excellent progress in bolstering our pipeline. A strong Q1 results and the added contribution we expect from our upcoming launches support our confidence in Glu as an industry leader in mobile gaming.
I'll turn it over to Eric now.
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Thank you, Nick. And good afternoon to everyone on the call. I will provide a closer look at our financial results for the first quarter and then discuss guidance for the second quarter and full year 2019. We delivered strong results that exceeded guidance in the first quarter. Revenue was $95.9 million, an 18% increase over the comparable quarter last year. Bookings reached $92.6 million, a 7% increase over last year's first quarter. 74% of bookings came from royalty free Glu IP titles. Bookings from ads came in at $12.3 million or 13% of total bookings. Ad bookings grew 32% over the same quarter last year, driven by strong performance in Covet Fashion in a seasonally weak ad quarter. We reported a GAAP profit of $663,000. This was the first quarterly GAAP profit since Q1 2015 and reflects the execution on our Growth Game strategy in conjunction with disciplined OpEx management.
The bookings outperformance is led by our three Growth Games, which contributed 78% of total bookings. On a year-over-year basis, Design Home bookings rose to $42.2 million, a 23% increase. Covet Fashion grew bookings 38% to $16.8 million, and the Tap Sports Baseball franchise was up 49% to $13.4 million. This quarter's bookings included only five days of Tap Sports Baseball 2019, which launched on March 27. The baseball studio team did an outstanding job in maintaining a large user base in the 2018 version and converting them to the 2019 version without having to reacquire the users.
On the expense side, adjusted platform commissions were $24 million. Adjusted royalties were $6 million with hosting costs at $1.5 million. UA and marketing spend $23 million compared to $22.2 million last year. UA and marketing as a percent of bookings declined from 26% last Q1 to 25% this quarter. Operating expenses, excluding $23 million of UA and marketing costs, were $30.5 million, up $2.5 million on a year-over-year basis. The bookings outperformance resulted in higher adjusted EBITDA profitability and guidance. As we discussed on our last call in the fourth quarter, we received four monthly payments from one of our platform partners and as such, we expected the first quarter would only have two monthly payments. Additionally, the first quarter is when we make our annual employee cash bonus payments. As a result, we used $2.9 million of cash from operations. We entered the first quarter with the cash balance of $92.7 million. As the year progresses, we will generate free cash flow and expect to end the year with approximately $145 million of cash.
Turning to guidance. Over the last two quarters, as we provided our preliminary view on 2019, we broke out our bookings guidance between our core business and new titles. With all three new titles scheduled to globally launch between May and August and our visibility into the full year improves, we think it's prudent to revert to our historical philosophy and provide a single bookings guidance figure. I wanted to provide color on some competitive UA pressure that we saw in the first quarter.
Starting in early February, we saw a significant uptick in aggressive UA campaigns from two casual game publishers. This had the effect of driving up CPI costs for Design Home, Covet Fashion and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. As a result, we've dialed back our UA spend for our female-centric titles, and this has impacted bookings for these titles in the first half of 2019. We expect Design Home and Covet Fashion to collectively be flat from the first quarter to the second quarter. We believe it is in the companies and shareholders' best interests to not drive short-term bookings growth via unprofitable UA campaigns. From here, we'll continue to monitor the competitive environment and react accordingly in alignment with our ROI-focused UA strategy. While this competitive pressure remains fluid, we are starting to see early signs of easing. We continue to be confident that our strong user base and the favorable introduction of meta, e-commerce and internationalization Design Home sets it up for increased bookings in the second half of the year.
Additionally, two weeks ago, one of our distribution partners banned the use industrywide of the certain type of in-game offer called pay-per-engagement. This offer was used in each of our Growth Games. We are working with our offer wall partners to find alternate inventory. But we are taking a cautious approach, and we built some softness in advertising bookings into our second quarter guide.
Turning to our slate of new titles. We are very pleased with the recent update to WWE Universe. The fourth iteration has significantly improved conversion and monetization, and we are preparing for a late May launch. Diner DASH Adventures is seeing very good retention and monetization and is scheduled for release in July. Both of these titles are also seeing great CPIs in the beta territories, which would imply the competitive UA environment may not be affecting these titles.
Disney Sorcerer's Arena just went live with the new beta build last week, and the studio continues to adjust the game's balance and tune the economy. We expect to launch Disney in August. We believe the addition of these three potential Growth Games will further diversify our portfolio and give us increased flexibility to direct UA spend toward higher pockets of our ROI. In turn, we believe this should provide the added benefit of insulating the business from episodic headwinds that arise from a UA perspective.
For the second quarter, we expect bookings in the range of $100 million to $102 million, a 2% year-over-year increase at the midpoint. This includes a small contribution from WWE giving us late May launch. I would point out that at the midpoint and high end of guidance, this would be the highest bookings quarter ever for Glu. On the expense side and at the midpoint of bookings, we expect adjusted commissions to be $26.1 million, adjusted royalties of $6.6 million and hosting costs of $1.4 million. We are very pleased with the expected CPI and estimated LTVs from our new title launches, and we believe there will be a favorable ROI to front load UA spend. As such, our UA costs in Q2 and Q3 will be at higher levels in the prior year comps and the first quarter of 2019.
We expect UA and marketing costs to be approximately 27.4% of bookings and all other adjusted operating expenses are forecasted to be $32.9 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA profit in the second quarter to be relatively unchanged with the first quarter of 2019 on an absolute dollar basis. Glu is focused on building a durable and diversified portfolio of Growth Games. As we progressed through the year, our core business consisting of Design Home, Tap Sports Baseball and Covet Fashion will be bolstered with our three new title launches. We are adding the Q1 bookings beat and increasing our bookings guidance for the full year 2019 by $10 million to range of $445 million to $455 million, representing 17% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. This portfolio effect is allowing us to increase full-year guidance as we expect to more than offset the competitive UA pressure on the core business, which is being reduced by double-digit millions of dollars, with strength from WWE, continued confidence in Diner DASH Adventures and the addition of Disney in our guidance.
On the expense side, for the full year at the midpoint of our guidance range, adjusted platform commissions are expected to be $116.9 million, adjusted royalties of $30.2 million and hosting costs of $6.8 million. UA and marketing costs are expected to be $116.2 million or 25.8% of total bookings, with all other adjusted operating expenses at $128.2 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA profitability to ramp from Q2 to Q3 and again from Q3 to Q4 on the backs of the three product launches. We also expect the full year 2019 to be GAAP profitable.
Looking even further ahead, we believe that we remain on track with the margin targets we discussed on our last earnings call of an adjusted EBITDA margin between 15% and 20%, when we achieved bookings of $500 million. Please note that range is largely dependent upon the bookings mix of licensed IP titles such as WWE, Tap Sports Baseball and Disney against royalty free Glu IP titles like Diner DASH Adventures, Design Home and Covet Fashion. We expect additional margin expansion if and when booking scales above $500 million.
In summary, this is an exciting time for the mobile gaming industry and Glu in particular. We have just reported the first GAAP profitable quarter in four years, a new milestone in our long-term plan to build a sustainable and profitable stand-alone mobile gaming business. We are now entering Phase 2 of Nick's strategy set when he was promoted to CEO.
Over the last two and a half years, we have nurtured our three Growth Games that we acquired empowered our creative leaders to think big and equip studios with tools and infrastructure to optimize live operations and events. These efforts have yielded a profitable and growing core business. We are very excited for the next phase of growth that we believe will come by launching our first three games greenlit under next leadership.
As previously noted, we expect these titles to launch between May and August, and we have increased confidence that these titles will become Growth Games. We also have three other titles in development for potential launches in 2020 and beyond, all of which are royalty free Glu IP. We expect the first of these 2020 potential titles to launch in beta before the next earnings call.
In closing, we are excited about our performance in Q1 and even more excited for what's to come in 2019 and beyond. We are confident that we remain on track to reach both our creative aspirations and our financial goals.
With that, we will now take questions. Operator?
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) And our first question comes from Mike Olsen from Piper Jaffray. Your line is open.
Mike Olsen -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Hey good afternoon. Just regarding the pipeline, I have a good understanding I think of your three titles for 2019 and 2020 that you described, but could you clarify the three internally developed titles. I think you said you greenlit this year, are those in additional three titles beyond the three for '19 and three for '20? And if so, what's the expected timing of those three additional titles if there are additional. And then second, you talked about the importance of some of the acquisitions you've done and the success of those deals. And just given that track record, would you say you're actively looking to add more through acquisition or more focused primarily on what you currently have in the portfolio or in development today? Thanks.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Mike. Yeah. So just to be clear, we're launching three games this year that we've been talking about for quite a while and those launches are May to August time frame. And we have, in parallel, been working on three other games that will loosely launch around 2020. We'll have a couple of those in beta this year. We've talked about that. That's Deer Hunter. And we just talked about a new original title coming out of our Toronto studio where Kim was developed. We'll actually have that believe or not in beta before the next earnings call. And then the third, which I guess look at it is three this year and, sort of, three next year. The third of the three next year is the one we just talked about, which is still in the early stages, but that's -- that will come from Crowdstar and is really a natural evolution of the lifestyle games that they've delivered with Covet and Design Home. We haven't said anything more about that and we'll leave it at that for now. But we're very excited about those all three of the next ones because they're all IP that we own, so very creative for margins and allows the team to really develop game they want to develop, which has been great for us.
In terms of the second question, M&A is a -- it's something we take very seriously that the Company was effectively built on really strong acquisitions. I talked about that in my remarks and it's something that we continue to monitor and if and when we find something that is both culturally and financially accretive to the Company, we'll absolutely pull the trigger. With that said and I've said this several times before, we really like the internal model and we're really pursuing the internally built games model because we feel like it is a great use of our resources. It gives us control over what we're building we kind of get capture all the upside and we just think the ROI is higher on these internally built games, which is a bit better use of capital in terms of how much we spend and what we have to gain in the long run. So for the short term, we focused on these internally built games. We'll be looking for opportunities on the outside, but we view those as nice to have not must-haves.
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Yeah. Mike, if I can just add there. I mean if you want to call Phase 1 and Phase 2 as I talked about in my script, Phase 1 when Nick got hired as CEO, promoted as CEO, it was really harvesting that the three growth titles that came from our acquisitions and that we combined with the acquisitions really nurture them into becoming what they are today. We've heard from investors a lot that they really want to see whether we can launch new titles from the ground-up and we're really entering now Phase 2, which is launching three games that have been greenlit from the ground-up under Nick's tutelage in the next four months. May to August, we will have WWE, Diner DASH Adventures and Disney Sorcerer's Arena. So we're very excited about being able to take a lower shot on goal. I mean, we'll spend less than $10 million to get our Disney Sorcerer's Arena title from ideation to global launch, excluding marketing and UA costs.
I mean if you compare that to what you would call -- what we would get for spending $10 million on a M&A transaction, you would not get a lot. We would not be adding a lot of revenue potential from a $10 million M&A transaction and we think that, that use of capital and the way that we are now building our creative process internally really sets us up for being able to prove out both the historical acquisition chops and integration, coupled with now our ability to launch greenlit launch from the ground-up new titles. And what's great about next year's three titles is they are all Glu IP -- royalty free Glu IP. So we can do a lot more things with our own IP and have a better marginal flow through.
Mike Olsen -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Thank you.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Mike.
Operator
Thank you. And our next question comes from Doug Creutz from Cowen. Your line is now open.
Doug Creutz -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst
Hey, thank you. You talked about the difficult UA environment a bit in your commentary. I just wondered if you could maybe elaborate on what you think is driving that and to what extent, do you think it's a temporary market condition versus potentially a more permanent condition? Thanks.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Great. Yeah. So what happened is in early February, there were two private company, but very large private company, mobile game publishers that were really focused on casual games that spends very, very aggressively on UA. And we believe they're maybe being spending at a non-profitable campaign just to drive user growth. We spent a lot of time and we've talked about our philosophy of being ROI focus. As a separation of church and state inside the Glu. The studios do not own the budget for UA and we drive UA based on ROI. Whether it's a one-year or a two-year ROI, we really work to make sure we are driving that competitive UA. The two publishers, they were also using ad creative that I would say was taking some liberal approaches to what you saw in the video ads on Facebook and elsewhere, really was not exactly what the gameplay looked like within the game. But there was a kind of bit of a disconnect. And with this, we saw CPI is going up and in the quality of views because of that confusion around what was happening in the space and this largely hit Design Home more than any of our other titles but -- because of that disparity, higher CPI, a lower bit of quality of users because of the market confusion, it impacted the title. I did talk about our guidance is obviously taking out $10 million plus for the impact that this had on Design Home and Covet Fashion.
But we just don't think it makes sense and in our interest or the shareholders' interest to spend on an ROI basis, that's negative. And the good thing is as we now get into launching three new games, we now had six games that are potential three Growth Games and three potential Growth Games that we can spend against and our games are in a much more broadly diversified portfolio when you now look at our games among four core genres, whereas before we are maybe under three or two, and we now think that as one genre may have pressure on something like the competitive UA campaign, this headwind, the others may not.
And as I said in my prepared remarks, the great thing about our new launches is we're already in beta today and the beta territories that we're in, we're spending on UA. So we're not seeing this UA pressure on WWE and Diner DASH Adventures and Disney and then within marketing machines that are both WWE and Disney, we think the coupled nature of our spend on UA coupled with what we're going to be doing co-marketing wise for those two titles will be another accelerant as well to help us on the use represent side.
Yeah. Doug, one thing I'd add is that the new games we've got in development all started under the Growth Games strategy. So the way we build them is really focused very much on the elder game, on social, on things that really drive LTV. And if there's one strategy to take on CPIs even if there's the short term there up, is higher LTV. So we're very focused on that with these next three products and the three after that. So that should be a good hedge against any future activity you see on the CPI front.
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Yeah. And just to finalize that, when I talked about those four core genres, kind of speaking left to right, more female to more male focus. The core genres that we talked about our lifestyle, which are Design Home and Covet Fashion, very female centric and a new title from Crowdstar would also fall in that bucket. Then you got casual, which is more female, but also skews a bit male. And this would be our Diner DASH Adventures title and a new title coming from our folks up in Toronto and then, we've got midcore, which is really our Disney title and then sports and outdoor, which is our baseball, our WWE and our Deer Hunter game as well.
Doug Creutz -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst
Okay great. Thank you.
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Thanks, Doug.
Operator
Thank you. And our next question comes from Jeff Cohen from Stephens. Your line is open.
Jeff Cohen -- Stephens, Inc. -- Analyst
Hey guys. Thanks for taking my question. So Tap Sports Baseball had a really strong quarter. Was that being driven more by monetization or have you seen an uptick in installs as well?
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Hi, Jeff. So this is definitely the former. This is really monetization. We think we probably found the audience, may grow a little bit here and there. But for the most part, we've really found this audience over the last couple of years. And what's really been driving the success the growth that we've had and the growth that we think will have this year with '19 is, just improvements in the elder game, improvements in the live operations, things like the new legends, club events.
We're definitely diving into subscriptions more this year. We've got technology to really reduce the amount of exploits. So those sorts of things are really driving retention engagement and monetization. But like I said, I think we've probably hit our DAU ceiling at least for the time being.
Jeff Cohen -- Stephens, Inc. -- Analyst
Got it. And then, I was wondering if there's any incremental color you can give around what kind of metrics you're seeing in soft launch for the Disney game. Is it downloading as well as you had anticipated?
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. I mean, we -- it's a little early to talk more broadly about it than I said -- as I said in my prepared remarks, I mean we're definitely seeing strong engagement, strong retention. We're seeing people getting through the new user flow, so they're getting into the experience and we're really happy with those numbers. And this is a game that is incredibly deep. I mean, it is really, really deep game, with lots to tune and lots of balance and that's what the team is doing now and they're really focused on that because on the last few months before we launch it. So, yeah, no real specifics on the KPIs, but we will be talking lots about that once we launch that in the August time frame.
Jeff Cohen -- Stephens, Inc. -- Analyst
Thanks guys.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Jeff.
Operator
Thank you. And our next question comes from Drew Crum from Stifel. Your line is open.
Drew Crum -- Stifel Nicolaus -- Analyst
Okay, thanks. Hey guys. Good afternoon. Just a follow-up on the question on Tap Sports Baseball, I just want to make sure I heard you correctly, you expect Tap Sports '19 to grow over '18, or is it you expect the franchise to be up year-on-year, just want to clarify that?
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it's really the franchise. Yeah. Hey, Drew. We really kind of look at the entire franchise as being up and we'll be up -- it will be up moderately on last year. I don't know if we'll see the same growth we've seen the previous years. As you know, we're going incredibly well. So we like what we're tracking to right now. We think it will be ahead of last year. And like I was just saying to Jeff a second ago, it's really based on what we're doing inside the game and the live operations and how we balance the elder game, and that's really where the growth is coming from.
Drew Crum -- Stifel Nicolaus -- Analyst
Okay. And then, just listening to something your public commentary during 1Q, a little more cautious on WWE and today, the tone seems a lot more positive. Is there one or two things you can point to that's really changed your view on the game and the launch?
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, there's two things actually. There's the core mechanic, and as we've talked about before, we just could not find the actual core mechanic that was engaging users in a way that kept a large enough amount in the top of the funnel as we say. We just did not find the fund with the wrestling mechanic. And the team just based on their dedication and their focus and their ingenuity have found. They're actually really core wrestling fans, WWE fans and they just really took this to heart to rise to the challenge of finding WWE to be really fun. So that was the first part.
The second part is they really went through a rebalancing exercise with the meta game. They moved a lot of the social and the competitive PvP up closer to the beginning of the game. And with that balancing -- rebalancing of the elder experience, it's just making it an enormous difference. So this is just one of those ones that you don't expect to have such a turnaround, but it really has and I think it's really testament to not only the team's energy, passion and just their expertise, but also to the fact that we allow teams and the products breathing room to find their potential before we launch it. And thankfully, we've got the environment here financially with which to do that and that's why we've approached WWE.
Drew Crum -- Stifel Nicolaus -- Analyst
Got it. Okay. Thanks guys.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Drew.
Operator
Thank you. And our next question comes from Mike Hickey from Benchmark. Your line is now open.
Mike Hickey -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
Hey guys. Great quarter. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got a few. I guess, first on the Disney game, as it relates to your guidance for the year, which I think you raised by $10 million, I think your prior guidance did not have the Disney game. And so, I think you said there's a headwind on Design Home, Covet Fashion $10 million, so I'm guessing Disney is in your guidance at this point and now you're, sort of, sizing your $120 million (ph).
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Yeah. I mean, I won't give you by title guidance, but certainly, the puts and takes that we had Mike was, first, we beat Q1 by $2.8 million. We added that. We've raised the overall remainder of the year by $7.2 million, so a total of $10 million. But I did say in my prepared remarks because of the headwinds we saw on this UA creative, even though Design Home will be flat from Q1 to Q2, we expected more out of Design Home and Covet Fashion in Q1 and more in Q2. So there is definitely a a double-digit million, more than $10 million effects from this UA creative negatively impacting those titles. So that was kind of one thing, but we more than offset that by being more more confident in WWE and then, adding guidance for Disney. So a lot of puts and takes, but overall a net positive and a net add to the full-year guide.
Mike Hickey -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
Okay. Thanks. I guess on Design Home, you mentioned the meta -- change in meta looks to be working in terms of driving long-term retention -- player retention and amortization. So I guess in that sort of scenario, doesn't that give you more justification to increase your UA spend even if the environment is more difficult than it has been? I mention -- you mentioned about Japan release. Please give a little bit more color on that game? (multiple speakers)
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Sure. I'll take the first question, Mike. And then Nick can talk about Japan and Cocone. So right now, the elder game retention, it reveals itself about 15 days in, and we're about 30 days into launching the meta. We certainly know that if you can improve long-term elder retention, you will have more daypart so to speak to make more revenue off users. So over time, yes, we do believe that the users that play this game will be generating more revenue overall. However, our current short-term belief was that the CPI costs were rising faster than that elder retention was driving the LTV. And out of an abundance of caution, we just felt that we would want a bit de-risk -- even though we are raising the full-year numbers, a bit de-risk the full-year guide from this competitive headwinds. And as we look to launching three new titles in the back half of the year, we'll have six titles to spend against and we can reallocate dollars to the highest ROI. In some cases, that'll be a license IP. In other cases, it'll be a new launching original IP. In other cases, it'll be an old Growth Game that has original IP as well. So we will have more titles to play against, but under an abundance of caution is what we saw this quarter we want to be prudent.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. And Mike, with regards to the Japanese version of Design Home, it's called Roomage, and it's being developed and published by a company called Cocone. And this is a version that is still in beta. It's actually in soft launch to be technical. They have not -- they've not started spending against it. We expect that to happen in the next few weeks or certainly couple of months and then, we will report out what we learned. But they are very happy with what they're seeing and their numbers are meeting their standards. So they're well on track to do that and for us, it's just going to be very interesting to see how this materializes in an Asian territory, Japan to be specific because it opens up the door for us to have other partnerships with other games in Asia and allows us to start stepping toward that territorial opportunity.
Mike Hickey -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
Good. So you're just collecting a royalty on that game in that in the guidance you are taking?
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Yeah, there's very minimal in our guidance from Cocone. But yes, what we would capture would be a percentage that we would recognize that , the top line, there'll be no cost of sales for us because it'd be net to us would be our top line revenue whatever that number is and then with flows direct to the bottom line.
Mike Hickey -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
Okay. Good. Last question from me, sorry for taking so much time here.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
It's all right.
Mike Hickey -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
On your slide deck, your longer-term margin guidance, sort of 15% to 20% EBITDA margin, you're at a bookings level of $500 million. I think historically the next step was over $750 million, you would see additional margin improvement. I think that's changed now. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think now you're saying over $500 million. So just wondering if anything that's changed in terms of how you see your longer-term margin opportunity. I'm also curious maybe more specific, how you think about the next step up, sort of, 25% to 30% margins. Thank you.
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
I think I want to rename you eagle eye Hickey, great analysis of looking at the last slide deck to this slide deck. Yeah, we certainly -- when we looked at our prior, we've not spent a lot of time talking about long-term guidance, but we'd said at $500 million, 15% to 20% and then above $750 million. And that kind of implied that there is very possibly for $250 million of bookings, we might not have any margin expansion above the current baseline and we felt that's not how we're going to operate the business.
We're not yet talking about what the next step function will be and what step level it will be above 15% to 20%. But I think some of our competitors are out there in about the 20-ish percentile even at numbers that are double or triple us today. I think our goal was to try to be more profitable than our competitors at similar size levels. But I think for now, there will be margin expansion. We're not yet to call the pocket until we hit $500 million and then at that point, I think we'll lay out a new set of longer-term targets. But we did want to get message across that it's not going to be $250 million of a plateau. There will be margin expansion above $500 million.
Mike Hickey -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
All right. Good. Best of luck guys. Thank you.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
All right. Thanks, Mike.
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Thanks, Mike.
Operator
Thank you. And our last question comes from Darren Aftahi from ROTH Capital Partners. Your line is now open.
Darren Aftahi -- ROTH Capital Partners -- Analyst
Hey guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Nick, I wanted ask you on the meta game launch with Design Home. So you said you're encouraged by it. I'm just kind of curious if you could share relative to what's called the control group of the prior game, what you're seeing with seven day, maybe even 30-day retention, why you're kind of encouraged by that?
Second point, you mentioned e-commerce in the past that kind of glance over that this quarter, just kind of curious an update there. And then Eric, a housekeeping thing. I saw your accrued liabilities long term jumped up quarter -to-quarter, I'm just kind of curious what's going on there. Thank you.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Hey, Darren. Okay. I'll go to the first. Eric will do the last one. So DH matter, Design Home matter has been very encouraging. The two areas we've been mostly encouraged is the engagement, how many times people come back to the game and how long they stay in the game with the meta and we act -- that's where really we were going after in creating the meta game is to give more reason to be in the game and to be in it longer and just more things to do. And we are also seeing longer-term retention. I can't give you the numbers and that I won't break that out, but we are definitely seeing positive signs that this is a long-term strategy that is really going to pay off. And the other thing, Darren, to keep in mind is that this is just like the opening salvo in meta. This is not a binary event we've launched and we're going to move on. We're going to keep adding to this and keep building it out and deepening it. It's very clear to us that our players really like that, and they get way more value out of having depth in a game. It's not for everyone, but it's for a large number. And we'll keep building that out.
I mean, in terms of e-commerce, it's still a bit early, but the interesting thing about e-commerce from our perspective is, that there are a lot of e-commerce apps out there and there are a lot of games. There's just not a lot of games with e-commerce at least at scale. So this is really going to be one of the first opportunities to see what kind of activity will happen in a game with e-commerce. We've really worked to make it a frictionless experience. So we're excited about what the potential is, but as we've talked about before, this is real blue ocean and we just don't know how this is going to pan out in the long run. We feel like we are logistically set. We think it's -- like we've talked about a great opportunity, but we've just been very careful in terms of guidance. It's negligible in terms of what the numbers we've put in until we actually see results, which will happen in the back half of the year and then if it works, we'll really lean into it.
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Yeah. And Darren, on the liability side, we jumped up about a little less than $40 million in liabilities really coming from two things. One, with the new lease accounting standards that came into effect on January 1, 2019 and we've got to go through and look at all of our leases across the Company, building leases as well as rent -- phone leases and copiers. And really, we determined that only the building leases that are operating leases would fall under this new lease accounting that caused us to gross up the balance sheet us and every other company that's public is doing this year as well. That added about $34 million on the assets and liability side to gross us up. And then, as we go throughout the year, we'll deduct -- well, this will be -- it's a 10-year lease overall, so this will be eaten through over the next nine-year time frame as we have rent expense and we'll reduce -- hit the OpEx for rent expense and then, reduce the prepaid and the liability.
And then secondly, in addition to that, we also did a five-year extension with the MLBPA or the Major League Baseball for our Tap Sports Baseball. And so, we also had some minimum guarantees that we owe them each year in advance over the five-year time frame. That was the balance of the increments to the balance sheet as well.
Darren Aftahi -- ROTH Capital Partners -- Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Darren.
Operator
Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. I would now turn the call back to Nick Earl, CEO for any further remarks.
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, operator. Thank you everyone for joining for today's call, and we look forward to seeing you on the next one.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes today's program. You may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.
Duration: 46 minutes
Call participants:
Herman Singh -- Vice President-Finance and Investor relations
Nick Earl -- President & Chief Executive Officer
Eric Ludwig -- Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer
Mike Olsen -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Doug Creutz -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst
Jeff Cohen -- Stephens, Inc. -- Analyst
Drew Crum -- Stifel Nicolaus -- Analyst
Mike Hickey -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
Darren Aftahi -- ROTH Capital Partners -- Analyst
Transcript powered by AlphaStreet
This article is a transcript of this conference call produced for The Motley Fool. While we strive for our Foolish Best, there may be errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in this transcript. As with all our articles, The Motley Fool does not assume any responsibility for your use of this content, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research, including listening to the call yourself and reading the company's SEC filings. Please see our Terms and Conditions for additional details, including our Obligatory Capitalized Disclaimers of Liability.
