PlaySide Studios: Market Is Sleeping on a Potential 10M+ Unit Breakout Year, FY26 Could Be the Rerate of the Decade

PlaySide Studios (ASX: PLY) is being priced like a sleepy, low-growth work-for-hire shop right before the biggest IP slate in its history goes live. After going through Steam wishlist data, indie comps, sell-through ratios, past margins and the latest analyst notes, my view is simple:

If the upcoming slate lands even normally well, FY26 can justify a move from around 0.19–0.20 today to the 0.70–1.00 range, with more if one title really breaks out. Report

1. Mouse P.I. already sits in the top 0.4% of all Steam games by wishlist

Mouse P.I. has already cleared 1 million Steam wishlists with roughly 20 weeks still to go before launch marketing hits full speed. Only about 6% of projects in the past 12 months ever reached 100k wishlists, and only 22 titles crossed 1 million. Mouse sits in that tiny top cohort. Report

The dataset of 5,744 games released after June 2024 shows:

• Correlation between wishlists at launch and first-month unit sales of about 70%
• Wishlist count explains roughly 49% of variance in first-month sales
• Once a game passes 1M wishlists, the probability distribution shifts toward 10M+ lifetime units

At the high end of the price bands, games priced above 30 USD with strong wishlists have materially better wishlist-to-sale conversion than the overall median of 0.28. Mouse P.I. sits squarely in that zone. Report

Using deliberately conservative assumptions:

• Price: 40 USD (about 60 AUD)
• Launch wishlists: 1M
• First-month sales per wishlist: 0.28

That already implies around 280k units and roughly 20m AUD of revenue in month one across platforms. The statistical work in the report shows that at 1M+ wishlists the curve points toward 8–12m lifetime units being entirely realistic for a well-received game. At typical PC/console economics that can mean 120–200m AUD of lifetime revenue. Even if PlaySide only takes something like a 40–50% net share as publisher, that is huge relative to a market cap just over 100m. Report

And that is before allowing for the fact that wishlists still tend to climb another 30% or so in the final 17–20 weeks pre-launch. If Mouse pushes toward 2m wishlists, the probability of a genuine hit goes up again.

2. Game of Thrones: War for Westeros is the second big shot the market is mostly ignoring

Everyone is staring at Mouse P.I. but the real slate is Mouse plus a Game of Thrones RTS.

The GoT title:

• Already sits in the upper wishlisted percentiles on Steam even before a full marketing cycle
• Launches into a broader GoT content wave with House of the Dragon and Dunk & Egg bringing fresh attention to the IP
• Sits in strategy, one of the genres with the highest median wishlists and strong monetisation dynamics
• Is both developed and published by PlaySide, which means better economics than a pure work-for-hire deal

PlaySide has already shipped an RTS in Age of Darkness, which reviewed very well and proves they can execute in this genre. Market behaviour around other big IPs like Fallout and Dune has shown how new TV adaptations can lift interest in related games; there is no reason to think Game of Thrones is different. Report

If GoT RTS is simply “good”, it can plausibly add 10–20m AUD of revenue in FY26. If it lands at the higher end of expectations, something in the 40–60m range is not outrageous given the combination of brand, genre and existing wishlist position. None of that is reflected in a 0.19 share price.

3. Dumb Ways To Die party game is a cheap call option

Dumb Ways will not move numbers like Mouse or GoT on its own, but it matters:

• Fully owned IP with no external licence drag
• Large existing mobile audience and strong brand recognition
• Party-game format that tends to do well on social, streaming and couch co-op

Even a modest success here supports incremental high-margin IP revenue, keeps the brand in circulation and underpins merchandising and spin-offs. In portfolio terms it is a free upside kicker. Report

4. Work-for-hire provides a real floor while we wait for the slate

Historically, 50–70% of PlaySide revenue has come from work-for-hire. This is not glamorous but it is exactly what you want as a downside buffer:

• Long-term relationships with Meta, Netflix Games, Activision and Take-Two
• Only one project cancelled in five years
• Most contracts either renew or expand rather than disappear

Work-for-hire growth stalled in FY25, which is why headline revenue looks flat, but the client list and renewal record show that this is a structural line of business, not a one-off spike. The broader industry trend toward outsourcing mid-market work also supports this.

This is why I do not see PlaySide as a binary “indie lottery ticket”. The services segment pays the bills and buys time for the IP slate to hit. Report

5. Margins and cost base set FY26 up very differently to FY25

There is a clear pattern in PlaySide’s history. In IP-heavy years:

• FY22 net margin was around 16.5%
• FY24 net margin was about 17.5%, with EBITDA margin around 27% and roughly 64.6m AUD of revenue

In years where the slate is being built and marketing spends are front-loaded, like FY23 and FY25, margins compress and the market punishes the stock.

Management has already acted:

• Roughly 5m AUD of annualised operating cost removed via restructure
• Marketing for Mouse P.I. and the slate funded up-front through prior capital raising
• No need for another raise to get these titles to launch

FY25’s loss was largely discretionary (marketing and restructure) rather than a sign that the model stopped working. If you assume FY26 lands somewhere between FY24’s strong margins and FY25’s investment year, mid-teens net margins on a larger revenue base look reasonable rather than heroic. Report

A conservative scenario:

• Work-for-hire: 32m AUD (flat)
• New IP (Mouse, GoT, Dumb Ways and back catalogue): about 38m AUD
• Group revenue: 70m AUD
• Net margin: 15%

That implies around 10.5m AUD NPAT. Even on a fairly plain 20x earnings multiple, equity value would sit around 210m AUD, which is close to 0.50 per share from today’s levels. Historically the stock has traded on 25–40x earnings when the slate is working, so this is not stretching history. Every extra 10m of revenue at mid-teens margins adds roughly 1.5–2m NPAT, which is around 20m of market cap, or about 4–5c per share at a 20x multiple.

6. Other analysts are already at 0.52 on average, before the latest wishlist surge

Recent published targets:

• J.P. Morgan: 0.65 (reiterated)
• Canaccord Genuity: 0.60
• Shaw and Partners: 0.43

The average sits around 0.52, which is roughly 170–220% upside from a 0.19–0.20 share price. These targets were largely set before Mouse P.I. pushed so far through the 1m wishlist mark and before the latest comparative data on 1m+ titles and 10m+ lifetime units became clear. Updating for that new information makes 0.70–1.00 over the next 12–18 months look much more plausible in my view if execution is competent. Report

7. Risk / reward: roughly 30% downside versus 200–400% upside

There are real risks here. Obvious ones:

• Mouse P.I. could review worse than expected, which would crush conversion and long-tail sales
• The GoT RTS could slip a year or land flat
• A major work-for-hire client such as Meta might cut budgets
• Micro-cap liquidity cuts both ways

In a rough “everything disappoints” scenario, I could see the stock drifting down into the 12–14c range and going nowhere for a while.

But when I balance that against the other side of the distribution, the skew looks attractive:

• Mouse P.I. is already in the top 0.4% of Steam titles by wishlists, with data showing a much tighter link between wishlists and sales once you pass 100k and especially 1m wishlists
• GoT RTS sits in one of the best monetising genres and carries a huge TV brand into a period of renewed attention
• Dumb Ways to Die adds a fully owned, low-risk IP kicker
• Work-for-hire keeps the lights on and has a strong renewal history
• The cost base is now leaner than in FY24, even though the potential revenue base is larger

If FY26 simply recreates something like FY24 on a slightly larger scale, a re-rate into the 0.30–0.50 range looks entirely reasonable from around 0.20. If one of Mouse P.I. or GoT performs closer to what the wishlist curves suggest, then 0.70–1.00 becomes realistic, and in a genuine breakout scenario, 1.20–1.50 is not crazy given prior trading history when sentiment was strong. Report

Bottom line

In my view PlaySide today is a funded services business with a cleaned-up cost base, a strong history of mid-teens margins in IP years, and a 2025–26 slate that actually has hard data behind it rather than pure story. Mouse P.I. and Game of Thrones are already showing elite-tier wishlist numbers, in genres that monetise well, backed by a studio with a record of highly rated releases.

At around 0.19–0.20 you are not paying for much of that. You are paying for a work-for-hire floor and getting a set of statistically strong IP shots almost for free. To me that is a classic asymmetric setup: limited downside if things go wrong, and multi-bag potential if even one of these titles lands close to what the current data implies.

Not financial advice.