Gameloft believes its return to launching games at a more regular pace “will progressively start showing in the coming quarters and accelerate throughout 2015”, as the ongoing traction of its back catalogue keeps the revenue rolling in.

For the previous nine months, sales of €167 million were down 2 per cent year-on-year, although Gameloft said it would have been a 4 per cent increase at constant exchange rates. Back-catalogue games accounted for 92 per cent of sales, which was attributed to “our efficient update strategy along with the quality and diversity of our product portfolio”.

Monthly active users averaged 164 million in Q3, while daily active users averaged 20 million.

But there is some indication that this long-tail powered momentum is slowing. Q3 sales of €55.8 million were down 10 per cent year-on-year (8 per cent at constant exchange rates). Noting this and “the challenging current trading conditions”, Gameloft said that reaching its sales target of close to €245 million is “highly dependent on the success of the company’s fourth-quarter game releases”.

Michel Guillemot, CEO, said: “Although we would like to be further along, we believe we have made the right decisions by reducing our time to market, progressively changing our product mix towards more mid-core and female oriented games and focusing on improving monetisation and by doing so we believe we have positioned the company for growth in the coming years.”

The company plans to have launched “between 12 and 15 games” in 2014, increasing to 20 yearly starting in 2015.

“With major advertising companies now switching a larger part of their budgets to mobile and with Gameloft being the leading publisher by downloads, we also expect our advertising revenue to rebound significantly in 2015,” Guillemot said.