How is Meta Plays doing financially? | 2025 H1 Report

Hi all,

Close followers of our YouTube channel may have already seen our financial report video for the first half of 2025. If you haven't, feel free to watch the whole thing, but we wanted to give you the short version here in writing as well.
Note: the video is much more detailed!

How is Meta Plays set up?

• Meta Plays is 100% owned by Nakamura. It's just a second brand name.
• The structure is self employment in the UK, so Meta Plays is not a company.
• Nakamura funds the project with a mix of personal day job income and content creation income.
• Our paid team consists of a web developer, 3 community managers, a graphic designer and an editor.
• Our mission remains as usual: we boost our team's favourite RTS game communities via tournaments.
• We roll as much revenue as possible back into the project.

So, how are we doing?

• Not too bad actually! But not amazing either.
• We're near the end of our "build" phase, and will start our "growth" focus in the next year.
• Basically, we spend just over 2x of what we make with the project. £7,330 in expenses vs £3,400 in income in 2025 H1.
• Ending the "build" phase means we will no longer develop website features, removing development costs.
• Once we look past the large one-off Age of Mythology Deathmatch tournament and dev costs, we are near break-even.
• We had a MASSIVE 78% HoH increase in sponsorship revenue. This hugely helps us pay for our events.

What about the games and their leagues?

• The Company of Heroes 3 Pro League is our most-watched series on Twitch! We are super pleased, as it's quite new.
• Halo Wars 2 in all its forms remains most popular, and this is the community that supports us the most by a mile.
• The Halo Wars 2 Amateur League wins in cost effectiveness, making back 44% of its costs via just content revenues.
• Age of Mythology has drastically underperformed regardless of whether it was major esports, or our own events.
• Despite this underperformance, we are sticking with our AoM Deathmatch League this season.

What didn't go so well in 2025 H1

• While soon addressed, the deficit is a massive drain on resources.
• Website feature development has been overblown in prioritization, and remains hard to justify going forward.
• We are no longer relevant in Age of Mythology, despite having been a co-host of a Microsoft-sponsored event.
  • We are not able to interest top players with our low prize pools as compared to MS-sponsored events.
  • MS-sponsored esports occupies the vast majority of prime slots, making scheduling tough.
• Direct community revenue is at a historically very low share (14.7%) of our income, totalling at just ~£500.

Goals for 2026

• Half-year event planning (seasons and reports).
• Achieve a break-even budget for each season.
• Grow average Twitch viewership and thus sponsorship revenue (targeting £2,000/season).
• Pursue Relic Sponsorship for CoH 3 Pro League.
• Addition of Rising Star CoH 3 League (top 8 players excluded).
• Website and tooling dev wrapped up, entering maintenance mode (imminent).
• Community-held tournaments and show matches on our website (imminent).
• Patronage revenue to fund more content pieces once new goals are hit.
• Increased number of total events for performant games.
• Failing above, prize pool reductions for low performers.
• Experiment with crowdfunded events for low performers.
• Consider pausing our self-funded Age of Mythology events until we’re needed again.
• Nakamura to cover crowdfunded passion projects (AoM Deathmatch / SpellForce 3) on personal channels.
  • This will help Meta Plays perform better by removing the worst performers from the data set.
• Eliminate cheating in Halo Wars 2 events.

Ways to financially support Meta Plays

• Become a Patron of the RTS
• Make a donation to a tournament or our staff
• Commission a show match
• Watch and share our content on Twitch and YouTube
• Participate in sponsorships as we announce them on Discord

Thank you very much for reading. We'll see you on the battlefield.