NASDAQ: PLAY

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Our fiscal year consists of 52 or 53 weeks ending on the Tuesday after the Monday closest to January 31. During fiscal 2024, we adjusted the year-end day from Sunday to Tuesday to improve labor and operational efficiencies by ending the Company's periods outside of the busier weekend timeframe. Each quarterly period has 13 weeks, except in a 53-week year when the fourth quarter has 14 weeks. Fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2024 contained 52 weeks, while fiscal 2023 contained 53 weeks. We refer to our fiscal years ended February 3, 2026, February 4, 2025 and February 4, 2024 as “fiscal 2025,” “fiscal 2024,” and “fiscal 2023,” respectively, throughout this report.

Entertainment

Game play is a key aspect of the entertainment experience at each of our stores, which we believe is the core differentiating feature of our brands. The arcade in each of our stores is an area where we offer a wide array of entertainment options (including redemption, simulation, virtual reality, traditional arcade and other midway-style games and experiences), some of which are exclusive to our Dave & Buster's and Main Event brands on a permanent or temporary basis. Our Dave & Buster’s and Main Event stores average approximately 125 and 112 games, respectively. The number of entertainment options at any particular store depends on the location footprint and other activities offered, which may include bowling, laser tag, billiards and gravity ropes.

Most of our games are activated by game play credits on cards or other radio-frequency identification devices. A customer purchases a card with game play credits or “chips” at an automated kiosk, through our mobile application, or from one of our team members. Our entertainment revenues accounted for approximately 62.9% of our total revenues during fiscal 2025. Redemption games offer our customers the opportunity to win tickets that are redeemable at a retail-style space in our stores with prizes ranging from branded novelty items to high-end electronics.

We believe this “opportunity to win” creates a fun and highly energized social experience that is an important aspect of the in-store experience and cannot be easily replicated at home. Many of our non-redemption games, which include our virtual reality, video, and simulation offerings, can be played by multiple customers simultaneously and include some of the latest high-tech games that are commercially available.

Sports viewing is another key component of the entertainment experience at Dave & Buster’s. All our stores have multiple large screen televisions and high-quality audio systems providing customers with a dedicated area for watching live sports and other immersive programming. The majority of our Dave & Buster's branded stores have an enhanced viewing experience with huge cutting-edge LED “Wow Walls” that deliver an elevated viewing experience and provide a platform for broader programming and marketing opportunities. Our sports-viewing areas offer an immersive viewing environment that provide customers with large, high-definition televisions, where customers watch national and local sports programming and enjoy our full bar and food menu. We strive to create an energetic environment that includes a differentiated and interactive viewing experience for customers. We believe these features create an energetic and social environment and support our strategy of positioning Dave & Buster’s as an entertainment destination. At Dave & Buster’s guests can enjoy arcade games, complemented by sports viewing, along with food and beverage offerings as part of an integrated entertainment experience.

Food and Beverage

We strive to differentiate our food with quality, flavorful offerings guided by a “modern American dining” identity at both our Dave & Buster’s and Main Event locations. These offerings are rooted in enhanced flavors and quality ingredients across a condensed number of menu items that enable our customers to explore new flavors while offering a balanced selection of familiar dishes. In recent years, we have modified our menus for simplified execution and made kitchen enhancements to allow us to deliver dishes to customers faster and drive an improved customer experience. During the third quarter of 2025, we launched our “back-to-basics” menu at our Dave & Buster’s stores, to bring back historically favored menu items and to add new menu options. We will continue to evolve our menus to reflect the changing tastes of our broad customer base, with options for full meals and appetizers to share with friends. We deliver high-quality offerings, including a wide variety of starters, one-of-a-kind burgers and handhelds, choice-grade steaks, pasta, and low calorie, vegetarian, and gluten-friendly options. We believe our broad menus offer something for everyone and are appropriate for many different occasions. To ensure that we stay on-trend, we continue to update our menus regularly with new food items or tailored promotions.

Each of our locations also offers full bar service, including a variety of beers, hand-crafted cocktails, and premium spirits. We are focused on maintaining a streamlined beverage menu for ease of execution, while using quality ingredients including fresh juices, purees and house-made mixers. Beverage service is typically available throughout the entire store, allowing for multiple point-of-sale opportunities. We believe that our high margin beverage offering is complementary to the other offerings at each of our stores.

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Competitive Positioning

The out-of-home entertainment market is highly competitive. We compete for customers’ discretionary income on entertainment with localized attraction facilities such as movie theaters, sporting events, bowling alleys, sports activity centers, arcades and entertainment centers, night clubs and restaurants as well as theme parks. We also face competition from local, regional, and national establishments that offer similar entertainment experiences and restaurants that are highly competitive with respect to price, quality of service, location, ambience and type and quality of food. Some of these establishments may exist in multiple locations, and we may also face competition on a national basis in the future from other similar concepts. We also face competition from increasingly sophisticated home-based forms of entertainment, such as internet and video gaming and home movie streaming.

The key elements that drive our total customer experience and help position us from a competitive standpoint include the following:

High brand awareness with broad customer appeal.

We believe that the customer experience at our stores, supported by our extensive marketing reach, has helped us create widely recognized brands. As of February 3, 2026, we had approximately 90% national brand awareness for Dave & Buster’s as an entertainment and dining venue, and a broad customer appeal across families and young adults. The primary target audience for our Dave & Buster’s locations is young adults and families, while our Main Event stores primarily focus on families with children.

Multi-faceted customer experience highlights our value proposition.

We believe that our combination of interactive games, attractive television viewing areas, high-quality dining, and full-service beverage offerings, delivered in a highly energized atmosphere, provides a multi-faceted customer experience that cannot be easily replicated at home or elsewhere without having to visit multiple destinations. We aim to offer our customers a value proposition comparable or superior to many separately available dining and entertainment options. We continuously work with game manufacturers and others to create new games and attractions that include content exclusively available at our Dave & Buster’s and Main Event stores on a permanent or temporary basis. Our new games in combination with new food and beverage offerings and focused attention to the customer experience are intended to help us to retain and generate customer traffic. Our value proposition is enhanced by marketing initiatives including unlimited game play offers or free game play as an introduction to new games, game play dollar volume discounts and eat and play promotional offers. We believe these initiatives encourage customers to participate more fully across our food, beverage, and entertainment offerings.

Store models generate favorable store economics and strong returns.

We believe our store models offering entertainment, food, and beverage options provide the benefit of historically higher revenue per store, higher gross margins, and higher operating income margins in comparison to traditional restaurant concepts.

Our entertainment offerings have low variable costs, generating a gross margin of 91.9% for fiscal 2025. Because entertainment generated 62.9% of our fiscal 2025 revenues, we have less exposure to increasing food costs and associated restaurant labor than traditional restaurant concepts. As a result, our business model generates strong operating cash flow which we can use to reinvest in the business, pay down debt or return capital to shareholders through share repurchases or dividends.

Our favorable store economics allow us to target new store returns of at least 30% and 25% cash-on-cash returns over one and five-year periods, respectively. We define and calculate cash-on-cash returns for an individual store as (a) Adjusted EBITDA (defined in Item 7. “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”) at the store level, divided by (b) our net development costs. Net development costs include equipment, building, leaseholds and site costs, net of tenant improvement allowances and other landlord payments, sale-leaseback proceeds, excluding pre-opening costs and capitalized interest.

Commitment to customer satisfaction.

We aim to continuously enhance our entertainment, food, and beverage offerings through our service philosophy of providing a high quality and consistent customer experience through dedicated training and development of our team members, supported by a corporate culture that fosters employee engagement.

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Strategy

We have a multi-faceted growth strategy focused on the following key components:

Drive growth in comparable store sales.

We strive to differentiate our brands from other entertainment and dining alternatives and drive growth in our comparable sales through the following strategies:

•Offer the latest entertainment to bring people together. We believe that our diverse offering of games and amusement activities is the core differentiating feature of our brands. Staying current with the latest amusement offerings promotes customer traffic to our stores and provides an exciting environment to enjoy with friends and family through the latest multiplayer games and challenges and social gaming experiences. We plan to continually update our games each year through the development of innovative and proprietary games and the purchase of new games that we believe will resonate with our customers to drive brand relevance due to a variety of factors, including their large scale, eye-catching appearance, association with recognizable brands, ability to be experienced by a group or the fact they cannot be easily replicated at home. We intend to extend our programming capabilities at our stores by offering more curated content and creating a calendar of ongoing and one-time events leveraging our investments in the best and latest audio-visual technology. We also plan to continuously review and update pricing of our games and amusement activities to provide affordable entertainment while remaining competitive with our peers.

•Offer novel food & drink at competitive prices. We aim to offer a wide variety of craveable items at optimized prices for our guests. We strive to increase efficiency by simplifying execution, allowing us to deliver dishes to the table hotter and faster for an improved customer experience. We continually update and innovate our food offerings based on customer research and optimize our selections to improve execution efficiency.

•Drive customer engagement through an optimized media mix and strategic loyalty offerings. We continue to review and optimize our media mix to both drive incremental visits from our existing customer base and increase new customer traffic. We maintain our focus on delivering personalized messaging that connects with consumers to drive incremental visitations and focus our advertising on our brand story and our attractive offerings. In addition, we continue to leverage our customer relationship management program and our growing loyalty database by delivering more targeted individualized offers, creative content, and exclusive offerings.

•Refresh our existing sites. We consistently update our existing sites through regular maintenance. We will invest in remodels of certain existing stores, as needed, to modernize our layouts, maintain or grow customer traffic and drive efficiency.

•Drive incremental sales volume through special event hosting. Our dedicated sales team strives to drive incremental special events traffic in each of our stores. We maintain our focus on opportunities to grow special events sales including optimized online booking and entertainment offerings tailored towards group events, and the introduction of ticketed experiences that allow smaller groups and individual guests to participate in themed or limited-time programming within our venues. We also offer elevated banquet menu offerings and dedicated service to provide an exceptional guest experience.

•Drive an improved experience and optimize operations through targeted technology investments. We continue to streamline our service model through store-level technology improvements including kiosks and other self-service technology. We regularly invest in analytics tools and technology upgrades to more efficiently measure and improve performance, drive incremental sales, and continuously monitor costs and profitability.

Invest domestically in our brands.

We believe the Dave & Buster’s and Main Event brands have significant domestic growth opportunities in the United States. In fiscal 2025, we opened eight Dave & Buster's stores and three Main Event stores, in addition to the relocation of one Dave & Buster’s location. In fiscal 2026 and beyond, the number of openings will depend on many factors, including our ability to locate appropriate sites, negotiate acceptable purchase or lease terms, generate sufficient operating cash flows or have sufficient financing capacity to construct new stores, obtain necessary local governmental permits, and recruit and train team members.

We select new site locations through an evaluation of a set of drivers we believe increase the probability of successful, high-volume stores, including: site quality, visibility, accessibility and traffic volume, population density, competitive presence and trade area demographics. The experience and established relationships derived from our development team enable us to focus our attention on the most relevant network of real estate brokers, which gives us access to a large pool of qualified potential store sites.

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Dave & Buster's Stores - Our Dave & Buster's stores vary in size from approximately 16,000 to 70,000 square feet. To optimize sales per square foot and further enhance our store economics, we currently utilize three basic formats when designing new stores. The target size of our future large format stores is expected to be between 30,000 and 45,000 square feet, the target size of our future medium format stores is expected to be between 25,000 and 30,000 square feet and the target size of our small future format stores is expected to be 25,000 square feet. The stores we opened in fiscal 2025 averaged approximately 28,000 square feet. We believe the smaller store format allows us to reduce capital investment risk per store and enter smaller markets that would not have warranted the investment of a larger box. For the smaller format, we have reduced the back-of-house space and optimized the customer-facing area dedicated to simulation and redemption games. We believe the smaller format maintains the dynamic customer experience that is the foundation of our brand and allows us flexibility in our site selection process.

Main Event Stores - Our Main Event stores vary in size from approximately 37,500 to 78,000 square feet. The target size of our future stores is between approximately 40,000 and 50,000 square feet. The Main Event stores we opened in fiscal 2025 averaged approximately 50,000 square feet. If an existing building exists at a target location, we could open a future store outside of this range depending on projected store economics, competition and various other factors.

Invest in foreign operations

We are expanding the Dave & Buster's brand through international franchise agreements. As of February 3, 2026, we have signed five international franchise partnerships, which will expand the Dave & Buster's brand to locations in India, Australia, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and Mexico. Under these agreements, we currently plan to open a total of 37 franchised Dave & Buster's locations.

We opened our first international franchise location in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, in December 2024, followed by our second in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, in August 2025, our third in Manila, the Philippines, in October 2025 and our fourth in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in February 2026. We currently have plans to open additional franchise locations in Mexico City, Mexico; Perth, Australia; and New Delhi, India in Fiscal 2026.

To drive international expansion, we have developed key strategic initiatives that uniquely support global market penetration. The initiatives include a customizable footprint to drive improved economics in each market; focused menu localization with high regional resonance; a proprietary, dynamic pricing model; global marketing programs that are demographically agnostic and locally executable; differentiated entertainment strategies and packages unique to each demographic; localized entertainment, and third-party programming.

We also own and operate two stores outside of the United States in the Canadian province of Ontario. The activities of stores outside the United States are subject to various risks of doing business in a foreign country, including currency fluctuations, changes in laws and regulations, and economic and political instability. We do not believe there is any dependence on or material risk to our domestic business related to our Canadian operations.

Human Capital Management

Our team members are the heart of our Company, and we depend on them to provide great customer service and to maintain strong operations. Our ability to attract and retain an engaged and experienced team is critical to the successful execution of our business strategies. While we continue to operate in a competitive labor environment, we believe our culture, policies, and labor practices contribute to strong relations with our team members.

Our Culture

Across the Company, we are committed to being fun creators. We are devoted to our service philosophy that calls for providing exceptional service to our customers and to each other every day. Our culture encourages intensity, hard work, and having fun. We firmly believe we are better together, and we encourage teamwork, empathy, and good judgment. We empower all team members to embrace innovation, change, and continuous learning and growth.

Our Team

As of February 3, 2026, we employed approximately 23,610 team members across both of our brands, consisting of 88.8% store hourly team members, 9.4% store management, 1.5% store support, and 0.3% dedicated special events sales force.

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Our values unite us in a shared commitment to attract, retain, and engage qualified personnel to develop a team that reflects the characteristics of our customer base. We strive to provide a fun corporate atmosphere, which we believe promotes teamwork, helps our team members maximize their potential, enables our team members to make better business decisions, and fuels innovation. At Dave & Buster’s, we are committed to fostering a workplace where every individual is valued and respected, every voice is heard, every experience is valued, and every team member has equal opportunities for growth and advancement. We are proud of our progress, but we remain dedicated to continually advancing our efforts to build a vibrant, respectful, and supportive workplace.

Our Leadership Team

We are led by a strong senior management team with a wealth of experience with national brands spanning casual dining, entertainment, and other consumer-centric industries. We believe our management team’s prior experience, combined with its experience at Dave & Buster’s and Main Event, provides us with specialized insights into our customer base and enables us to create the dynamic environment that is core to our brands.

Our Store Teams

Our typical store team consists of a General Manager supported by an average of six to seven additional management positions per store. Management team members handle various departments within the store including responsibility for hourly team members. Our stores typically employ approximately 100 hourly team members, most of which are part-time.

The General Manager and the management team are responsible for the day-to-day operations of the store, including the hiring, training, and development of team members, as well as financial and operational performance. There is a defined structure of development and progression of job responsibilities within the supporting management positions to help ensure that each store has an adequate succession plan. Each store is overseen by a Regional Operations Director, Senior Regional Operations Director or Vice President of Operations (collectively, “Regional Management”) who directly or indirectly reports to our executive team. We are proud of our store leadership teams’ experience and carefully monitor our store management team retention rates, which have consistently tracked in the top quartile of the casual dining industry.

Attracting Talent

We seek to hire experienced leaders and team members and offer competitive wage and benefit programs. We offer performance-based compensation programs to our store management and store support center employees. In addition to salaries, these programs (which vary by employee level) include bonuses, stock awards, and various employee assistance programs. In addition, our salaried and hourly team members are also eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan and medical/dental/vision insurance plans and to receive vacation/paid time off based on tenure.

Developing Talent

We motivate and develop our team members by providing them with opportunities for increased responsibilities and advancement. Throughout the year, we provide numerous training opportunities for our team members, with a focus on continuous learning and development. With hundreds of leadership positions across our stores, we provide a pathway and training for individuals across the organization to advance from entry-level jobs into management roles. In addition, our geographic footprint often allows us to offer our store team members relocation options.

We strive to maintain quality and consistency through the extensive training and supervision of our team members and adherence to high standards relating to personnel performance, food and beverage preparation, safety protocols, game playability and maintenance. We provide new team members with comprehensive orientation and one-on-one training for their positions to help ensure they meet our high standards. New team members are trained by partnering with a trainer to help ensure that the training and information they receive is complete and accurate. Team members are certified for their positions by passing a series of tests, including alcohol awareness and responsibility training for service team members.

We require our new store managers to complete an eight-week training program that includes front-of-house service, kitchen, amusements, and management responsibilities. Newly trained managers are then assigned to their location, where they receive additional training with their General Manager. The last two weeks of their training include a comprehensive evaluation of new skills. We place a high priority on our continuing management development programs to ensure that qualified managers are available for our future openings. We conduct regular evaluations with each manager to discuss prior performance and future performance goals and continuously evaluate our staffing to proactively plan for growth. Through an Annual Operators Conference our General Managers share best practices with each other, and all receive an operating plan to drive performance for that year.

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When we open a new store, we provide varying levels of job-specific training to team members to help ensure the opening is smooth and to help guide an efficient operation from the first day the store opens to the public. Prior to opening a new location, our dedicated training and opening team travels to the location to deliver an intensive training program for all team members. We believe this additional investment in our new stores is important because it helps us provide our customers with a quality experience from day one. After a location has been opened and is operating smoothly, the store managers supervise the training of new team members.

Corporate Responsibility

Our core values guide each of our team members to care for each other, our customers, and the communities we serve. We will not do business with organizations that employ or condone unfair labor practices. We partner with suppliers who share our commitment to ethical business conduct; fair labor practices; proven environmental, health, and safety practices; and environmental sustainability. We also specifically condemn human trafficking and abuse of child labor. We understand that supporting our communities includes being good environmental stewards and striving to conduct business in a sustainable and environmentally responsible manner.

We strongly encourage team members to give back to the communities we serve. Although our Company invests time and resources in many charitable causes, we have two main causes we focus our efforts to support. The first main charitable cause is our long-standing partnership with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which we have proudly supported in a national partnership since April 2012. Through fiscal 2025, we have given over $20.0 cumulatively to this worthy cause, and we participate in several events throughout the year, both in our stores and at our store support center, to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. We also volunteer our time and talents to Make- a-Wish.

The second main charitable cause is our continued investment in helping our own team members during their times of greatest need through the Buster’s Legacy Fund. The Buster's Legacy Fund is an independent non-profit established to create an employee assistance fund for the benefit of team members who suffer catastrophic events resulting in severe economic hardship. The fund is financed by contributions from our team members, customers, and business partners.

Advertising and Marketing

We leverage advertising and marketing to drive awareness and strengthen brand relevance, in order to achieve constant customer demand. We strategically evolve our marketing strategy and media investment approach to be more data-driven, consumer-centric and experience focused. We continue to align our investments to meet the evolving media consumption trends of our guests.

We offer a range of promotions, daily specials, events, and key holidays and cultural moments, which provide guests with compelling reasons to return to our locations. Popular promotions include Eat & Play Combo®, Season Passes, Unlimited Game Play Passes, Half Price Games, food and beverage specials during popular sporting events, and local offers targeting industry nights, school outreach programs, with additional trivia nights, contests and more at the events.

Our media offerings are diversified, including linear and connected television, social and digital video marketing, programmatic displays, paid social, influencers, outdoor billboards, radio, and paid search. We conduct various digital marketing initiatives including search engine marketing and optimization, organic social media, content marketing, and mobile advertising campaigns.

Additionally, we continue to invest in our mobile application and web platforms, which enhance customer satisfaction, provide exclusive offers and limited-time discounts for loyal guests, and offer a convenient way for customers to purchase and recharge gaming cards. We are now able to track in-store transactions for our customer retention programs, offering promotional messaging based on the guest’s in-store spending habits. For example, we are often able to cross-sell food purchases to gaming-heavy guests by offering a free appetizer or dessert promotions with the purchase of an entrée.

Our creative strategy is designed to ignite excitement around the in-store experience, constantly showcasing fresh and innovative offerings intended to keep guests eagerly anticipating upcoming offerings. Our strategy helps to ensure our entertainment options appeal both to adults and families, with seasonal messaging to align with school breaks, sports-watching occasions, and cultural moments like holidays and special events.

Our special event marketing programs continue to support our special events team initiatives through targeted digital marketing, customer relationship management, organic social media content marketing, partnerships, co-op programs, and print marketing. We have online booking for social parties, providing added convenience and a customizable experience for our customers when booking events.

We work with best-in-class external advertising, digital media, and public relations agencies to help develop and execute our advertising programs, ensuring our marketing efforts remain at the forefront of innovation and customer engagement.

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Technology

We utilize several proprietary and third-party management information systems. These systems are designed to enable our games’ functionality, improve operating efficiencies, provide us with timely access to financial and marketing data and reduce store and corporate administrative time and expense. We believe our management information systems are sufficient to support our business plans. Information systems projects are prioritized based upon strategic, financial, regulatory and other business advantage criteria.

Our managers have daily routines focused on driving consistent execution in entertainment, food and beverage. Our inventory management platform allows us to determine the theoretical food and beverage costs for each store and provides additional tools and reports to help us identify opportunities to increase efficiency, including waste management. In addition to our own routines, we leverage a third-party vendor to help ensure quality beverage operations, responsible alcohol service and loss prevention. Our workforce management platform allows management to quickly increase or decrease labor based on real-time business needs and assists our managers in optimizing hourly labor based on anticipated sales volumes. Our enterprise resource planning platform allows us to manage and automate accounting and supply chain processes to improve efficiency, accuracy and decision-making across the organization. Our amusement team uses a proprietary system that is supported by a mobile application that identifies amusement issues and needed repairs to help ensure our games are operational and meeting our ideal playing standard. Complementing this program is our routine preventative maintenance program, designed to prevent game failure and extend the functionality of our games. Consolidated reporting tools for the key drivers of our business are provided to our Regional Management to identify and troubleshoot any systemic issues.

Our store systems enable staff to deliver the multi-faceted customer experience including ordering food and playing games. We have invested in connectivity and data infrastructure to modernize and upgrade the capacity of our store systems. Our customers can also engage with us through customer-facing digital experiences, such as the mobile application and in-store self-service kiosks.

Food Preparation, Quality Control and Purchasing

We strive to maintain the highest food quality standards. To ensure our quality standards are met, we negotiate directly with independent producers of food products. We provide detailed quality and yield specifications to suppliers for our purchases. Our systems are designed to protect the safety and quality of our food supply throughout the procurement and preparation process. Within each location, the Kitchen Manager is primarily responsible for ensuring the timely and correct preparation of food products per the recipes we specify. We provide each of our stores with various tools and training to facilitate these activities.

Store-Level Quarterly Fluctuations and Seasonality

Our revenues are influenced by seasonal shifts in consumer spending. Typically, we have higher revenues associated with the spring and year-end holidays, which will continue to be susceptible to the impact of severe or unseasonably mild weather on customer traffic and sales during that period. Our third quarter, which encompasses the back-to-school fall season, has historically had lower revenues as compared to other quarters. (See