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Activision-Blizzard has released its Q4 2017 earnings report that shows the company beat its own projected earnings. ATVI was projected to earn $1.7 billion in Q4 but came in just over $2 billion. Year over year, the company went from $6.6 billion in 2016 to $7.0 billion in 2017.
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What I'm wondering the most is, why are they bragging about King? It's revenue was at 2,3 billion in 2014 (before Activision Blizzard bought it for 6 billion), and in 2016 it was already down to 1,5 billion. Not to mention 290mil players in a quarter is the worst it has ever been (down from 550mil in 2014). King is in a serious decline, and at this rate Activision Blizzard will need 15yrs to make a return on their 6bil investment off King. One of the worst investment I've ever seen. Next time they should really turn to Tencent for an advice.
As for Blizzard, I'm surprised they only have 40mil of players across all games, especially if most of them are F2P Hearthstone players. Seems like WoW's numbers are very low.
If Activision keeps this up, I wonder how long till they completely overtake Blizzard. It's clear to me they are the ones making the majority of the money between the two, even if the new CoD was nothing special either.
No evidence 2 years on that buying King was a success.
2 of the top 10 games ..... when they bought king it was 3 of the 10.
Average player engagement & revenue up - tends to happen when more casual players leave and only the more hardcore remain. And numbers are still declining.
Maybe it will all work out. One can only speculate what heights AB would be scaling if they hadn't taken on all that debt to buy King.
Edit: Just in case anyone reads the comment "King returns to growth". The metric AB won't want to you to check is Operating Margin. Whilst revenue in 2017 Q4 did increase - to $162M compared to $156M in 2016 Q4 - margin went from 36% to 31%. So they sold more but made less (gross) profit - $6M less.
But hey they manage to sell a lot of it! Not that hard I guess with all that hype, who cares about the game itself, they're probably already working on Destiny 3.
2016 average 41%
2016 Q4 39%
2017 average 33%
2017 Q4 27%
A steady decline. Same pattern for revenue and operating income as well; the latter well down.
I would like a peak at Wows economy though, for us MMOers that would be more interesting then general numbers for a huge publisher.
As a pro- I would like to say: The numbers are looking good..lol
mmorpg junkie since 1999