14 DAY TRIAL // Activision was one of the biggest companies in the video game industry, and when it merged with Blizzard it was certain that its rule would be a strict and severe one. But even though a lot of analysts marked the fact that it would make a reasonable amount of profit, the recent earnings report painted a very profitable picture for the company.
With numbers around 981 million dollars in revenue for the first quarter of the year, which ended in March 31, the estimates made by the company at the start of the year, namely 860 million dollars, were broken, as the financial recession doesn't seem to have an impact on the sales of titles such as Guitar Hero or World of Warcraft.
“Our better-than-expected first quarter results were driven by strong global consumer response to the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero franchises and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft, despite challenging economic times,” the company's CEO, Bobby Kotick, said in a statement.
After these results, the company executive went on to add some big words, claiming that Activision Blizzard was the number one third-party console and handheld publisher in North America, while holding the same position for the Wii in the whole wide world.
Big money-makers were of course the second expansion to World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, which keeps on holding the top spots in the PC sales charts every month, and Guitar Hero, which was big in Europe in this first quarter, as sales rose by 84 percent year over year on the “old continent.”
With the next quarter holding releases like Prototype and other Guitar Hero titles, and for a wider audience Transformers and Ice Age games, things will certainly look up for the big corporation in the near future.