14 DAY TRIAL // Video game publisher Activision Blizzard has announced that it has managed to beat its own internal projections in order to announce a profit of 335 million dollars for the second calendar quarter of 2011 while overall revenue reached 1.1 billion.
Bobby Kotick, who is the chief executive officer of the company, stated, “Our better-than-expected second-quarter performance was driven by record digital sales of our online-enabled franchises. For the six month period, net revenues from digital channels grew more than 20 percent, driving record operating margin and EPS growth of more than 50 percent.”
The company says that at the moment its most exciting prospects for the future are Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which has seen more pre-orders than last year's Black Ops, and the next Spyro-powered game.
For the entire calendar year, Activision Blizzard expects to see revenue of 1.8 billion.
A lot of that will be derived from the Call of Duty franchise, with Eirc Hirshberg, the CEO of Activision Publishing, saying that Black Ops has managed to sell more than 14 million pieces of downloadable content since launch, which is 40 percent more than Modern Warfare 2 managed.
The executive also drew a comparison with Facebook, saying that people play Call of Duty and spend more money on content than on any game published in the social network that use microtransactions.
In addition, Activision has promised that the Nintendo Wii will get a Modern Warfare 3 version this year and that the new game will be the best in the series and will again dominate the first-person shooter genre.
The company has further revealed that the Call of Duty Elite service has managed to get 3 million registered gamers since it has gone into beta in the middle of July.
Activision Blizzard also talked about Diablo III but refused to talk about a clear launch date, saying only that work was being done to get it to gamers before the end of the year.