14 DAY TRIAL // There's a worldwide recession going on and its impact seems to reach almost every branch of the industry, including the gaming one, which has seen several big corporations announce the fact that they will resort to important layoffs in order to still make a profit.
But one company doesn't even worry about that, as its economic forecasts for this quarter have been exceed. That company is none other than Activision Blizzard, which has grossed way over the 860 million dollars in net revenue it predicted at the beginning of February.
“Global consumer response to the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero franchises and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft remains strong despite the challenging economic environment,” Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, said.
“We exceeded our quarterly financial goals as the video game market continues to grow and our franchises continue to perform. This bodes well for our upcoming spring titles Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which are inspired by theatrical feature films releases, Prototype, a new intellectual property, and the release of Guitar Hero Smash Hits, as well as continued sales of our recently released Guitar Hero Metallica game.”
With franchises such as Guitar Hero and Call of Duty from Activision and the hugely successful World of Warcraft from Blizzard, you can definitely be sure that the large corporation won't be feeling the impact of the recession for quite some time.
Don't forget that it has also planned to release Modern Warfare 2 at the end of the year, a title that, at least according to some of its executives, will shatter records in terms of sales. All that's left for us to do is to hope that the company will still deliver new games and not flood the market with new Guitar Hero iterations.