14 DAY TRIAL // In an investor call that follows the release of the financial results for the first quarter of 2008, Activision Blizzard leading figures mentioned a few facts regarding the future development of their company.
Bobby Kotick, the head of Activision, says that he expects the merged Activision Blizzard to sell videogames to the tune of around 636 million dollars in the next quarter and to break the 2 billion barrier in fiscal year 2008.
Mike Griffith, the Chief Executive Officer of Activision Publishing, announced that, even though they would retain Crash Bandicoot, Ice Age and Spyro, as well as Prototype from Vivendi Games, Activision Blizzard regards "all other Vivendi Games products and operations" as being unimportant to the strategic outlook of the company. In other words, they will be sold to third parties or shut down.
Activision Blizzard mentioned the figures that it uses to project games sales. When it comes to hardware sales, the company is expecting that in 2008, the PlayStation 3 will sell around 8 million consoles, with the Nintendo Wii moving some 15 million units, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft selling 6 or 7 million. The company is also expecting that the combined sales of the PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo DS will reach 24 million units. Activision Blizzard aims to boost its presence on the Wii and on the other consoles, while limiting its exposure on the PC market.
Mike Morhaime from Blizzard joined the investor call and explained that the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft would indeed be out by the end of 2008, but certainly not in the quarter that goes from the beginning of July to the end of September. He also mentioned that rival MMO launches, like that of Funcom's Age of Conan, could take some players away from World of Warcraft for a period of time, but he also pointed out that, so far, more than 40% of those that left the game re-activated their accounts.