According to The Wall Street Journal, Blizzard’s Key Revenue has skyrocketed. A key revenue measure more than doubled in the latest quarter. Blizzard attributes part of this recent financial success to their latest team based first person shooter, Overwatch. The game has garnered critical and financial success and according to PC Gamer, players have already spent more than 500 million hours in the game.
Adjusted per-share profit rose to 54 cents compared to a mere 13 cents from the previous year. Financial analysts had expected an adjusted 42 cents a share. The company has raised its outlook for the fiscal year. Now they expect revenue of about $6.4 billion and profit of about $1.83 a share.
Blizzard has also benefited from an embrace of digital distribution in favor of physical retail. The company had recently acquired King Digital Entertainment, a company best known for the popular Candy Crush Saga app.
In October of 2015, Activision Blizzard launched an eSports division through Major League Gaming, a producer and broadcaster of gaming competitions they acquired December. In the first half of the year, views of Call of Duty competitions increased substantially.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick provided the following insight:
With Overwatch’s incredibly successful launch, Call of Duty‘s record first-half performance and Candy Crush‘s continued growth as key drivers of our overall performance, we delivered a record Q2.
Though the Warcraft movie adaption has found considerable box office success with $433 million worldwide, the domestic box office was mere $47 million. However, Activision Blizzard only has a small participation in the profit from the Legendary Pictures co-production. Paul Bond of The Hollywood Reporter speculates that Blizzard will financially benefit from the film’s publicity.
Conversely, Take Two has recently taken on considerable financial woes. Its fiscal-first-quarter revenue fell 26% from a year prior to $272.6 million. Take-Two benefited a year ago from the launch of the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V. Coincidentally, they also released a cartoony team based first person shooter called Battleborn. Leading up to the the game’s release, Battleborn was immediately compared to Overwatch by publications such as the weekly gaming comic strip, Penny-Arcade. Unlike Overwatch however, Battleborn failed to find critical or financial success.
of PC GAMER predicts “another big push” when the first-ever Overwatch World Cup debuts at BlizzCon 2016.