Activision Blizzard Q4 earnings. Not all bad news

Community General Discussion
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MAU down but not as much as I expected. WoW doing better than the forums would make you think (no surprise), and a mobile game coming soon.

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It’s all good .

WoW is not dying . Company continues to make strong profit .

Compared to the company with makes FF14 ( the supposed WoW killer ) :joy::joy:

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Obivously all the maus are actually just ions alts meant to boost systems engagement metrics. Wake up sheeple!

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That is some quality copium you’re taking.

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Didn’t they ban maus somewhere?

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I think it’s about average for a content lull. It’ll go back up with 9.2.

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TBF, lots of people are still playing Hearthstone, Diablo, and Overwatch. Apparently, Hearthstone has about 3 million and Overwatch a little more than 7 million, Diablo contributes about 4m. I estimate that WoW has about 1-2 million subscribers now but I sincerely hope it’s more than that. Remember that there are people who play multiple games, though

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I’m going to be playing Diablo immortal. I know it’s a mobile game but it’ll be fun

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Blizzard Entertainment - 24 million monthly active users, down from 26 million in Q3 2021

Fourth Quarter:
“Blizzard segment revenue grew 20% year-over-year, driven by the successful launch of Diablo II: Resurrected. While World of Warcraft revenue is down, the game is on track to deliver its strongest engagement and net bookings outside of a Modern expansion year in a decade, indicating that the loss between content cycles is not as bad as previous years. However, Diablo is taking the center stage for Blizzard Entertainment this quarter.”

  • Within the Warcraft franchise, fourth quarter World of Warcraft reach and engagement continued to benefit from the combination of the Modern game and Classic under a single subscription. In 2021, World of Warcraft delivered its strongest engagement and net bookings outside of a Modern expansion year in a decade. HearthstoneÂź fourth quarter net bookings grew year-over-year, driven by a steady cadence of new content.

  • Blizzard is planning substantial new content for the Warcraft franchise in 2022, including new experiences in World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, and getting all-new mobile Warcraft content into players’ hands for the first time.

  • In the Diablo franchise, Diablo II: Resurrected sold through more units from its September release until the year end than any other Activision Blizzard remaster over an equivalent period. On mobile, Diablo Immortal concluded its public testing with positive feedback.

  • Blizzard is making strong progress on its pipeline, including new experiences in Warcraft, ongoing development in Diablo and Overwatch, and an exciting new IP.

Third Quarter:
“Blizzard segment revenue grew 20% year-over-year, driven by the successful launch of Diablo II: Resurrected. While World of Warcraft revenue is down, the game is on track to deliver its strongest engagement and net bookings outside of a Modern expansion year in a decade, indicating that the loss between content cycles is not as bad as previous years. However, Diablo is taking the center stage for Blizzard Entertainment this quarter.”

  • Diablo is entering an era of unprecedented content scale for the franchise, starting with a strong release of Diablo II: Resurrected, which had the highest first week sales for a remaster in Activision history.

  • Diablo Immortal is in public testing and remains on track for a release in the first half of next year.

  • Diablo IV is set to be the foundation for great experiences for PC and console fans over many years, believed to expand and serve the Diablo community better than ever before.

  • The Grand Finals of the Overwatch League in September was the most-watched match in the league’s history.

  • Starting in the Spring, the next season of the Overwatch League will run on an early build of Overwatch 2‘s new 5v5 competitive multiplayer mode.

  • World of Warcraft reach and engagement continues to benefit from the combination of the Modern game and Classic under a single subscription, and is on track to deliver its strongest engagement and net bookings outside of a Modern expansion year in a decade.

  • Hearthstone launched Mercenaries in October, giving new and returning players an entirely new way to play the game, and net bookings were stable year-over-year in the third quarter.

They gave the same speech twice “It appears that we are loosing money and subscribers; however, if everything goes as we expect then profits will go back up.”

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Even if WoW only has 1 million subs world wide that still roughly 15 million dollars a month. Could be slightly less or more considering 6 month sub is less than 15 a month and tokens are more than 15.

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For anyone new to the quarterly reports, “Engagement” means “daily time played”, generally. It took people longer to do the stuff they wanted to do in the game in 2021. Hooray?

“Net bookings” means sales of things like boosts, mounts and pets on top of subscription fees, netted out by costs. So it may not even be that they’re selling more mounts and boosts and pets than ever, it might be that because they had to fire so many people their costs are especially low.

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The way it is worded sounds like Classic is propping up Retail.

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Maybe not carrying it entirely, but it’s certainly helping their “engagement” metrics for counting minutes logged in across both games.

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Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, means the Retail team will have to re-evaluate their current design philosophy and reign the game back into it’s RPG roots instead of the constant focus on E-Sportsification.

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From the context, this is 26 million across all Blizzard products. This isn’t just WoW, this is Hearthstone, Diablo, Overwatch etc etc

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Anyone armory’ed ion lately?

I looked up his Shaman last night while waiting on a queue, out of curiosity. The dude is still renown 50 some ~7+ months out from 9.1 release, and he apparently stopped raid progress at 3/10


So the same dude designing/overseeing all these boring grinds for us lowly commoners doesn’t even do the grinds himself - he doesn’t drink his own medicine. Even the most casual of casualiest casuals is renown 80 by now on their main, ion doesn’t even believe in his own product (patch 9.1) and quickly got bored/stopped playing it judging by his armory page :laughing:

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Good god, MAUs are lower now than at the lowest point during Warlords while they have more games to prop it up. That means less people are playing Shadowlands than Warlords, the supposed worse expansion ever, haha.

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Imagine for a moment that they had stuck to their, “You think you do, but you don’t,” attitude. These quarterly reports would be a lot less pleasant for them.

Classic may not be carrying retail, but it’s certainly saving it from looking extremely bad.

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It’s also Monthly Active Users, so if a unique account logs in one time in a month to any of the Blizzard games, they count as a MAU.

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Yep, it’s broad wording for a reason.