Activision Blizzard turned in its quarterly earnings report just recently, and within it contain some interesting tidbits of information.
First off, the newest iteration of the long-running Tony Hawk series, Tony Hawk Ride, will only release this year in America, U.K., Germany. All other territories will get the game “early 2010”. New James Bond, Spider-Man, and Tony Hawk games are all planned for 2010.
Modern Warfare 2 continues to break records, as Activision Blizzard announced it has become the most pre-ordered game in the company’s history. With the recent announcement that Activision Blizzard hired an advertisement agency to promote Modern Warfare 2, common sense tells us that those numbers will only go higher. CEO Robert Kotick states that:
“[Retailers are] still showing strong commitment to our holiday launches [and are giving them] shelf space allocation.”
For the April – June financial quarter, Activision Blizzard managed to rake in an impressive $1.038 billion, slightly higher than the anticipated $1 billion. Bobby Kotick remarked on his company’s brow-raising figures:
“Since our merger one year ago, we have delivered better-than-expected financial performance for four consecutive quarters.
Our second quarter overperformance was driven by Activision Publishing’s Prototype, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises, as well as Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. During a challenging economic climate, Activision Blizzard grew its quarterly North American and European market share 2.8 points across all platforms to 12.7 percent from 9.9 percent for the previous year and was the number one North American third-party console and handheld publisher for the quarter and first six months of the calendar year, according to the NPD Group, Charttrack and Gfk.”
A console-by-console breakdown of Activision Blizzard’s profits reveal that the PS3 brought in $152 million, the PS2 $44 million and the PSP a respectable $17 million.
