If you’re interested in the financial side of Blizzard, you’ll want to look at this transcript of a conference call with financial reporters, during which Actvision/Blizzard’s quarterly earnings were revealed. The talk features Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision, and Michael Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard, along with several of their top financial officers. The discussion is chiefly about earnings ratios, stock buy backs, and international sales of WoW and Guitar Hero, but there are some mentions of BlizzCon as well.
During the 10-page-long transcript, Mike Morhaime revealed some pretty impressive figures:
Even though the quarter was book-ended by competitors in the MMO space, the World of Warcraft subscriber base continued to grow. Age of Conan launched toward the end of the June quarter, and Warhammer Online came out in mid-September.
To date, 68% of the players who listed Age of Conan as their reason for cancellation and 46% of the players who listed Warhammer as their reason for cancellation have reactivated their subscriptions to World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft also managed to grow its subscribership, despite the Olympics and the summer vacation period. At the end of the quarter, World of Warcraft had 1.5 million more subscribers than during the same time last year. As a result, our non-GAAP net revenue was up 19% and our operating income was up 11% compared to last September.
Wrath of the Lich King will be released on November 13th and 14th in most of the regions that we operate in, and we will follow in Korea and the region of Taiwan on November 18th.
Approximately 15,000 midnight launch events will take place around the world with countless retailers. Key members of the Blizzard executive and development teams will attend some of these events in virtually all of the countries where the game is operated. Thousands of gamers showed up for these events when we launched the first expansion and we are expecting a similar turnout this year.
The first World of Warcraft expansion, the Burning Crusade, became the fastest selling PC game of all time when it was released in January of 2007. Before that, the record was held by Warcraft III and before that by Diablo II, both Blizzard games. The Burning Crusade sold nearly 2.4 million copies to players in its first 24 hours and it went on to sell about 3.5 million in its first month. We believe that Wrath of the Lich King contains some of the most compelling World of Warcraft content that we have created so far and we have put a lot of work into preparing for a strong launch.
It is currently the top pre-sale on Amazon.com among all videogames, not just PC games, and Walmart has told us that it was among the highest number of preorders ever sold on Walmart.com.
Overall, we estimate that by the end of this year, Blizzard Entertainment will have tripled revenues from 2005 and doubled revenues from 2006. We expect to exceed $1 billion in revenue this year for the second year in a row and it looks like our operating income will be more than three times what it was in 2005.
Via Dii.net
