In 2019, Activision Blizzard said it wanted to make more mobile games, and all franchises were under consideration. Now, the company has gone further, saying the plan is to release a mobile version of every one of its franchises “over time.”
Activision Blizzard president and COO Daniel Alegre said during a recent investor call that the company wants to bring its franchises to the widest possible audience, and mobile is a critical part of that.
“We need to make sure that we’re enabling our franchises on the billions of mobile devices that are available right now,” Alegre said. “That’s by far our biggest opportunity, and we’re investing meaningfully to capitalize on this and to take all our franchises to mobile over time. That’s really, really important for us.”
Alegre also pointed out that Activision Blizzard’s resources are finite, so the company plans to “focus on where the biggest opportunities are,” and it appears that’s mobile.
One of Activision’s biggest success stories on mobile right now is Call of Duty: Mobile, which recently passed 300 million downloads after one year. Activision Blizzard also owns King Digital, the makers of the Candy Crush series that is very popular on mobile.
Mobile is already a gigantic category for Activision Blizzard. For the July-September 2020 period, the company made $661 million from all of its mobile games, which compares to $514 million on PC and $695 million on console. Given those numbers, mobile made up around 34% of Activision Blizzard’s total of $1.95 billion in revenue for the period.
Activision’s next big mobile game is Crash: On The Run, which is an endless runner due out in 2021. Another high-profile game, Diablo Immortal, is also in the works for mobile.
Many of Activision’s mobile games are free-to-play, and they make money from microtransactions. The business practice is very lucrative for Activision, as the company made $1.2 billion from microtransactions in the July-September period.
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