Thanks mostly to Blizzard and the incredibly popular Overwatch, Activision surged to its strongest year ever in 2016. In total, the company raked in $6.6 billion in net revenue, which is a hefty 42% increase over 2015’s take of $4.66 billion.
While Activision has a strong stable of franchises and products, nothing impacted the bottom-line the way Blizzard and Overwatch did last year. Net revenue for the division, which celebrated a healthy 25 years of success in 2016, came in at $2.43 billion, a 39% portion of Activision’s entire revenue. Driving those numbers is Overwatch, which according to COO Thomas Tippl, is “the most successful intellectual property in our company’s history.”
In addition to the success of the aforementioned game, Blizzard also oversaw a resurgence of popularity in the long-running World of Warcraft. Thanks to the August release of the Legion expansion, year over year active users were up 10%. Finally, the digital card game Hearthstone reached a new milestone in active monthly users for the year. If it wasn’t good to be Blizzard before, it certainly is now.
With the company accounting for 39% of Activision’s net revenue, the rest is broken up between two parties. King, which the publisher paid a mammoth $5.9 billion for last year, made up 25%, while all other titles published by the company compiled the last 36%. Products from the past year include Destiny: Rise of Iron, Skylanders: Imaginators and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which despite the hyped up inclusion of Modern Warfare Remastered, actually missed sales expectations.
Tell us are surprised at the massive 2016 that Activision Blizzard had? Or were you expecting it thanks to the soaring success of Overwatch? Sound off in the usual place and let us know!