Activision-Blizzard reveals that it's sitting on a big pile of money

by Samuel Axon Sep 6th 2008 at 3:00PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, MMO industry, News items

This year, Activision and Blizzard merged under French media group Vivendi (Blizzard's parent company) to become the biggest, baddest game publisher in the known universe. To make sure investors know just how awesome that event was, Vivendi sent out a press release describing its generally excellent financial condition.

Earnings for Vivendi as a whole were reported to be up 10.2% for the first six months of this year. While game division earnings are still actually down compared to this time last year, that should be no cause for alarm. It can be attributed to the lack of a World of Warcraft expansion. By this time last year, The Burning Crusade had reached store shelves.

Vivendi assured investors that it still plans to release Wrath of the Lich King by the end of this year, so that bump is still coming. But will Wrath be as big as The Burning Crusade? By definition it can't be any bigger, because you have to have played the TBC content to reach the point where you can enjoy most of what Wrath has to offer, right? Apparently we'll see soon.

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Tags: activision, activision-blizzard, blizzard, business, earnings, expansion, finances, investors, press-release, sales, tbc, the-burning-crusade, vivendi, world-of-warcraft, wotlk, wow, wrath, wrath-of-the-lich-king

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

ScytheNoire said on 6:27PM 9-06-2008

But the question is how many people will end up buying Wrath post-Warhammer launch?

I know I won't, and I know a bunch of others who also won't.

So they could end up looking at much lower sales numbers, because of more competition and people just being tired of the main problems with WoW not being fixed.

Hopefully all the flaws with WoW are addressed in Blizzard's next MMO. I can't see them just trying to release the same old thing like many Korean companies do.