It was time for the Activision Blizzard Q1 2021 fiscal reports, so we can once again see what the company is hyping and what they are mysteriously failing to mentions. You can find everything I reference on the Activision Blizzard investor relations site.
As usual, it is nice I guess that Activision is doing well with yet another spin of the Call of Duty wheel and that a bazillion people still play Candy Crush Saga, but my interest resides in Blizzard camp where they continue to talk up World of Warcraft and WoW Classic.
Overall revenue was down from Q4 2020, but that was also when Blizzard launched the Shadowlands expansion, which is usually a peak item in their financials.
Activision Blizzard Q1 2021 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 9
Margins are very good, but the only title they mention is WoW, while pointing towards “product timing” as a drag on the overall numbers. Somebody else isn’t pulling their weight.
Details from the quarter again rely heavily on WoW.
Activision Blizzard Q1 2021 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 7
Shadowlands and the coming of Burning Crusade Classic are up top, followed by another Hearthstone expansion. But there is always another Hearthstone expansion, isn’t there? They’ve had so many they’ve got Hearthstone Classic option in the game now.
The only “hope for the future” item on the list that isn’t invested in Azeroth is Diablo II Resurrected, which I will admit I am a bit hyped for myself. And then there is Diablo Immortal, which continues to take its sweet time getting to a point where it can launch.
After that we have Overwatch League and nothing else. We heard last report that Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV are not slated for this year.
Meanwhile, the reported MAUs, monthly active users, for Q1 was 27 million which, according to Massively OP, which has been keeping track, down 29% from the Q1 2018 peak of 38 million. If WoW is still booming… and carrying the company… that means 10 million fewer people are engaged with other Blizz properties. For those interested, slide 13 defines MAUs as:
Monthly Active Users (“MAUs”) We monitor MAUs as a key measure of the overall size of our user base. MAUs are the number of individuals who accessed a particular game in a given month. We calculate average MAUs in a period by adding the total number of MAUs in each of the months in a given period and dividing that total by the number of months in the period.
An individual who accesses two of our games would be counted as two users. In addition, due to technical limitations, for Activision and King, an individual who accesses the same game on two platforms or devices in the relevant period would be counted as two users. For Blizzard, an individual who accesses the same game on two platforms or devices in the relevant period would generally be counted as a single user. In certain instances, we rely on third parties to publish our games. In these instances, MAU data is based on information provided to us by those third parties, or, if final data is not available, reasonable estimates of MAUs for these third-party published games
Since I played WoW and WoW Classic a bit each month over the last quarter I guess I count as two users, which seems to imply that Azeroth is possibly propping up the MAU count even more than I might have suspected.
Massively OP also has some notes from the investor calls including some inconsistencies from the company.
Anyway, that is what we have from Activision Blizzard for Q1 2021.
No comments:
Post a Comment