Activision-Blizzard can’t claim “biggest quarter ever” for the quarter ending March 2017, but it continues to rake in huge sums of money, enough to at least claim “biggest first quarter ever” on multiple counts with the $1.73 billion it made during the period. But you’re here for the MMOs, which is good, because it’s Blizzard’s titles making all the bank.
“Activision Blizzard had 431 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs)A in the quarter. Blizzard had the biggest Q1 online player community in its history with MAUsA of 41 million, up 58% year-over-year. Overwatch continues to be Blizzard’s fastest growing new franchise, reaching over 30 million players globally less than a year after launch. Overwatch is now the 8th billion-dollar franchise in Activision Blizzard’s portfolio. Hearthstone® MAUsA grew year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, despite no content releases in the first quarter, and recently surpassed the 70 million registered player milestone life-to-date.”
World of Warcraft managed this bit: “With a regular content and feature update cadence, World of Warcraft® time spent grew year-over-year in the first quarter.” Rah-rah.
Notably, 80% of the revenue comes from digital sales — including subs, online  and lootboxes, as Gamasutra has rightly pointed out.
It’s also worth pointing out that “MAUs” are Monthly Active Users, “the number of individuals who played a particular game in a given month” calculated 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” such that “an individual who plays two of our games would be counted as two users” and “an individual who plays the same game on two platforms or devices in the relevant period would generally be counted as a single user.” This is Blizzard’s preferred method of describing engagement since it stopped reporting WoW sub numbers a year and change ago.
And howasabout Destiny 2?
“Activision and its partners at Bungie expect to release Destiny 2 on September 8, 2017 and welcome PC players into the Destiny universe for the first time. Response to the Destiny 2 reveal was very encouraging, and pre-orders are off to a very strong start.”
