We could practically copypasta last quarter’s Activision-Blizzard report to this one and nobody would notice. That’s because once again, it’s the Blizzard segment of the company driving the revenue flow; Blizz’s incomes rose 4% year-over-year to account for 42% of the revenue (with King and Activision itself trailing behind).
“Blizzard had the biggest quarterly online player community in its history with a record 46 million MAUsB, up 38% year-over-year. The Overwatch community continued to grow more than a year after launch, setting another all-time MAUB record with the release of two seasonal events in the quarter. Hearthstone MAUsB grew year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter to an all-time record, driven by its expansion, Journey to Un’Goro.”
Blizz is also talking up its “time spent” metric and claiming that it’s increased in World of Warcraft year-over-year, which should shock absolutely no one given Legion:
“Blizzard had Q2-record time spent. In April, Blizzard launched Uprising, an Overwatch seasonal event that included a player-versus-environment mode that drew record play time. Overwatch’s Anniversary event in May and June also drove strong engagement with record participation in customization items. Time spent in World of Warcraft grew year-over-year in the second quarter, and the Legion™ expansion continued to perform ahead of the prior expansion.”
As for Destiny,
“The Destiny 2 console Beta had more total players than the 2014 Destiny Beta, and Destiny 2 pre-orders are now above the first Destiny.”
As always, we note that “MAUsB” and “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 “deep engagement” since it stopped reporting WoW sub numbers a year and change ago.
