If you were expecting big news out of Activision-Blizzard’s Q3 2017 financial report… sorry to disappoint you, but you’ve probably heard the big news before, and that’s the news that Destiny 2 is doing pretty well. All told, D2’s console launch helped drive the corporation’s revenues to a record $1.62B for the quarter, a slight boost QoQ.
“Activision had the biggest third-quarter online player community in its history, with a record 49 million MAUs,” boasts the company. “Launched in September, Destiny 2 is the best-selling console game year-to-date in the U.S. Digital mix was over 50% of console full game sell-through, a new record for the company.”
On the Blizzard side, it’s Overwatch and Hearthstone taking home strong report cards, thanks to the former’s late summer and fall events and the latter’s Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion. World of Warcraft got a nod for its last patch too, which the company says led “to stable MAUs for the franchise quarter-over-quarter and continued participation in value added services.” Stable, well then.
“Blizzard had the biggest third quarter online player community in its history, with a record 42 million MAUs. This is the fourth quarter in a row that Blizzard drove quarterly record MAUs. Overwatch and Hearthstone MAUs grew year-over-year. The Overwatch community grew to over 35 million registered players.”
As always, we note 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 “deep engagement” since it stopped reporting WoW sub numbers in 2015.
