Activision Blizzard have released results for the fourth quarter of 2013 and they beat their own projections. Non-GAAP net revenue for the quarter was $2.272 billion (outlook $2.215 billion), it's a slight drop from last year's $2.595 billion - but nothing overly dramatic. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said:
"2013 was a transformational year for Activision Blizzard and for our industry. Our transaction with Vivendi returned us to independence and eliminated the challenges and constraints of being a controlled company. The continued success of our games delivered better-than-expected financial results, including stronger net revenues and earnings per share, and over $1.26 billion in operating cash flow."
While scarce on actual sales numbers the report did include some fascinating figures nonetheless. The Skylanders franchise had generated more than $2 billion in worldwide sales by December 31 with more than 175 million Skylanders toys sold.
World of Warcraft saw a slight increase in subscriptions since this summer moving from 7.6 million to 7.8 million. Prior to this stabilisation, World of Warcraft was losing players at an alarming rate.
Activision also announced expectations that Bungie's Destiny will be their next billion dollar franchise. And the company is looking towards the free-to-play market for growth with Call of Duty Online (mainly geared towards the Chinese market with partner Tencent), Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and Heroes of the Storm from Blizzard. It was also mentioned that Hearthstone is coming to Android and iOS in 2014.
Another news to come out of the financials is that Call of Duty is now on a 3 dev cycle with Sledgehammer Games doing the next one.