Activison Blizzard Value Drops by $2.5B on Poor Earnings
Activision Blizzard has released their final quarterly results of 2015 and the numbers have led the company's stock to take a -16% dive. Quarterly revenues were down compared to 2014, $1.35 billion in 2015 compared to $1.58 in the previous year, at earnings of $0.81 per share (and missing the estimated $0.83).
But the company did show off quite a few impressive numbers.
While casual titles such as Guitar Hero Live and Skylanders performed poorer than predicted Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 "had the biggest entertainment opening weekend of 2015, and was the #1 console game globally for the calendar year." The franchise has generated over $15 billion and isn't likely to disappear anytime soon. That's a fact I did not expect. Destiny's expansion The Taken King also proved enormously successful and Hearthstone surpassed 40 million players on November 06, 2015.
Across the board Activision Blizzard did reach an all-time player-base high of 80 million users in Q4 2015, spending 3.5 billion hours playing games in the fourth quarter.
Bobby Kotick, Chief Executive Officer of Activision Blizzard, said, “With our expected closing of the acquisition of King Digital later this month, we will have the largest game network in the world, with over 500 million users playing our games every month
Some investors have been wary of the Candy Crush addition to Activision Blizzard's lineup. I'm personally not sure what the company has planned (maybe a connect-3 Heroes of the Storm?).
What is certain is that Activision Blizzard is playing the long-term investment in eSports: acquiring Major League Gaming on December 21, 2015 (to the tune of $46 million).
Activision Blizzard predicts around $6.25 billion in revenue in 2016. Whether or not the company is accurately predicting their earnings remains to be seen. But with heavy investment in eSports, the upcoming release of World of Warcraft's Legion, and new franchise titles like Overwatch I'm curious to see where the numbers stand in one year.
If you want to learn more about the Q4 2015 results or the future of Activision Blizzard head to the investor relations page.
