Call of Duty and World of Warcraft publisher Activision Blizzard did not have the best 2021 when it came to PR. With multiple employees coming out to claim that the company had enabled a workplace culture of harassment, alongside calls for Activision CEO Bobby Kotick to resign that are carrying on today, Activision Blizzard is looking to 2022 as an opportunity to rebuild the relationship between its fans and the company.
Head of Blizzard Entertainment Mike Ybarra has been the figurehead of this plan to rebuild trust between Activision Blizzard, its fans, and its employees. While Activision Blizzard may be putting in the work to rebuild a relationship of trust, it seems this hasn't stopped people from spending heavily on the games that the company publishes. In its recent quarterly earnings report, Activision Blizzard confirms that at least in the space of in-game purchases, it has made a significant financial increase compared to 2020.
Activision Blizzard reported that in 2021 it earned a staggering $5.1 billion, up from the $4.85 billion reported in 2020. This large amount of money was raked in solely from in-game purchases, which includes microtransactions and DLC purchases for games. Despite a 5% increase in profits from microtransactions and DLC, Activision Blizzard saw its profits fall slightly, from a total of $8.41 billion in 2020 to $8.35 billion in 2021.
Looking at these figures, it's easy to see that Activision Blizzard takes in most of its profits from microtransactions and DLC purchases. Producing games like Call of Duty: Warzone though, which relies heavily on its Battle Pass for players to spend money on the game, and World of Warcraft, which releases consistent expansions and encourages a paid subscription service, it's unsurprising that the publisher is able to rake in so much money on the purchases outside of the games that it makes.
Profits and money earned from microtransactions were not the only interesting figures to come out of Activision Blizzard's most recent quarterly earnings report. It seems the famous publisher took the quarterly earnings report not only as a chance to share its financial statistics, but also to update players and fans on what their favorite franchises would be producing next. Quiet announcements like the addition of a Warcraft mobile game and updates coming to the delayed Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 made their way to the news through bullet points listed in the quarterly earnings report. So it seems, even with some setbacks Activision Blizzard is still looking to produce some headlining games.
Source: Activision Blizzard