8 February 2013 | |
iTZKooPA
Headline aside, it’s far from all bad news for Activision. Yes, the elephant in the subscription-based MMOG room has floundered a bit, with a subscription rate of only 9.6 million by the end of Q4 2012. That’s down 4% from World of Warcraft’s Q3 2012 return to the 10 million mark. Still a dominating number in the (dwindling) subgenre of subscriptionn-based titles.
What’s the good news? Activision had no problem making an incredible amount of money even though WoW had a hiccup during the period. We’re talking billions. Yeah, with a B. The company pulled in an impressive $1.77 billion in revenue for Q4 2012. An increase of nearly 26% over Q4 2011’s $1.41 billion.
The added cashflow was largely due to the Skylanders product, the unstoppable force that is the Call of Duty brand and the combined PC power of Diablo III and World of Warcraft. CoD and Skylanders helped make Activision Blizzard the #1 console and handheld publisher in the West.
MMO gamers know that holding the crown of the largest subscription MMOG is becoming easier and easier as more and more companies opt to launch or change their business model to the F2P model. The arguement continues on if this is the future of the genre or a result of WoW’s dominance.
What are your thoughts?
7 May 2012 | |
iTZKooPA
Pew, pew, pew. Now only 1.3 million to deal with!
Earlier today, Electronic Arts had its stuffy quarterly report. The number, fact, and strategy filled report was of little interest to most MMO gamers until the mention of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Following the recent trend of LoreHound coverage, the mention wasn’t good. According to the publisher, TOR lost 24% of its subscribers, shedding 400,000 paying customers from the peak of 1.7 million a quarter earlier (during the included free month).
That places the second Star Wars-based MMORPG over the million subscriber mark, at 1.3 million, but still showing a decline as troubling as the current, yet declining, kind of World of Warcraft. This is roughly on target with the estimate made by an analyst group in mid April.
This has left many players scratching their heads. TOR was easily one of, if not the most, anticipated MMOG releases of 2011. Sure, there’s the just released action-oriented TERA, or a flood of F2P games available and coming, but is there one core aspect that has drained TOR’s base?
Conspiracy theories will abound as analysts and players attempt to isolate the trend. Hit the jump for our perspective reasons.
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