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Tag: Q4
Activision Blizzard Q4 Finances: Lesser Billions
Activision Blizzard has released their fourth quarter financial reports and if you were hoping the company would burn to the ground following last year’s Hearthstone debacle, well you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
The positive side of this year’s Q4 report is that Activision didn’t pair an announcement of record revenues with hundreds of layoffs. We still expect the company to siphon a few hundred million in taxpayer dollars for simply existing in 2019. Unfortunately Activision hasn’t been able to keep up its record results from last year as the company has seen multiple straight quarters of revenue loss. Sad for the investors, but since Activision isn’t infinitely expanding not quite a surprise.
Despite this, Q4 results exceeded expectations according to Bobby Kotick.
“Our fourth quarter results exceeded our prior outlook for both revenue and earnings per share,” said Bobby Kotick, Chief Executive Officer of Activision Blizzard. “Our recent Call of Duty® success illustrates the scale of our growth potential, as we expanded the community to more players in more countries on more platforms than ever before. With our strong content pipeline across our franchises and momentum in mobile, esports, and advertising, we look forward to continuing to delight our players, fans and stakeholders in 2020 and beyond.”
Net revenue dropped from $2.3 billion for Q4 2018 to $1.98 billion in 2019, while overall net bookings similarly fell. Activision boasted a monthly average user rate of 409 million with a large portion coming from King (249 million) and of course the ongoing success of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch.
Investors are happy because Activision increased dividend payouts by 11% and you have to focus on the important things.
Source: Activision
NCSoft Posts Q4 Report: Wildstar Revenues Climb
NCSoft has posted their fourth quarter reports for 2015, and the results are a general mixture of the good and the bad. As you can see from the chart above, while figures were pretty solid across the board over the third quarter, revenue and profit dropped notably over the same period last year. NCSoft pits the majority of the loss on overseas royalties, but that overall the company is growing in profit thanks to a balanced growth from overall IPs.
On the games front, every single title in NCSoft’s library saw growth in the last quarter, including Wildstar. Lineage and Lineage 2, as well as Blade & Soul, grew thanks to content updates and strong in-game item promotions. Guild Wars 2 drove in plenty of new revenue thanks to the sale of Heart of Thorns.
Thank you to NCSoft for plotting out each game on an individual basis, it saves me a lot of time. As you can see from the chart above, while Wildstar’s income grew in the first quarter of free to play, it didn’t grow all that much. Revenue is still far down from where it was when the game launched, and it brought in only $2.23 million USD in its initial free to play rush.
At this point in the timeline, it looks like the upcoming China launch may be Wildstars best, and only, bet at salvation. Assuming NCSoft is willing to shoulder the title to that milestone, we’ll likely be hearing in 2017 about whether or not this title goes on the chopping block. As for Guild Wars, it looks like the Heart of Thorns quarter brought in a bump of $14 million. According to the earnings call itself, while sales were good for Heart of Thorns, they did fall below expectations. This lines up with earlier predictions of Daewoo Securities that Heart of Thorns would sell less than expected.
The first quarter earnings for NCSoft won’t be out for another few months, but they will have some very important information going forward: How has Blade & Soul fared with its western launch? How will Wildstar hold up after its free to play transition?
Funcom Q4 2014 Finances Released
Funcom last week released their fourth quarter finances and the results are mixed. Revenue for the quarter amounted to $2.94 million, an increase of $288 thousand over the previous quarter thanks to strong results from The Secret World, Age of Conan, and Anarchy Online. As part of Funcom’s ongoing restructuring, the company’s work-for-hire business is being sold off with the results not materializing until the second quarter of 2015.
Promotions lead to strong sales in Age of Conan over the fourth quarter, although sales fell year over year, while The Secret World released Issue #10 and two holiday events. LEGO Minifigures saw an increase of players, however is still lagging behind internal targets for sales. The iOS beta for LEGO Minifgures will become more widely available.
(Source: Funcom)
Star Vault 2014 Finance: Sales Down, Profit Up
Star Vault has released their fourth quarter finances for the 2014 year and the results are not all bad.
While net sales fell for the second quarter in a row, down to $57 thousand, net profit dipped slightly more out of the red at $109 thousand below. This year Star Vault made advances toward release on Steam, announcing that Mortal Online would support the Oculus Rift, testing a territory control system, and worked towards the upcoming release of Sarducaa, the next continent.
As always, here are CEO Henrik Nystrom’s (translated) comments:
We have throughout 2014 continued to improve the quality and the experience of playing Mortal Online. During the early years was updated game engine Unreal Engine which has facilitated and laid the foundation for further development. Territory control system was in place during the second quarter. This allows for further development with new features and experiences that will be interesting to follow the 2015th
We have in the fourth quarter continued to work hard for the upcoming launch of the platform Steam, which is the world’s largest digital distribution channel for PC games. In November we released a so-called “performance patch” to improve the performance of the players when especially a large number of players are on the screen simultaneously. This has previously been heavy for players’ computers but have become much better and the players now need not miss out on the game experience when playing surface is under heavy load. It is thus an impressive performance increase.
We are continuing to work on the new continent, which is the last step before STEAM launch, where the technical challenge is now complete. This means that our network solution now supports both the existing continent and the new continent that soon we will be presenting to our players. What we have left before launch is improving the artificial intelligence that gives players a better gaming experience. We think it’s important to stability in the continent is so good it can be before we release the update. Our previous goal was to release it before the end of the year but we want to give it extra time to the players who patiently waited for a new continent will get as good an experience as possible. We are committed to releasing the continent first quarter of 2015, and shortly after this launch the game on STEAM platform. We made the decision to have two continents implemented before STEAM to even be able to handle an increased number of players in the game world. As previously commented, we will continue to be very honest with our loyal player base and allow them to participate and judge when we have what it takes for a successful launch. One of the major challenges in the industry is to bring in new players, but also to retain existing players by offering a high quality and solid gaming experience which is very important for us at Star Vault.
Furthermore, I can happily comment that Mortal Online was nominated and came in first place as the most “hyped” game on the Gold Chip – a stipend provided by Estrella. The Gold Chipset provides Estrella players the opportunity to vote for a title that offered a place in Estrella’s booth at Dreamhack. DreamHack went well, we got a lot of fans who tried the game and playing now.
Oculus Rift is that earlier in wait for when we know when it will be released and the hardware will apply to the market. Before we know it, we will not do any work here. We focus remains on being able to provide full support in Mortal Online as Oculus Rift will be on the market, precisely because the game fits so well on the type of hardware with dedicated first-person view. We believe that many will try out a game like this when they own a pair Oculus Rift, and then we also have the chance to reach out to many interested players.
Work on the continent release is proceeding according to plan.
Henrik Nystrom
CEO, Star Vault AB
(Disclosure: Star Vault’s finances are published on the Aktie Torget stock exchange in Swedish, linked below, and translated using Google’s automatic tools. Figures shown above are based off of the SEK to USD conversion rates as of the day of their publishing.)
(Source: Star Vault)
MMO Fallout 