World Class Villains

Okay, that isn’t exactly what he said. The head of Activision Blizzard actually said, “Today, probably 70 percent of our operating profit comes from non-console-based video games. So, while you might see a month-to-month change or volatility against expectations, that doesn’t really get us too concerned.”

The key word there is ‘profit’. Not ‘revenue’ which is sometimes thrown around because it is bigger and looks more impressive, but ‘profit’, which is what really counts. It’s the reason why the push is on to make Battle.net ‘stickier’, why subscription-based titles and paid DLC is the focus of a lot of Blactivision’s business – it has been immensely profitable and doesn’t look like wearing out soon. For video game sales, where the pressure is always on to have a hot title or two that drive profits, long-tail stickiness is a paradigm shift. Right now, however, it is working for Mr Kotick.

Also interesting is that Blactivision believe that PC game sales are going to be up in 2010 purely based on the output of Blizzard (slide 9) … although it might be hard to argue with that.