Back in 2019, Activision Blizzard stated that they wanted to make more mobile games than they had been thus far. Moreover, they even said that all of their franchises were potential candidates for getting mobile games. However, now even that statement is an understatement: apparently, Activision now plans to introduce mobile games for every single one of its franchises “over time.”
Activision Blizzard president and COO Daniel Alegre mentioned as much during a recent investor’s call, saying that the company wants to bring its many franchises to as large an audience as possible, a goal in which mobile gaming is a crucial aspect to take into consideration.
“We need to make sure that we’re enabling our franchises on the billions of mobile devices that are available right now,” Alegre said. “That’s by far our biggest opportunity, and we’re investing meaningfully to capitalize on this and to take all our franchises to mobile over time. That’s really, really important for us.”
Alegre also rightly mentioned that Activision Blizzard’s resources are limited, and as such, the company must focus on where the biggest opportunities for success are to be found. Apparently, those biggest opportunities exist in the form of mobile gaming.
It’s possible that one of the main reasons Activision is looking towards mobile success, in general, is thanks to the success of one such mobile game already, that being Call of Duty: Mobile. It has just recently passed over 300 million downloads after only a year of being available. To add even more credence to this, Activision Blizzard also owns the company that makes the Candy Crush series, which is of course an immensely popular mobile game franchise.
Needless to say, the mobile realm is already a very profitable sector for Activision Blizzard. For the July-September 2020 period, the company made $661 million from all of its mobile games, compared to $514 million on PC and $695 million on console. Given those numbers, mobile made up around 34% of Activision Blizzard’s total of $1.95 billion in revenue for the period.
For now, Activision’s next most prominent mobile game on the horizon is Crash: On the Run, which is an endless runner due out in 2021. Supposedly, Diablo Immortal is another major mobile game in development right now.
Like many mobile games these days, many of Activision’s mobile entries are free to download and play, with the profit coming primarily from microtransactions. As one might imagine, this business practice is used because it has proven to be very effective for most companies, with Activision making $1.2 billion from microtransactions in the July-September period.
Considering the mention of finite resources, one may wonder if Activision’s focus on more mobile games will have any sort of impact on their production of non-mobile games. However, we find it hard to believe that it would get in the way of major console releases for their most prominent titles, though that is just a guess on our part. For all we know, console games may slow down while mobile games pick up.
