STAT | $US1.11 billion — Amount of revenue Activision earned in the first quarter of this year, down from $US1.32 billion last year; the company projects revenues of $US4.22 billion for the full year, compared to $US4.3 billion in 2013.
Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …
STAT | $US1.12 billion — Amount Electronic Arts earned in the first quarter of this year, and revenues for its fiscal year (ended March 31) were $US3.58 billion; EA predicts $US4.38 billion in revenues for the new fiscal year.
STAT | 51 million — Number of PlayStation 4s sold by 2016, according to research firm IDC, making it the leader among next-gen consoles; IDC also believes Xbox One will be the leader in North America once it unbundles the Kinect, which IDC expects to see in 2015.
QUOTE | “With 48 million subscribers through Xbox Live (silver and gold), Microsoft has a bigger audience than DirecTV.” — Nancy Tellem, head of Xbox Entertainment Studios, talking about why she thinks their original content will do very well.
QUOTE | “We’re taking PC gaming, Windows gaming and Xbox gaming and bringing those a lot closer together.” — Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, in the same interview where he said “Absolutely” when asked if he’d support selling off the Xbox division.
QUOTE | “I think mobile is mainly geared toward the multimillion dollar corporations … which can probably put 10 times the amount into marketing that they put into the product itself .” — Teddy Lee of Cellar Door Games, explaining why he thinks PC and mobile are less indie-development-friendly than consoles.
STAT | $US230 million — Amount Nintendo lost for its fiscal year ended March 31, due to lower-than-expected sales of the Wii U and 3DS; overall sales were $US5.62 billion, down 10 per cent from the previous year and well under what Nintendo forecast in January.
QUOTE | “This is gonna be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in VR.” — Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, talking about how the company’s ambitions have scaled with the Facebook takeover.
QUOTE | “Crowdfunding is very difficult, and much more difficult now that it was even a year ago.” — Designer Julian Gollop, talking about the difficulty he had Kickstarting a remake of his 1985 Spectrum game Chaos.
STAT | 142 per cent — Amount that King Digital’s profits jumped for the first quarter over last year’s, to $US127 million; however, the stock price dropped 9 per cent over investor worries about Candy Crush Saga sales slowing.
STAT | 19 per cent — Amount game and toy revenues for Sega Sammy Holdings increased last year, up to $US981 million; their best-selling game was Total War: Rome II with 1.13 million copies sold.
Comments
7 responses to “This Week In The Business: A Billion Dollar Battle”
That will be the day i buy an Xbox one.
Think of the propeller dicking opportunities your missing out on on Skype though!
You can quote me on this, I say PS4 will never reach PS3 sales, currently at 80 million.
That doesn’t really mean much since you will need Gold to watch their videos, if they plan to follow the same model as Netflix. I highly doubt it will be pay per video.
This place really needs a rumour section.
Anyways, a couple of new rumours about next gen and PC versions of GTA V, first is says that Sony is set to reveal the PS4 version of GTA V at their presser at E3 and Michael Pachter who normally gets everything wrong says that there “most likely” won’t be a next gen GTA V saying that it is presumably extremely difficult to port from X360 and PS3 to Xbone and PS4.
More and more retailers are starting to take pre-orders for PC GTA V even it’s in a Gamestop rewards program, normally you cannot pre-order what isn’t on their systems. So maybe Rockstar are getting the ball rolling with the PC release or maybe they aren’t… who knows with Rockstar?
on those 48 million subscribers: that’s a really suspect way to list it.
I’m one of those 48 million, but I haven’t played online, nor have had a gold account in over a year.
It would be like if WoW referred to their account numbers instead of their active account numbers.
(sort of, I know you can still be active on Xbox with a silver account, so the metaphor doesn’t quite hold up, but shrugs)
Bill Gates did not agree to selling off xbox. He agreed to it becoming it’s own entity under the Microsoft umbrella. A subsidiary.
Anyone else notice how Nintendo’s revenue is about $1b more than Activision! This is where the decision to get out if hardware would be more difficult; Nintendo isn’t in the business of retrenching workers so how do they replace the revenue of selling $200 things with selling only $60 things?