This Week In The Business: A Billion Dollar Battle

This Week In The Business: A Billion Dollar Battle

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.

Image via Shutterstock


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


7 responses to “This Week In The Business: A Billion Dollar Battle”