For further proof that microtransactions aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, all one needs to do is look at Activision Blizzard’s recent financials. In just three months’ time, the publisher raked in a whopping $1.2 billion from microtransactions alone. That’s $1.2 billion between the months of July and September of this year.
Activision Blizzard recently shared its financial results for the aforementioned three-month period. Evidently, microtransactions count as one sector that continues to perform phenomenally for the publisher. The $1.2 billion figure, marked as “in-game net bookings,” is an 69 percent increase over the $709 million earned from microtransactions during the same period last year.
And that’s hardly the most fascinating part of all this. In the last three months, Activision Blizzard’s revenue amounted to approximately $1.95 billion when taking every facet of the business into account. Thus, those “in-game net bookings” constituted well over 60 percent of the publisher’s earnings during the most recent reporting period.
Much of the year-over-year increase is owed to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone. GameSpot notes that microtransaction-related sales across these titles were four times higher than that of Call of Duty’s in-game earnings during the same period in 2019. Of course, Activision-owned King, the team behind Candy Crush, experienced year-on-year growth for in-game net bookings, too. However, the publisher didn’t report specific numbers for this particular title.
As a whole, Call of Duty arguably couldn’t be in better shape. Activision’s financial report further informs that the first-year sales for Modern Warfare are the best in franchise history. Interestingly, about two-thirds of the game’s sales are from digital storefronts.
The next entry, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, launches for the PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S on November 13th.
[Source: Activision Blizzard via GameSpot]
