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Activision Blizzard Q4 Earnings Call

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Quarterly results of the Activision Blizzard Earnings call are here and the company reached its highest operating income in Q4 2017 in a year without any major game releases.

Q4 Earnings Call Highlights (Slide Presentation)

  • Blizzard reached their highest operating income in a year with no major game releases thanks to delivering continuous content across franchises including Overwatch, Hearthstone and World of Warcraft.
  • 2017 was an important year in which Blizzard prepared for their future growth initiatives, including the launch of the Overwatch League.
  • The inaugural season of the Overwatch League started on January 10 with 12 world-class team owners from across the globe, multiple league and team-level sponsors, a premium viewing experience, and a robust distribution strategy.
  • In its first week, the Overwatch League reached more than 10 millions unique viewers across the world with an average audience of more than 280,000 on a per minute basis.
  • Audience Reach: 385 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the quarter across the company (up from 384 million last quarter).

(Source)

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7 hours ago, Stan said:
  • In its first week, the Overwatch League reached more than 10 millions unique viewers across the world with an average audience of more than 280,000 on a per minute basis.
  • Audience Reach: 385 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the quarter across the company (up from 384 million last quarter).

Things like that make me seriously wonder when e-sport will be considered for the Olympics and eventually introduced. I have already read articles hinting it. The Olympic Committee are not stupid and surely they know how to count the money and as we all know audience will translate to money at some point.

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8 hours ago, Stan said:
  • Blizzard reached their highest operating income in a year with no major game releases thanks to delivering continuous content across franchises including Overwatch, Hearthstone and World of Warcraft.

I can totally understand this, when looking at how Blizzard handled Content Patches in WoW for Legion. In the past i was always in and out of WoW. playing a couple months at start of new expansions and having a look again if patches interest me, or so. But Legion, oh boy, it was the first time, Blizzard had me subscripted for the whole expansion. I loved everything about it, even the rng that came with legendaries and titanforging. Mythic+ was the most perfect thing to come to the game, for me and my friends, and i am looking forward to the future of M+ in BfA.

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4 hours ago, VegaPl said:

Things like that make me seriously wonder when e-sport will be considered for the Olympics and eventually introduced. I have already read articles hinting it. The Olympic Committee are not stupid and surely they know how to count the money and as we all know audience will translate to money at some point.

It's still a long road. You would need national federations, then people responsible for each unique game, coaches that will select players (or you'll do it similarly to curling in Canada, where teams based on Canadians compete for a ticket to Olympics, but it'll probably work in countries like Korea or China, where you have a single nationality teams).

Most likely we'll get the E-Sport Olympic Games, as summer ones are packed, unless at Winter Games? It's a lot of money, yes, but there is a lot of paperwork for Olympic sports and, while I'm not an expert, I don't think that e-sport is near that, as I don't know if most of us, people interested with e-sport, are aware of that need, of professional federation.

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5 hours ago, VegaPl said:

Things like that make me seriously wonder when e-sport will be considered for the Olympics and eventually introduced. I have already read articles hinting it. The Olympic Committee are not stupid and surely they know how to count the money and as we all know audience will translate to money at some point.

The bigger problem here is, that games have a life cycles. At some point games are old and will eventually die out of popularity. That is not a good start for an olympic discipline to be considered.

An Esports-olympic Games (as Mortalo mentioned) specifically just for gaming competitions on the other hand is a likely scenario that i really hope for. It just needs to be flexible enough to have popular games coming into the disciplines, and have old ones get sorted out. A lot of work needed there. :)

Edited by Lawrenz

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6 hours ago, Lawrenz said:

The bigger problem here is, that games have a life cycles. At some point games are old and will eventually die out of popularity. That is not a good start for an olympic discipline to be considered.

This i think is the biggest hurdle.  

Although like someone said they're suckers for $, they might let it ride with 'flavor of the year' ones.

 

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On 9.02.2018 at 4:32 PM, Lawrenz said:

The bigger problem here is, that games have a life cycles. At some point games are old and will eventually die out of popularity. That is not a good start for an olympic discipline to be considered.

 

20 hours ago, PatrickHenry said:

Although like someone said they're suckers for $, they might let it ride with 'flavor of the year' ones.

This is obviously true, but I would say that games would somehow rotate, from one Olympics to another. Or there might be general sub-disciplines, e.g. MOBA, RTS, FPS, etc. Then, depending on the current state of gaming, the games would rotate. This would need to be announced beforehand, needless to say.

 

On 9.02.2018 at 4:11 PM, Mortalo said:

You would need national federations, then people responsible for each unique game, coaches that will select players (or you'll do it similarly to curling in Canada, where teams based on Canadians compete for a ticket to Olympics, but it'll probably work in countries like Korea or China, where you have a single nationality teams).

Most likely we'll get the E-Sport Olympic Games, as summer ones are packed, unless at Winter Games? It's a lot of money, yes, but there is a lot of paperwork for Olympic sports and, while I'm not an expert, I don't think that e-sport is near that, as I don't know if most of us, people interested with e-sport, are aware of that need, of professional federation.

Both points - yes and yes. But I can easily imagine National Gaming Associations being founded. Did not check, but I would imagine some proto-organizations like that already exist. Surely, introducing e-gaming would be a tremendous effort, but every new sport had to begin somehow ;)
 

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2 hours ago, Oxygen said:

Zero mention of Heroes of the Storm.

Struck me too, right? I guess HOTS is not that profitable, but I don't have any hard data on it.

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Olympic committee already co-sponsered a SCII tournament during this year's olympics, can definitely see them supporting more as time goes on.

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