Activision Blizzard, the world’s leading video games company, was formed in 2008 from the merger of two major players in the sector: Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Vivendi, and Activision Entertainment, an American company. Activision Blizzard is listed on the NASDAQ and is 61.2%-owned by Vivendi (as of March 31, 2013).
Activision Blizzard holds a fantastic portfolio of world-famous brands from first-person shooters and realistic or fantasy action games such as Call of Duty, Diablo and Starcraft, to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft, and games for children such as Skylanders.
Every year before Christmas, Activision Blizzard releases a new version of Call of Duty. This series of games has broken one record after another. In November 2011, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 achieved sales of one billion dollars in 16 days, thus beating the record held by the film industry’s Avatar, which made the same amount in 17 days. In 2012, the same record was achieved by Call of Duty Black Ops 2 in 15 days! Call of Duty now has more than 20 million fans, and is available in 8 languages (as of end of 2011). An online service called Call of Duty Elite also allows internet users to play each other and interact.
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, which is the fourth expansion of the famous MMORPG, was launched commercially on September 25, 2012. As at December 31, 2012, thanks in particular to Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft had 9.6 million subscribers. Its previous expansion, Cataclysm, sold more than 3.3 million copies in the space of 24 hours, setting a record as the fastest-selling PC game of all time. World of Warcraft is available in 10 languages (as of end of 2011).
An innovative game was also launched in 2011: Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure. Aimed at children aged 6 years and above, this game combines traditional toys and video games in an original way. With Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure players can teleport figurines from the real world to the virtual world by placing them on a portal (more than 100 million figurines had been sold by January 31, 2013). These figurines can also be collected. A new version, Skylanders Giants, was released on October 19, 2012.
Under IFRS, Activision Blizzard’s revenue in 2012 was €3.768 billion, and its EBITA was €1.149 billion.
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