Guitar Hero Rescues Activision Blizzard
Activision Blizzard posted amazingly positive earnings today for its first fiscal year, and its success can be directly tied to several major franchises in its lineup.
The California-based company reported an incredible $981 million in net revenue for last quarter thanks to the success of [shal]Guitar Hero[/shal], [shal]Call of Duty[/shal], and World of Warcraft. Just to put that into perspective, Activision Blizzard made more money in three months than THQ did in an entire year. It’s also pretty close to the amount of money that Electronic Arts lost last year.
[shal]Activision Blizzard[/shal] was even bold enough to declare “[shal]Guitar Hero World Tour[/shal] was the #1 best-selling third-party title in the U.S. across all platforms in dollars.” And with $2 billion in sales from the title, it’s hard to argue with them. The flipside is that we now have multiple Guitar Hero titles scheduled to release this year.
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7 Responses to “Guitar Hero Rescues Activision Blizzard”
Well ya if people are buying the peripherals bundled up at 200 dollars a piece, and the regular game is 60 dollars…
A normal 60 dollar game needs 33million sales to hit that financially.
Where as the guitar hero bundle needs only to sell 10.5 million units at the bundle price.
Then you consider all the people who already have instruments (including but not limited to Ion Drum set owners, and Rock Band owners) for the 60 dollar game to boost in sales.
Then you include the fact that it’s one of the very few FUN games to play on any of the 3 systems for a long period of time. It’s on the PS2, it’s on the PS3, the Wii, the 360, etc… This means it has a HUGE base to reach. Rythm games are one of the few games that can be multiplatformed that much and be virtually untouched in the enjoyment factor.
PS3 exclusives can’t reach those numbers. Neither can a 360 exclusive. There’s only 30 million 360s in the world (how many of which have RROD’d?)
There are only 22 million PS3s in the world.
There are 50 million wiis in the world but that’s 66 percent of the Wiis userbase in order to get those base sales.
It would be freaking pathetic for them to NOT have a ton of sales especially considering all the buzz and hype they tried to get around their drumset and the name sake that people from HARMONIX started.
Of course this is after the merger with Blizzard that also includes the 11 million subscribers paying anywhere from 10-15 a month. A quarter is 3 months. Do the basic math and you’re looking at 1/3 of that net revenue just from WoW SUBSCRIPTIONS. That doesn’t even include the people paying 20 dollars for the game, 20 for burning crusade, 40 for Wrath of the Lich King, 25 for paid character customization, 25 for paid character transfers, etc…
I mean with so much working for them, I would say that I am still possibly underwhelmed.
wow… i mean blizzard alone makes a fortune off its World of Warcraft….
Harmonix actually pitched the Idea to Red Octane about Rock Band. They were not interested in it what so ever, So they broke off and made Rock Band. Now I think it’s funny that RO/Neversoft followed suit after they saw how amazing Rock Band took off.
The president of the company quoted in an interview they were the first company to use instruments on a gaming system, well the woman called him out saying isn’t that called rock band? He didn’t know what to say. I can’t find the video anymore but it was pretty funny.
Anyway, ActiBliz is just massive now hardly anyone could compete with blizzard now they are one, what else would anyone expect from this?
15million subscribers at 14.99 a month comes to 224,850,000. That is just for one month! Interesting. I’m sure the subscriber number is larger now.
@nikrel
haha @ ActiBliz………… ROTFL!!
Stupid. If people are spending so damn much money, time and energy on a toy, in the most remote sense possible, makes music… why the hell not just learn to play the real instrument? I mean these people are going to spend a LOT of money on buying the video game songs anyway, why not invest that money in something you can actually develop into a REAL talent?
a lot of guitar hero news lately
Hey activision/blizzard can I borrow fifty bucks?
LOL, that’s a butt load of money.