One of the big reasons why Activision Blizzard’s sales rose 50% year-over-year to $1.57 billion – $1.14 billion of which was from digital sales – in Q2 (ended June 30) was due to the “incredibly successful launch” of Overwatch.
Released on May 24, Overwatch now has over 15 million players worldwide, “including box and digital sales, internet game room players, and multi-user console households.” Not only did Overwatch breaks Diablo III’s record as the fastest-selling PC game in China, but it also holds the #1 spot in Korean Internet Game Rooms with an over 30% share of play time.
Activision Blizzard added that players have spent about 500 million hours playing Overwatch so far.
During the Activision Blizzard earnings call, it was revealed that Overwatch has reached 15 million players faster than any game in Blizzard’s history, and the player split is “roughly even” between the East and West. In total, Overwatch’s global revenue is around $500 million.
Blizzard President Michael Morhaime then explained that this is just the beginning for Overwatch:
[…] altogether, the game has generated about $0.5 billion life to date, excluding deferrals. But more importantly, in the past two months since launch, we’ve already provided some great content to the Overwatch community including a competitive play mode, a new hero, the recently launched Summer Games content, which drove record engagement yesterday as well as customization items. So, we’re very excited about creating even more content for players moving forward.
I also want to point out that while we had a great start with the game release, we really view this as just the beginning. We think we’ve created a strong character driven universe with big opportunities beyond just the game. We think Overwatch has strong potential as an eSport. The recently announced Overwatch World Cup, which will take place at BlizzCon this year is a good first taste of that, but we’ll be talking more about our Overwatch eSports plans later in the year. We also look forward to telling more stories about the characters in the world of Overwatch through other media. You’ve seen some of this through the animated shorts and comics, but there’s still more to come.
In terms of Monthly Active Users, Activision Blizzard as a whole had 491 million in the quarter. This includes a record 33 million from Blizzard (up 13% year-over-year) and 49 million from Activision (up 11% year-over-year; second biggest quarter in history). King was by far the biggest contributor to this number, seeing 409 million MAUs.
Do you think Overwatch will reach 30 million players this year?
[Source: Seeking Alpha, Games Industry]
