Activision Blizzard’s 2017 investor report was released today, and the company isn’t ready to settle for just being one of the biggest video game publishers. The company announced that they’re looking to expand their franchises outside of games. There are several different avenues that Activision outline as potential outside opportunities: esports, film, television, and consumer product. That means you can expect to see the company continue to diversify themselves, and use their successful franchises in different ways. It also means more projects like their recently launched Overwatch League, which has already captured a lot of esports attention for the company.
Here’s the relevant section from Activision’s 2017 investor report:
Our fans spend significant time investing in our franchises through purchases of our game content, whether through purchases of full games or downloadable content or via microtransactions. Given the passion our players have for our franchises, we believe there are emerging opportunities to drive additional engagement and investment in our franchises outside of games. These opportunities include esports, film and television, and consumer products. Our efforts to build these adjacent opportunities are still relatively nascent, but we view them as potentially significant sources of future revenues.
As part of our efforts to take advantage of the esports opportunity, during 2017 we completed the sale of 12 teams for the Overwatch League. The Overwatch League is the first major global professional esports league with city-based teams. The first preseason matches occurred in December 2017 and the inaugural regular season started in January 2018.
Activision also teased that they’ll be releasing several remastered titles in 2018.
