Video game giant Activision Blizzard has announced plans to create mobile entries in all of its franchises.
Speaking in a recent investor call, Activision Blizzard president and COO Daniel Alegre noted that mobile presents a major opportunity to bring its properties to a larger audience.
“We need to make sure that we’re enabling our franchises on the billions of mobile devices that are available right now,” Alegre said. “That’s by far our biggest opportunity, and we’re investing meaningfully to capitalize on this and to take all our franchises to mobile over time. That’s really, really important for us.”
So far, the company has seen significant success on smartphones and tablets with a couple of games. Most notably, Activision owns King, the makers of the massively popular Candy Crush series. In 2017, Candy Crush Saga surpassed 2.7 billion downloads — just five years after launch.
More recently, the company put out another hit: Call of Duty: Mobile. Since launching in October 2019, the mobile first-person shooter has racked up more than 300 million downloads, Activision announced last month.
As it stands, there are a few other mobile games based on Activision Blizzard properties that are confirmed to be in the works. One of them, the endless runner Crash Bandicoot: On the Run!, is being developed by King for a spring 2021 release. Blizzard and Netease are also working on Diablo Immortal, the Diablo series’ first-ever mobile entry, that currently doesn’t currently have a release date.
It’s also worth noting that Blizzard revealed in 2018 that mobile games based on “all” of its properties are in the works. While specific titles outside weren’t confirmed beyond Immortal, it seems that fans can expect mobile iterations of franchises like Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Starcraft, among others.
Meanwhile, on the Activision side of business, other franchises that remain untapped on mobile include Spyro the Dragon and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
Regardless of property, though, it seems clear that most — if not all — of these games will be free-to-play with in-app purchases. Microtransactions have proven to be quite lucrative for Activision, with the publisher noting in its most recent earnings report that it generated $1.2 billion USD (about $1.6 billion CAD) in revenue through the monetization method in the last quarter alone.
Image credit: Activision
Source: Activision Via: GameSpot
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