Diablo Immortal First Regional Tests coming Mid-Year!

We’ve entered a new year and a month into year 2020, and looking back at Blizzard’s past quarter has been…pained to say the least.

It’s not all bad news, however. There is some interesting things to note of in this slide shown above. Namely, Diablo Immortal will be release it’s first regional tests in the middle of 2020! That’s pretty exciting. There will be new expansions for World of Warcraft Modern called Shadowlands. Lastly, Overwatch League will return and will be broadcast live on YouTube!

Of note, there was no mention of Warcraft 3: Reforged. In response to an analyst question about the Warcraft 3 Reforged debacle, Blizzard says it’s committed to supporting the game and community. Not much of an answer, but we can hope that they will deliver on their promises.

Diablo Immortal aims to bring the conflict of angels and demons from the Diablo franchise onto the mobile platform. Early reception was bad when it was announced at Blizzcon, going so far as to call it an “out of season April Fool’s joke”. However, things are looking up as Blizzard has released some new trailers along the way that shows some nicely polished gameplay footage.

Unfortunately, Activision-Blizzard had yet another down quarter with Q4 revenues down once again, this time down by 16% compared to the same quarter last year. Despite that, the company calls it a “better-than-expected” quarter, saying that it was largely due to Call of Duty and Call of Duty: Mobile.

Compared year over year, their performance have also dropped. In 2019 Blizzard made $1,717M in revenue for $464M in operating income, which gives a simple margin number of 27%. In 2018 Blizzard made $2,291M in revenue for $685M in operating income, which put the simple margin number at 30%. Breaking it down further, Blizzard was down 25% in revenue and about 33% in income in 2019. You view a .pdf file for the slides that they presented here.

Hopefully, Activision Blizzard will have a better time this year than their Q4, and manages to avoid any future problems.

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