Activision Booked Over $4 Billion In Revenue Thanks To Microtransactions During 2017
Gamers, for the most part, aren’t big fans of microtransactions in games. However, modern games are festooned with microtransaction for things you can buy in the game to upgrade characters and weapons all to make the game easier to defeat and to make
Activision Blizzard made a killing off microtransactions last year to the tune of $4 billion in revenue. That number came from a recently published earnings report that shows money made from "in-game net bookings" (including DLC sales, loot boxes, and in-app purchases for mobile games) reached $4 billion in 2017. Q4 alone was good for over $1 billion in microtransactions.
Microtransaction royalty for Blizzard Activision was especially bountiful at King, its mobile subsidiary purchased back in 2015 and the company behind the insanely popular and often soul-crushing Candy Crush. King alone raked in $2 billion in microtransactions from its mobile games. The other $2 billion was racked up in console and PC games.
There is no break out of what games earned the most in microtransactions. Call of Duty: WWII, for instance, has microtransactions for Call of Duty Points that can be used for unlocking loot boxes with cosmetic items. Paid maps like those in CoD and Overwatch make up some of that money earned. Activision isn’t alone in leveraging microtransactions for monetary gain. EA does it as well and recently caught an immense backlash from gamers over microtransactions in Star Wars: Battlefront II.
That backlash from gamers was so severe that EA temporarily suspended those microtransactions to appease the angry gamer hoards. Ubisoft made more money in microtransactions than it did in game sales according to a report from November 2017. Activision's earnings report noted that the overall revenue for its fiscal year was $7.16 billion. Microtransactions were responsible for more than half that number and that is all the proof you need to know they are here to stay.
