Saw another quarterly statement from Blizzard http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ ... tables.pdf
Now people obviously focus on the # of subs which magically went up again. But why do people never look at the revenue? If you follow any MMORPG at all you know pretty much everyone lies about their sub numbers, but revenue numbers are harder to lie because you'd get in trouble if you lie too much. For ActivisionBlizard, under online subscription, defined as:
Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing
royalties, and value-added services. It also includes revenues from Call of Duty Elite memberships
For 2012 it's 226 million versus 2011 where it's 336 million.
I believe Pandaria came out in this quarter so just assume Pandaria + 3 month of sub = $80, you get (226 million / 80) = 2.825 million. Pandaria sold 2.7 million in the first week so this at least looks like a reasonable number. There's a section about deferred revenue which I have no idea what it means (do people get to play WoW for free now and pay later?) but it's listed as 119 million, so let's just add that and you get 1.46 million more. Now of course we know they make very little off each sub in China and nobody really knows how much people pay on average per month (could be less or more, after adding microtransactions), but you're looking at something like no more than 4 million people would be paying what we consider a normal $15/month sub by western standards. After all I don't think anyone really cares if X million guys are paying $1/month to play WoW in China anyway, and if you look at the revenue breakdown it's pretty clear NA/Europe is still where they're getting most of their money from.
It's also noteworthy that revenue declined by 110 million compared to last year which would be 2.4 million subs at $15/month. Yes there's call of duty in there too but I assume most of 'online revenue' comes from WoW, and if not that's their own problem for lumping two things together assuming one drastically decreased this year compared to last year.
Now here's the weird thing, people make all kinds of crazy predictions in general, so why haven't someone come out and say, 'numbers show WoW is dead, short this stock now!' From what I can tell if you're an analyst you can say stuff like that without any basis because you can't be sued for stupidity. I guess if you're some guy who still hopes to get some Blizzard exclusives you probably don't want to do that, but surely there's got to be some random wall street guy making doomsday projection that'd be interested in this. I've seen a lot of random 'sell this OMG' on far smaller companies compared to ActivisionBlizzard, and such a prediction based on these revenue numbers might even make more sense than the average analyst advice. If one fears that having an actual basis for advice might get you sued, you can always invoke the usual, "The market outlook for WoW is dim so sell it all!" and then nobody can sue you for that because again you can't get sued for being stupid. For that matter, where are the MMORPG doomsday sayers? We know every MMORPG is dead if you go on the forum and here is actually some pretty useful info to show it, or does looking up a company's earning statement too much effort to make a doomsday projection?
Now people obviously focus on the # of subs which magically went up again. But why do people never look at the revenue? If you follow any MMORPG at all you know pretty much everyone lies about their sub numbers, but revenue numbers are harder to lie because you'd get in trouble if you lie too much. For ActivisionBlizard, under online subscription, defined as:
Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing
royalties, and value-added services. It also includes revenues from Call of Duty Elite memberships
For 2012 it's 226 million versus 2011 where it's 336 million.
I believe Pandaria came out in this quarter so just assume Pandaria + 3 month of sub = $80, you get (226 million / 80) = 2.825 million. Pandaria sold 2.7 million in the first week so this at least looks like a reasonable number. There's a section about deferred revenue which I have no idea what it means (do people get to play WoW for free now and pay later?) but it's listed as 119 million, so let's just add that and you get 1.46 million more. Now of course we know they make very little off each sub in China and nobody really knows how much people pay on average per month (could be less or more, after adding microtransactions), but you're looking at something like no more than 4 million people would be paying what we consider a normal $15/month sub by western standards. After all I don't think anyone really cares if X million guys are paying $1/month to play WoW in China anyway, and if you look at the revenue breakdown it's pretty clear NA/Europe is still where they're getting most of their money from.
It's also noteworthy that revenue declined by 110 million compared to last year which would be 2.4 million subs at $15/month. Yes there's call of duty in there too but I assume most of 'online revenue' comes from WoW, and if not that's their own problem for lumping two things together assuming one drastically decreased this year compared to last year.
Now here's the weird thing, people make all kinds of crazy predictions in general, so why haven't someone come out and say, 'numbers show WoW is dead, short this stock now!' From what I can tell if you're an analyst you can say stuff like that without any basis because you can't be sued for stupidity. I guess if you're some guy who still hopes to get some Blizzard exclusives you probably don't want to do that, but surely there's got to be some random wall street guy making doomsday projection that'd be interested in this. I've seen a lot of random 'sell this OMG' on far smaller companies compared to ActivisionBlizzard, and such a prediction based on these revenue numbers might even make more sense than the average analyst advice. If one fears that having an actual basis for advice might get you sued, you can always invoke the usual, "The market outlook for WoW is dim so sell it all!" and then nobody can sue you for that because again you can't get sued for being stupid. For that matter, where are the MMORPG doomsday sayers? We know every MMORPG is dead if you go on the forum and here is actually some pretty useful info to show it, or does looking up a company's earning statement too much effort to make a doomsday projection?
