Activision Blizzard: How to project Revenues

Hi all,

Im currently working on a personal project related to Activision Blizzard.

Now im trying to understand is the company KPIs as a way to project the revenues.

What is the correct way to look at this company?, project MAU? or perhaps their most important IP?

Thanks a lot.

 
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Best Response

IP is the way to go. With ATVI it's pretty easy to identify the key titles. Modeling video game publishers in some ways has become easier as they move to fewer titles, although overall I'd argue that the opacity of digital revenue makes things more difficult.

Here is a cheat sheet for ATVI. COD, Destiny, Overwatch, Warcraft and Hearthstone are the key titles ex-King. King is easy to model just plug in whatever they did last year (could change with ads coming but we have seen no sign of the upside yet).

ATVI will give you some nuggets here and there on revenue. Like when Destiny (the original) released they would say things like "Destiny sold through $700M in retail revenue" through the end of the year. It is frustrating that they don't just give actual to-the-company revenue (wholesale I guess you could call it) but whatever.

The old way of modeling publisher revenue was to predict unit sales for each upcoming title (companies tell you what is coming) and multiply by an average wholesale price ($45 or so). NPD would release monthly sales data and you could extrapolate or adjust based on that. NPD still does their releases but the data has become less useful because of the difficulty in capturing digital sales (downloads). NPD is still a good source to get a directional feel, and they do track most digital sales now (at least on console).

Superdata tracks digital sales. Look for their top 10 lists. They do monthly releases that track both new unit sales and microtransactions.

The other source I like is VGchartz. They were much more useful pre-digital but I think the site does a really great job of giving historical perspective.

For 2017, this is off the top of my head but I think I model COD at 1.9B, Destiny 2 at 800M, Overwatch at 600M, Hearthstone at 450M and WoW at 800M. King is another 2B. The catalog/other I think I have at another 800M or so.

 

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