Recently, Activision revealed their financial results for Q4 2017 and for the year, which saw investors learning that the company had brought in record amounts of revenues in the last year, bringing in a total net revenue of $7.02 billion.
With the gaming industry heavily adopting the practice of microtransactions, it may be easier to understand that over $4 billion of this revenue, which is over half of what Activision brought in, came from microtransactions. Long story short, Activision Blizzard made more money from microtransaction methods such as selling loot crates than they did from selling games themselves. The company stated: “Activision Blizzard delivered a fourth-quarter record of over $1 billion of in-game net bookings, and an annual record of over $4 billion of in-game net bookings.”
Around $2 billion of the revenue from these microtransactions were from King, who are the makers of mobile games such as Candy Crush Saga and Shuffle Cats. King were acquired by Activision Blizzard a couple of years ago in 2016.
As painful as it might be for some, you can kind of see some reasoning behind the controversy behind Star Wars Battlefront II, which has seen a wealth of backlash since release regarding microtransactions. It may be extremely unpopular in terms of such practices, but there is clearly a lot of money to be made from doing so.
