Activision 2013 Annual Report Download - page 17

ACTIVISION BLIZZARD, INC // PAGE 15
2013, with more than 4.5 million viewers around the
world tuned in for its debut. Most importantly, Blizzard
has been growing its World of Warcraft game develop-
ment team to enable it to accelerate the cadence of
content delivery, including expansions, while continuing
to raise the bar on quality.
Blizzard Entertainment also delivered the best-selling
PC game in North America for 2013 at retail with
StarCraft® II: Heart of the Swarm®. StarCraft contin-
ues to connect with fans around the world, including
through eSports events. Blizzard has not announced any
StarCraft II releases for 2014, but is continuing to work
on the final expansion in the StarCraft II trilogy, Legacy
of the VoidTM.
Finally, Blizzard Entertainment returned its Diablo® fran-
chise to consoles for the first time in almost 15 years in
2013 when it released Diablo III for the PlayStation 3
and the Xbox 360 to widespread acclaim. This expanded
on the popularity of the game even further, yielding more
than 15 million units sold across all platforms, PC and
console. Earlier in 2014, Blizzard released an expansion
for Diablo III, Reaper of SoulsTM, to strong reviews and
sales. Later this year, Blizzard expects to bring Diablo III
to PlayStation 4 with Diablo III: Ultimate Evil EditionTM,
which combines Diablo III and Reaper of Souls in one
package for console.
EXPANDING THE PACK
Time and again we have proven our willingness to create
balance by investing in our core proven franchises as
well as selectively pursuing new opportunities.
We have announced plans to launch what we hope to be
four great additions to our franchise portfolio—three new
potential franchises and one signif icant franchise expan-
sion being developed in parallel to continued core franchise
development. These new additions, which we will dis-
cuss below, show a balance of growth and diversification
initiatives—one game based on all-new intellectual prop-
erty, two new games that leverage existing characters
from proven franchises for new modes of gameplay, and
one expansion of an existing franchise to a new geogra-
phy and business model. Each of these four is designed
to capitalize on emerging audience opportunities that we
believe have both great creative and financial potential.
Hearthstone
TM
: Heroes of Warcraft™, the game Blizzard
launched in closed beta in 2013 and then fully released
on both PC and iPad so far this year, is off to a good
start, attracting millions of players across all major
regions with strong engagement and monetization. The
game sits at the nexus of two drivers of industry growth—
free-to-play payment mechanics and mega mass-market
mobile platform gameplay. Until recently, success in both
these areas was difficult to predict, with low-development
cost entrants soaring to the tops of the charts and disap-
pearing almost overnight. In this kind of business, success
seemed to turn more on luck than on creative skill and
sound management, and games did not offer the kind of
recurring revenue streams that are essential to our
approach. Recently, as the category has developed and
we have found unique ways to deliver creative, inspired
original gameplay we have started to see possibilities for
great success.
In September of this year, we plan to launch Bungie’s
DestinyTM, the first game in what we expect to be our
next billion-dollar action franchise, developed by the
studio that brought the world Halo. Destiny pushes to
the next level a trend we have been talking about since
its infancy—the shift in the console experience toward
online gameplay. With our Call of Duty games, we have
done more than any other company to drive this shift
with a multiplayer game that remains the most popular
online console play experience in the world. With Destiny,
we were finally able to build an entire console game
around the assumption that our player base is passion-
ate about connected social game experiences. Destiny
is seamlessly social, but it has the pace and excitement