Blizzard 2015 Annual Report Download - page 17

Download and view the complete annual report

Please find page 17 of the 2015 Blizzard annual report below. You can navigate through the pages in the report by either clicking on the pages listed below, or by using the keyword search tool below to find specific information within the annual report.

Page out of 108

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22
  • 23
  • 24
  • 25
  • 26
  • 27
  • 28
  • 29
  • 30
  • 31
  • 32
  • 33
  • 34
  • 35
  • 36
  • 37
  • 38
  • 39
  • 40
  • 41
  • 42
  • 43
  • 44
  • 45
  • 46
  • 47
  • 48
  • 49
  • 50
  • 51
  • 52
  • 53
  • 54
  • 55
  • 56
  • 57
  • 58
  • 59
  • 60
  • 61
  • 62
  • 63
  • 64
  • 65
  • 66
  • 67
  • 68
  • 69
  • 70
  • 71
  • 72
  • 73
  • 74
  • 75
  • 76
  • 77
  • 78
  • 79
  • 80
  • 81
  • 82
  • 83
  • 84
  • 85
  • 86
  • 87
  • 88
  • 89
  • 90
  • 91
  • 92
  • 93
  • 94
  • 95
  • 96
  • 97
  • 98
  • 99
  • 100
  • 101
  • 102
  • 103
  • 104
  • 105
  • 106
  • 107
  • 108

15
1 MAU defined as number of individuals who
played a particular game in a given month
averaged across the number of months in a
respective period. Refer to definition included
in press release for additional details.
TIME SPENT
(Billions of Hours)
12+
14+
2014 2015
AVERAGE MAU1
(Millions of users)
25%
GROWTH
16%
GROWTH
60
75
2014 2015
Note: Does not include time spent
spectating.
Like Activision and Blizzard, King has an established portfolio of beloved
franchises—
Candy Crush
,
Farm Heroes
,
Pet Rescue
and
Bubble Witch
—and
they have new potential franchises in development. They have diverse audiences
in 196 countries, and their games are played 1.4 billion times a day.
King management is philosophically aligned with our strategic goals of building
enduring franchises. Like Activision and Blizzard franchises, King games can be
expanded and nurtured year-round. King also has incredible potential upside from
the careful integration of advertising into their games. Their network is bigger
than Twitter or Snapchat, and they have well over 20 billion hours of game time
to monetize. They also have exciting new content and services planned to further
enhance the player experience.
We paid a very reasonable price for King at six times their 2015 adjusted EBITDA,
and as a result, with over 500 million users each month, we are now the world’s
largest gaming network. To understand the scale of this network, on a global basis
only Facebook, YouTube and WeChat have bigger audiences.
Last year our games generated over 14 billion hours of game play (up 16% year-
over-year). Additionally, spectators watched—not played, but watched—over 1.5
billion hours of video game play. The number of people watching video game
competition continues to grow. We believe the esports spectator experience can be
the equivalent of professional sports both in quality of viewing experience and in
advertising, subscription and pay-per-view revenues.
To improve and accelerate our efforts in this regard, we acquired Major League
Gaming, the pioneer in esports. With Major League Gaming as our anchor, we
accelerated the growth of the Activision Blizzard Media Networks division, which is
devoted to broadcasting professionally produced esports competitions around the
world, celebrating players and highlighting their successes.
With the goal of becoming the ESPN of esports, we recruited world-class talent to
lead this effort and welcomed to Activision Blizzard Steve Bornstein, who as the
long-time CEO of ESPN greatly influenced how people watch and follow sports
today, and Mike Sepso, who as co-founder of Major League Gaming helped pioneer
esports more than a decade ago.
It is exciting to see the evolution of gaming. Recognition that the competition be-
tween video game players is as thrilling to watch as traditional professional sports
has resulted in over 225 million gamers watching organized gaming competitions.
Our franchises are among the most important in all of esports, and no organiza-
tion has more experience creating compelling esports content than Blizzard.
This year we also created Activision Blizzard Studios, a television, film and short-
form entertainment studio that will use storytelling to strengthen our franchises.