Singleplayer games are extremely un-important for Activision-Blizzard

Singleplayer games might be important to Electronic Arts, but they are the farthest thing from for Activision-Blizzard.

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It's no surprise that Activision-Blizzard is focused on live games. The publisher makes billions every year from online games like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and World of Warcraft, and in Q2 2022 it made $1.2 billion from in-game microtransactions.

While scouting Activision's latest earnings report, I noticed an interesting breakdown of its revenue sources. There's two types of revenue streams for Activision-Blizzard's games: Point-in-time, which is basically a singleplayer/multiplayer game that you buy and receive in full that has no microtransactions (think Tony Hawk 1+2 remasters), and point-over-time, or live games with expanding content with in-game purchases (practically every other ATVI game).

It's no surprise that point-over-time games made up 92% of net revenues, or $1.51 billion whereas the singleplayer-leaning category made just 8%, or $131 million. This illustrates something we've already known to a degree that fully realizes Activision-Blizzard's emphasis on digital live games.

The publisher is delving even deeper into this service-based territory with a bunch of new mobile games currently in development, including Warzone mobile, a new Warcraft mobile game, and the wildly popular Diablo Immortal, a microtransaction-heavy title that has helped Blizzard's mobile earnings spike by 462%.

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