2020 has been a pretty intense year, from start to finish. At this point, it’s hard to find anyone that isn’t regarding 2020 as one of the worst years or, at the very least, undoubtedly one of the most cartoonishly ridiculous.
The impact to the gaming industry is almost impossible to measure, with everything being affected from top to bottom. Production, especially, has been hit hard by things like social distancing as teams are moved on work-from-home remote status.
Blizzard, however, seems to have not been affected too horribly – as far as profits go, anyway. In fact, in their third quarter financial results, they seem to be doing better than they even expected to be doing.
We’ll be focusing mostly on the more traditionally-Blizzard projects that the company runs, such as the Diablo franchise. While ActivisionBlizzard has become a bit of an umbrella at this point, the inclusion of so many franchises has a tendency to muddy things.
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The question on the minds of most players might be, why is Blizzard doing well? They haven’t had any major game releases this year, with the exception of some DLC for Hearthstone and a few major content patches for World of Warcraft, so what gives?
Much of the success seems to be rooted in the fact that most major Blizzard franchises were given massive attention-grabbers this year. Practically anyone in the MMO community has had their eye on World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, for example, which will be releasing in late November.
There’s also the eyes being turned by the relatively-recent announcement of Diablo IV, one of the most highly-anticipated titles the company has announced to date. With so many people turning to see what Blizzard was up to, the rest fell in place.
While the results that Blizzard discussed were focused on Q3 of 2020, it really goes to show how well they’ve been able to get their feet back under them in the second half of such an intense and tumultuous year. Even with delays to Shadowlands and a few other hiccups, Blizzard seems to be doing fine.
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Of course, the Activision part of Activision Blizzard can’t be understated – releases like Warzone and several other Call of Duty titles are certainly giving a massive injection of revenue as well. These are a significantly larger gain than Blizzard, actually, as are the products from the King side of the company.
With the rest of 2020 stretching ahead and an unsure-at-best 2021 following close behind, it’s hard to say what we should expect to see. But with the releases that Blizzard has planned, we can likely bet on finding them ending the year on a high note.