Call of Duty, Hearthstone, and King push Activision to record in-game sales revenues

Y’all are spending some serious cash on in-game purchases in Activision games.

The Call of Duty and Destiny publisher reported the results of its fiscal third quarter today, and it revealed that its games saw a record of nearly $1 billion in revenues from spending on in-game content through the three months that ended September 30. Call of Duty, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, World of Warcraft, and mobile games were all major contributors to those results. Activision explained that delivering new content provided players with new opportunities to spend their cash on microtransactions, and that’s a strategy it plans to continue using.

Blizzard released new content for World of Warcraft’ with the Legion expansion that led to record participation in its microtransaction services. The studio’s Hearthstone add-on One Night in Karazhan outperformed the game’s previous expansion, Whispers of the Old Gods. And Overwatch, Blizzard’s team-based shooter, had a special Summer Games event that it styled after the Olympics. The company noted this led to “record engagement and participation in in-game customization items” — although these are not necessarily from microtransaction sales.

For Call of Duty, the company notes that more of the shooter franchise’s players are embracing spending money inside of the games.

“Call of Duty continues to deliver record performance,” reads the publisher’s quarterly report. “The number of in-game content purchasers in Call of Duty more than doubled year-to-date and, along with robust participation in Season Pass and a-la-carte map packs, drove an increase in average revenue per user as well.”

Finally, Activision’s mobile label King saw an increase in average revenue per paying player year-over-year. The various Candy Crush and Farm Heroes games all contributed to that.

With the publisher now generating so much cash by giving players extra ways to spend money in games across mobile, console, and PC, you can expect to continue seeing this business model in your games whether they are free-to-play or $60.