I recently wrote about the earnings that Ubisoft announced, well, Activision Blizzard have released some of their own financial news now. If you are unaware of what Activision Blizzard is, it is a combined company between what was Activision, creators of Guitar Hero and Call of Duty, and Blizzard, part of Vivendi and creators of World of Warcraft and Diablo.

Back to the news part, these combined giants have released their revenue figures for the first quarter of their fiscal year, January to March, and their figures surpassed their expectations of $860 million, as they expected, if that makes sense.

The company announced total revenues for that quarter of a rather large $981 million which is almost as much as THQ’s total yearly income and almost as much as EA’s yearly losses. I’m sure Activision Blizzard are pleased with that.

The main three titles that were singled out were Guitar Hero, World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. These 3 come as no surprise really considering they have all had major releases in the last few months. Looking more closely at the figures for one of these games, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King proved to be one of their major incomes in the announced quarter, the number-one game in the pc charts managed to clock up a whopping $314 million, around a third of the total revenues.

Just like Ubisoft, the dust had not even settled before Activision Blizzard were talking about the targets and expectations for the next quarter and the rest of the year. Some points that were made included:

• The company is planning to release another 11 titles in the later part fo the year, of which some will likely be a series of Guitar Hero games, and the next Call of Duty game.
• Guitar Hero holds just over half of the music game market after stealing it away from Rock Band, they certainly haven’t pulled me away from Rock Band.
• They are planning to release a new style Tony Hawks game, basically try and get some more market ground against the brilliant Skate games.
• The Guitar Hero series collected over $2 billion in sales which is only one of three games that has ever managed to get over this goal.
• Alot of information about the upcoming Guitar Hero games regarding compatibility of instruments, these included the information that a guitar controller can be used on DJ Hero, and all Guitar Hero instruments will be compatible with the Band Hero game, apart from the DJ Hero turntable controller.

So it looks like Activision Blizzard will be having another good year of sales, just aslong as everyone buys their Guitar Hero games because that seems to be the majority of games that are set for release, however, I do think that they are trying to milk everything out of it as soon as possible, considering they released Guitar Hero World Tour in November 2008 and they announced recently that they plan to release DJ Hero, Band Hero, Guitar Hero: Metallica and Guitar Hero 5 before the end of the year, either they have a team the size of a town working on these 4 games or we might end up with the disappointment that was Guitar Hero World Tour.

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