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Activision Down, Vivendi Waaay Up
Gamespot is reporting that Activision faces delisting from NASDAQ due to non-compliance. They failed to report their quarterly earnings on time, a situation the company says they will correct as soon as 'practicable.' Meanwhile, Vivendi earnings are up 190% No, that's not a typo. Two guesses as to why. From the article: "Unsurprisingly, Vivendi Games attributed the profit spike largely due to what it describes as 'the higher margin of the World of Warcraft business.' It also cited other factors, including the start-up investments for the Sierra Online and Vivendi Games Mobile divisions and strong sales of Scarface: The World Is Yours in October." Translation: "We have a money hat machine! Yay!"
go figure, WoW is becomming a gamming super-power, just wait till EA buys it or worse, Activsion
Wulfram II - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Gam
.. being purchased by Sony Online Entertainment. If there's one company thats proven itself able to make a bad idea even worse, it's SOE.
how all the old huge developers of yesteryear are dissapearing or becoming steaming piles of shit? Old sierra, activision, electronic arts, midway, konami, capcom...the list goes on. These people used to be at the very pinnacle of gaming in any form...now they are either dissapeared or corrupted into crap. I wonder where gaming will be and what companies will be carrying it in 20 years...
Living With a Nerd
Nintendo is at an all time high as investors expect the Wii to make large profits(well, large for Nintendo anyway)
Monstar L
... my wife plays WoW, I play EQ... imagine if you could get both on a Sony Station Pass... we could save money!!!!
If they left the creative talent to the Blizzard team and just have Sony do the admin work (like they do with a lot of projects) it would actually be a good relationship. EQ and EQ2's uptime far exceeds WoW's uptime, even the low pop servers.
Dell, Novell and Apple have also received delisting notices at some point. Let me know if/when Activision actually gets pulled off the exchange.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
7.5 million subscribers, all paying a monthly access fee? That makes World of Warcraft a $1 billion industry all by itself. Have any other games broken the $1 billion barrier?
If that article is correct, Vivendi has so far this year made $31 million in profit from revenues of over a billion dollars. That isn't a very good profit margin. You'd get a better return off a money market account.
And WoW is the overwhelmingly dominant product in its industry, even! No wonder nobody makes PC games anymore.
What about Microsoft? They certainly put the smack down on Bungie.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When a game studio is young, it attracts hot, young talents who are willing to put all of their passion into the work. They go for a while releasing cool, cutting edge titles, sometimes at the cost of other parts of their lives (or other parts of the business).
As the studio grows, the other business realities start to take hold. The founders and other talent brought on board earlier in the life of the company often get a little burnt out and leave, or in the case of a merger/aquisition, the new management doesn't jive with the old guard and the older employees leave to do their own thing, or their influence is marginalized.
In any event, any business, not just game studios, change as they go from a brand new start up to an "established" company. In the case of game companies, though, you often tend to lose your best and most passionate talents if you don't treat them extraordinarily well. Even if you do, turn over can really change the make up of your talent as time goes one.
Also, an "established" studio is less likely to take chances on new game play ideas since its primary function becomes one of sustainable profitability. A new development shop might be more likely to try new things. Not that they have less to lose, but in general a young company is more likely to take more chances.
Its predictable. Companies that survive for decades tend to hold on to the particular business model that allowed them to survive for so long. IE. Iterations of successful titles. They will do so until they collapse. What these companies need is innovation, but they are too afraid of being innovative.
*If* the asians had been paying $15/mo, then the guy saying billion dollar industry is correct. You mention it would be a 100 million dollar busines - that's 100 million PER MONTH, * 12 months in a year= over $1B/yr. Remember, businesses/industries are generally rated on Annual revenune, not monthly revenue. A busines with 100 million a month is, therefor, a Billion dollar business.
However, the fact remains that the figure is probably off by a factor of ten because the asians don't pay $15/mo. I don't know what they pay, but my understanding is, it's something like $2/mo. I've thought for a long, long time, before WoW ever became a success, that whoever could get millions of asians to pay $1-$2 bucks for a game, and not pirate it, would make a hella lotta cash. A subscription service like WoW is difficult (though not impossible) to pirate.
Blizzard seems to be the lucky winner of that race. Good for them.
Do you like my hat? It's made of MONEY! - not quite the same (X-Box exclusive release for Munch's Oddysee vs. mad profits on many titles), but you've got your money hat. The end.
Yeah! No more room for creativity!
BTW The "no more" crowd is taking votes for 2006