Activision recently reported on their 2017 financials, and it looks like microtransactions played a massive part in a record breaking year for the company. Activision Blizzard reported that they made $7.16 billion in revenue for the 2017 fiscal year. Of that revenue, $4 billion came from in-game purchases, or microtransactions. That means that more than half of the total revenue Activision Blizzard brought in for 2017 was due to microtransactions and post-launch monetization.
$2 billion of that income can be attributed to King, the Activsion owned developer of Candy Crush, among other mobile titles that center on microtransactions. That still leaves $2 billion made from other Activision Blizzard properties like Overwatch, Destiny 2, and Call of Duty: WWII. Each of these games are living titles that rely on post-launch monetization for support. It seems like the recent upending of the industry over microtransactions didn’t have a heavy impact on Activision’s bottom line for last year. The major controversy regarding microtransactions came at the end of last year with EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II, and that has continued to translate to other titles, developers, and publishers, including Destiny players recently calling out Bungie for aggressive tactics in Destiny 2. The Activision microtransaction sales for 2017 seem to directly counter the dialog from gamers. 2018’s financial report will be the one that is most telling regarding the future of micro...