Any one-hit-wonder who’s had chart success in the past will tell you that one song is all you ever need to guarantee a lifetime of income if the song is popular enough. So long as people want to hear it, it will provide you with royalties every year for the rest of your life. You could say the same about video game development companies and the games they create. You only need one popular franchise to support an entire business, and Activision has arguably the very best of them in the shape of “Call of Duty.”
It would be wrong to describe Activision as “one-hit wonders.” The company existed long before the first “Call of Duty” game was even designed and has other strings to its bow. Most of its other games and franchises are profitable, but all of them pale in comparison to the gargantuan success of the “Call of Duty” series. At least one new game is released every year, and it’s usually the biggest-selling game of the year. “Call of Duty” releases are more like events than game launches and have swelled the company’s revenue figures. In the first quarter of 2021, the company’s revenue came in at $2.28bn. That was better than Wall Street expected of the company, and the money is set to serve as a springboard for Activision’s aggressive expansion plans.
The record-breaking revenue announcement was made during Activision’s quarterly earnings call with investors but wasn’t the most newsworthy announcement made during the call. The most interesting the company told us was that by the end of 2022, it plans to have three times as many people working within its development teams as it does right now. Existing teams are set to be expanded, and brand new studios will open under the Activision banner. The company wants to make more games than it ever has before, and it wants to go about that creation process much faster than it has done in the past. More than two thousand developers are expected to be hired as part of the new initiative. Many of the hires will happen in the United States of America, but Canada, Australia, Poland, and China have also been earmarked for expansion. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that Activision wants to take over the world.
The enormous hiring push will need continued financial support from the parent company, but that’s not likely to be an issue. “Call of Duty: Warzone” is one of the most popular games in the world right now, and sales for the most recent “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War” continue to be strong. That game – the most recent entry into the franchise and the first to be built for the new generation of consoles – was only released in November last year. It will soon be yesterday’s news, though. On May 5th, the company confirmed that Sledgehammer Games would be in a position to release a game tentatively titled “Call of Duty: WW2” by the start of the fourth quarter of 2021. That will be every bit as big a deal as “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War” was and should ensure that Activision’s revenues continue to break records for the rest of the year. There’s never been a better time for the company to invest in the future, and that’s exactly what it’s doing.
The unparalleled success of the “Call of Duty” series has given Activision a template to work from when attempting to create other franchises in the future. That now appears to be the company’s grand plan. Going forward, the “Call of Duty” model will be used to create and develop every major gaming property that the company and its multiple subsidiaries work on. No matter the genre or style of the game in question, the techniques and marketing strategies that turned “Call of Duty” into such an enormous win for the company will be replicated in the hope that they’ll remain effective. That vaguely-worded initiative might not be so much about the style of the games that the company develops but the multiple avenues that the games take to reach consumers.
In real terms, what’s meant by the “Call of Duty” template probably refers to the fact that there’s a “primary” game supported by a “free to play” variant and also a mobile version. In the case of “Call of Duty,” there’s also a real money casino game available too, although that’s a few years old, and it isn’t clear how closely connected it is to Activision. It’s still available at several casinos and has an official license, but it’s the only Activision-associated game in existence. This might mean that we’ll see more Activision-approved games at places featured on sistersite.co.uk – the UK’s leading casino database in the near future. Slots are a good way of making big money with minimal effort. They only require a fraction of the development time of a more interactive game, so it makes financial sense for the company to experiment more with them.
The earnings call was good news for investors and good news for gamers. Investors are happy because the company is outperforming expectations and in better shape than ever before. Gamers are happy because there’s yet another “Call of Duty” game on the horizon, and it will be available before the end of the year. There was little discussion of the future of “Crash Bandicoot,” which suggests that the recently-released fourth game in the series might be the last, but that might just because the company’s focus is elsewhere at the moment. Developers were recently moved across from “Crash Bandicoot” to “Call of Duty,” so the company is clearly prioritising its flagship creation at the moment. That only serves to underline the urgent need for more developers to keep all of Activision’s multiple plates spinning. This is a video game development company that’s going from strength to strength, and the next few years look like they could be very lucrative indeed.
Until the next “Call of Duty” game appears, “Cold War” will continue to be developed and added to, and new maps will continue to be added to “Warzone,” too. It’s expected that “Warzone” will eventually interface with the next game in the series, but that’s yet to be determined.
Source:- Plato
