Activision Blizzard Q1 2021 Investor Call

[Lurker1]

is it just me but i been following diablo immortal it almost feels like its going to be a action MMOrpg from what i been reading how it will gameplay like or am i wrong?

[jazen]

SL is the first expansion where my subscription will lapse. I've was very active during BfA, had 30+ max lvl toons, most of them fairly well geared. I've struggled to lvl 2 in SL, just not that engaging.

[Dhrizzle]

They're not lying, they're sugarcoating.

It doesn't matter what you want to call it, if further examination of the figures reveals that Acti-Blizz tend to sugarcoat things in their investor calls they lose trust and that directly affects their share price and ability to attract further investment.

The intended audience for these calls isn't nu-gamers who prefer to spend their time bitching about video games on forums, it's for people with big bags of money who want to turn them into bigger bags of money and they will be very unimpressed if it turns out the size of their money bag is being compromised to appease forumites.

[Lolites]

Just took a look at the numbers and summaries. Everything looking good. Surely the "community " of mmoc won't have anything to complain about. Open this thread...oh.

Lol you guys are too much. "They're lying!" "They're twisting the numbers!!!" (As you twist the numbers) lmao

people on MMOC dont twist numbers, they twist nothing into proof of whatever they believe

[ellieg]

people on MMOC dont twist numbers, they twist nothing into proof of whatever they believe

Lol thats true. Just leaves me wondering why they feel so hurt

[Lolites]

Yes it is and no amount of personally charged denial will alter that. The moment you insert in real money to obtain benefit for gameplay it turns into P2W.

then it was p2w since the very begining as you could buy gold, help with leveling or clearing content, gear, literaly everything you can buy now you could buy since vanila... (except gametime and game itself and shop items obviously)
and please dont give me that bullshit "it was against tos", people still did it, my old guild was selling gold and runs for decade and never had any troubles...

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No-one involved in the production of that report cares what random internet people on forums think, it's for investors and if it turned out they were lying to impress people with edgy spelling they'd lose trust and struggle to attract nu investors.

not to mention giving false information to investors is actualy federal offense afaik

[ws31bold]

"Early in the pandemic, Bobby shared his personal phone number with all Blizzard employees in case they needed anything"

There is no fucking way that actually happened. Just confirms what I already believed, that these "quarterly reports" is just the company spinning bad news as positively as possible and cherry picking numbers that make them look good.

Perfect example: 7% increased revenue with no mention of profit. The company is in shambles right now but they just want you to look at the 7% revenue increase as an indicator that everything is peachy!

You need to stop spreading those toxic lies and misinformation. If you cannot stomach that ActivBlizz is doing good and don’t like their games, just move on.

[Lolites]

Lol thats true. Just leaves me wondering why they feel so hurt

thats simple, its ego defense
im sure you met people like that, girl dump them and after they are done crying they are like "no, i dumped her, she was awful" and they have to shit on her on every occasion just to persuade themselves its not them who is horrible person, its their ex

this is similar just with the game, rather than admit the game they left for whatever reason is doing great without them they have to shit on it to feel better about themself

[bluspacecow]

I would like to point out that the full quote from Booby Kotick re : the hiring of 2000 developers is that it started in Jan 2020 and will continue until the end of 2022

The timeline was not *fire people* *major devs run away* *opps we need to hire more people*

It's part of a hiring effort for developers that's been ongoing since the end of 2019

https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-t...ings-call-tra/

We continue to ramp our investment in creative and development talent, especially with increased competition from Chinese companies and platform providers, and this will allow us to better serve our players. From the start of 2020 through the end of next year, we intend to hire more than 2,000 developers. We plan to triple the size of certain franchise teams compared to those team sizes in 2019. And we have aggressive hiring plans around the world, including new studios or major expansion in Poland, China, Australia and Canada.

(emphasis mine)

[Prag]

"Early in the pandemic, Bobby shared his personal phone number with all Blizzard employees in case they needed anything"

There is no fucking way that actually happened. Just confirms what I already believed, that these "quarterly reports" is just the company spinning bad news as positively as possible and cherry picking numbers that make them look good.

Perfect example: 7% increased revenue with no mention of profit. The company is in shambles right now but they just want you to look at the 7% revenue increase as an indicator that everything is peachy!

Revenue is important and margin for the portfolio is included in the deck.

And yes, spinning positivity/optimism to stakeholders is obvious. They’re not lying - but a 7% YoY increase isn’t “doom and gloom”.

[bluspacecow]

He didn't turn anything down,and he didn't "take" anything.

The shareholders forced him to do these things,as they were already quite upset with how overpaid he was

Where did you get that nonsense from?

Kinda half right, not nonsense.

They eluded to the cause of the reduction in a recent 8K SEC filing then went into more detail in their DEF14A 2021 Proxy statement to investors

Activision Blizzard put out a vote for investors to vote on their 2020 compensation program.
They only got a 57% positive vote back so they set out on a feedback program with their investors.
Over a 12 month period they had over 70 meetings with over 50 institutions owning approximately 63% of outstanding shares.
For a good majority of those meetings either Bobby was present , a member of the Compensation Committee was present or both.

Considering ATVI is over 80% institutionally owned means they spoke to a lot of institutions like investment funds and the like. All that feedback was a major factor in coming up with the new pay program. The compensation comittee is the team that comes up with remuneration at Activision Blizzard so it was both them and Bobby who come up with the new pay program.

[Dazu]

Yes it is and no amount of personally charged denial will alter that. The moment you insert in real money to obtain benefit for gameplay it turns into P2W.

Considering the same system has been in game since it launched and people have been paying for gold with game time within the confines of the game since vanilla, its always been P2W then. And while direct trading of game time for gold/services was against the ToS, it was also somewhat allowed and accepted that people were gifting stuff in game for sub time when they couldnt afford it (such as paying for a guildies 2 months and theyd stock the guild bank with herbs for raid etc).

As for real money for in game benefit making something P2W, where do we draw the line? You can afford a better internet connection than me, you have a better computer, you dont need to work as many hours because you dont need an income so therefor can spend more time in game etc.

P2W is being able to win at the game just by spending money. As I said before, there is no advantage to progress in the game just by buying tokens to sell for gold that is not also available without buying tokens. Ive never sold a token but I have enough gold to buy any carry or boost or loot funnel etc if I want to right now. Now if it was a case of gold was so hard to come by that it was almost impossible to earn enough to buy those boosts without selling tokens, you might have a point, but that isnt the case.

[bluspacecow]

He's not getting the bonus, he turned it down along with taking 50% pay cut to salary and yearly bonuses.

Looking at the 8k and the new 2021 proxy statement that's not actually that clear.

Change to Win , the activist investor group who raised the concern spoke of being concerned of how overpowered the "Shareholder Value Creation Initiative" clause is in Bobby Kotick's employment contract. They advised this can result in a $200 million bonus but never went into how they calculated that number.

While the Shareholder Value Creation Initiative has been cut it's only cut for future equity awards granted after April 28th 2021. This is something that , from what I've seen most all of the gaming media has missed out on. The 2021 proxy statement makes this a little clearer - it doesn't apply for bonuses given to him via section 12 before April 2021.

However the 2021 Proxy Statement (linked on a previous post) has his other bonuses for 2020 calculated but doesn't have anything listed for the SVCI in particular (only a list of equity awards that say they are subject to Section 12 in terms of when they can vest them)

[apelsinjuice]

yeyey record profits and more layoffs as always nothing new just funnel more cash to the top

bobby will just put the money he "lost" from taking a lower salary and bonus into some other pot or inatitive that he can claim later via some offshore account

[hulkgor]

It was postulated that you cannot say that SL sold 3.7M in day one because if preorders.

No one said they sold the copies on -a single day-. They were sold by launch. Why are you being so purposely dense for the sake of being argumentative. Give it a rest. Move along.

[Gorsameth]

No one said they sold the copies on -a single day-. They were sold by launch. Why are you being so purposely dense for the sake of being argumentative. Give it a rest. Move along.

because he can't stand the concept that the game might be doing decent/good in his absence.

He no longer likes WoW therefor WoW has to be shit because he no longer likes it.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

What's interesting, Blizzard is having less MAUs during Shadowlands' first months than it had during BfA's last.

Just compare Q1/20 (release of 8.3) and Q1/21 (+1 month after Shadowlands' launch) and MAUs dropped significantly.

Q1/19: 32m MAUs
Q1/20: 32m MAUs
Q1/21: 27m MAUs

That's a drop of 15% although Shadowlands is just 1-4 months old, whereas BfA was 5-7 months old in Q/19 and 17-19 months old in Q1/20. So Blizzard is losing players overall, but their microtransactions rise - this is not a good development for the future of the studio and us as players.

This doesn’t actually tell us any thing in regards to wow as things like overwatch put out there last hero in April 2020, Starcraft had its last season update in august 2020 and so on. With a lack of post 2020 updates to other blizzard games its there’s no real way to know what games are driving the losses.

[FelPlague]

Less players but higher result, means record high microtransactions.

More store mounts, pets, gear, tokens inc.

or less players in games like overwatch, starcraft, heros of the storm, and diablo which have not had any major updates in a LONG time.

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What's interesting, Blizzard is having less MAUs during Shadowlands' first months than it had during BfA's last.

Just compare Q1/20 (release of 8.3) and Q1/21 (+1 month after Shadowlands' launch) and MAUs dropped significantly.

Q1/19: 32m MAUs
Q1/20: 32m MAUs
Q1/21: 27m MAUs

That's a drop of 15% although Shadowlands is just 1-4 months old, whereas BfA was 5-7 months old in Q/19 and 17-19 months old in Q1/20. So Blizzard is losing players overall, but their microtransactions rise - this is not a good development for the future of the studio and us as players.

you do know wow is not blizzards only game right?
And this also came around the time of us finding out overwatch 2 was still far from release, aswell as the same for diablo 4, and diablo 2.

[TheFirstOnes]

"World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands expansion continued to drive strong results following its record-setting release in November, with first quarter franchise net bookings growing sharply year-over-year. World of Warcraft saw strong reach, engagement and participation in value added services, along with a particularly high number of new players joining the community for the first time, boosted by initiatives to enhance the onboarding experience."

Ok...

But how are they NOW?!

What are the SUB NUMBERS?!

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You can't just say shit like this without proving it.

[Coldkil]

Less players overall, but more revenue overall. Granted, most of them don't actually stem from WoW but from other franchises that are basically dead in the water right now, like OW and Diablo (because people are waiting for the next game and they didn't receive substantial updated in a while).

What worries me is that they're actually making more money - doesn't really matter how, but it's a strategy that works. So they're likely to continue on this route, because in the end it's what nets them more money.