While I completely agree that Overwatch is making them a ton of money I'm going to have to call shenanigans on Venture beat's declaration that it made up $1.386 billion of the $1.726 billion Activision Blizzard earned in the first quarter of 2017.
Because if you looked into the financial reports you'll see that the company as a whole earned $1.73 billion. And that King Entertainment had 342 MaU dwarfing Blizzard's 41 MaU (million active users). Assuming there's quite a bit of F2P in game purchasing going on then King's contribution should be quite a bit larger.
Now follow me to page 15 of :
http://files.shareholder.com/downloa...ss_Release.pdf
You'll see that in that quarter Blizzard made $441 million and King $474 million. No I think what we're seeing here is the article author taking the statement "Overwatch is the eighth Activision Blizzard game to generate $1 billion in revenue" and assuming they did that in the first quarter of 2017. When technically they've had since the 2nd quarter of 2016 to generate that $1 billion in revenue.