Diablo IV: Thanks to Lilith: Blizzard breaks the billion dollar mark for the first time

Well hello, Activision Blizzard’s latest financial report should put a big smile on the faces of the management floor, because sales are currently going through the roof – mainly thanks to Diablo.

Activision Blizzard can be more than satisfied with the latest financial report for the second quarter of 2023. With sales up 50 percent year over year to $2.46 billion, there’s precious little to complain about.

Blizzard in particular has grown enormously and actually broke the billion dollar mark in sales for the first time. It’s easy to guess that this is mainly due to the successful release of Diablo IV, which has already had over ten million players. No wonder, since the title “sold more units than any other Blizzard title in a comparable release phase”.

Interestingly, the Diablo mania also seems to have carried away the mobile offshoot Diablo: Immortal, which also posted a significant increase in sales in June after the release of Diablo IV. One can now be curious for the third quarter how the first season of Diablo IV hits. The players are currently quite angry after the pre-season update messed up the balancing massively.

Elsewhere, Activision Blizzard has reported a drop in player engagement and investment in Overwatch 2, which could explain the upcoming jump to Steam. With regard to World of Warcraft, the publisher is satisfied that the Dragonflight expansion has apparently ensured stable subscriber numbers.

Also contributing to Activision Blizzard’s strong overall revenue was a mix of increased “player investment in Live Operations content” in games like Call of Duty, which rose 17%, and “another quarterly record net bookings at King.” Call of Duty Mobile seems to play a special role in this. According to the financial report, more than half of all CoD players across all platforms deal with the mobile offshoot and, with more than 90 million players per month, has more players than PC and console combined. In total, CoD Mobile has generated more than three billion US dollars in sales since its release in 2019.

In any case, mobile is Activision Blizzard’s top-selling area. In the past six months, mobile titles brought in a whopping $1.9 billion, followed by PC at $1.25 and consoles at $1.19 billion.