During its Second Quarter 2023 Financial Report, Activision Blizzard stated that PC is currently a more profitable platform than both Xbox Series X and PS5.
According to the publisher, for the 6 months of the year, PC made $1.25 billion. For comparison purposes, all consoles combined made $1.19 billion in that same period. However, even the PC platform was no match for mobile. Mobile is currently the golden cow of Activision Blizzard as it brought in $1.9 billion.
Now in case you’re wondering, the success of both the mobile and PC is not only due to the Diablo series. Interestingly enough, Call of Duty also has more players on PC than on both Playstation and Xbox.
Now while Call of Duty is filled with microtransactions, we can at least say that, on a tech level, its PC version was solid. In fact, Modern Warfare 2 was among our most optimized PC games of 2022. And as for Diablo 4, it can run silky smooth on a wide range of PC configurations.
Activision Blizzard is the second publisher for which the PC outperforms consoles. Capcom has also stated that PC is more profitable these days than consoles. And, as we all know, almost all of Capcom’s games perform extremely well on PC.
What’s also funny is Microsoft’s comments regarding COD. Microsoft has stated that it was a mistake for Call of Duty to skip Steam. And, in a way, these numbers prove that MS was actually right (as the latest COD games launch simultaneously on Steam and Battlenet).
Lastly, given those profits, I don’t expect Activision Blizzard to change its overall attitude. The company is making a lot of money, despite the past few boycotts. So yeah, expect more microtransactions and “Games As A Service” features in its future games. Unless Microsoft steps in and changes that.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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