Activision: no profit on 12 million games sold

[Morreion]

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sells 12M copies, but company Activision Blizzard makes no profit (NY Daily News)

Boosted by the record-setting popularity of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, video game giant Activision Blizzard posted better-than-expected results Wednesday night - but still couldn't manage a profit.

Although the new Call of Duty has sold more than 12 million copies, the company's losses grew to $286 million in the last three months of 2009 because of accounting changes and a hefty reduction of the value of its music games - like the popular Guitar Hero - and other titles for Nintendo's Wii console...

Last year was difficult for the video game industry, with video game sales sliding 9.8% in the United States, the world's largest market.

[Oatik]

For 2009, Activision Blizzard's consolidated net revenues were $4,279 million, and consolidated net income was $113 million, which included a $409 million charge from the impairment of finite-lived intangible assets reflecting the impact of the weaker market for the casual and music genres. The Company generated $1,183 million in net cash from operating activities.

I think they'll be ok, that "no profit" was due to some 400M charge they decided to take in the 4th quarter.

[Regolyth]

CoD:MW2 is freakin' awesome. I love it. But they have ran the Guitar Hero franchise into the ground. They got super greedy. Two new games a year? They over saturated the market with it. I stopped buying them after the third. I didn't like the direction they were going. The third was overly hard. You could be playing the game, beating songs left and right, then hit a brick wall on how hard a song was. Then the next ten songs would be a piece of cake again. They did a horrible job with that. Not to mention the song selection was really, really poor.

The first and second Guitar Hero games were awesome. But then the people who actually made the first two didn't make the rest. The guys who made GH1 and GH2 now make Rock Band, which is a far superior game. For one, RB has a full set of instruments. For two, RB has a great song selection (covering pretty much any genre you can think of). For three, it's just fun; it works. I still play Rock Band 2, two and a half years after it's release.

The thing that RB got right over GH as downloadable content. Instead of releasing a new version of RB, Haromonix just released more DLC songs. I have a huge library of things I've downloaded. And the cool thing is, everything I downloaded for RB1, ported to RB2. Also, when I bought RB2, it came with a code that allowed me to port all my RB1 songs (that were on the disc; part of the game) over to RB2. So I get to play RB1, RB2 and every song I've downloaded all at one time. It's great.