In brief: Activision Blizzard in its recent third quarter earnings report said it generated an eye-watering $1.2 billion from "in-game net bookings." For comparison, the same category generated just $709 million for Activision Blizzard in the year-ago period. That's an increase of nearly 70 percent.
Per Activision Blizzard's description, in-game net bookings primarily include earnings generated from downloadable content and microtransactions, and are equal to in-game net revenue. So in other words, the company generated $1.2 billion in DLC and microtransaction fees.
Zooming out a bit, Activision Blizzard reported GAAP net revenue of $1.95 billion with earnings per share of $0.78, compared to the $1.28 billion in revenue and $0.26 earnings per share from the same period in 2019.
Monthly active users (MAUs) were 390 million for the period ending September 30, 2020, we're told, which consists of 30 million MAUs under the Blizzard brand. Activision had 111 million MAUs and King, the Candy Crush maker that Activision Blizzard acquired years ago for $5.9 billion, had 249 million MAUs in the third quarter.
Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush were the top platforms from the three respective divisions. MAUs were up 3x in Call of Duty compared to last year's title while WoW remained stable. MAUs also increased in Candy Crush but the company didn't elaborate further.
Image credit: aliaksei kruhlenia, Pryimak Anastasiia