Activision Blizzard up after-hours following EPS, revenue beat

Activision Blizzard reported quarterly earnings that topped street estimates. The company posted revenue of $2.07B and an EPS of 98 cents vs. the street estimated revenue of $1.79B and an estimated EPS of 71 cents. Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down the key metrics.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Activision Blizzard out with its earnings report. Shares here moving higher, up just around 6%. Dan Howley has the numbers for us. Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: That's right. We saw a big, big beat for Activision Blizzard this quarter. We're talking about revenue of $2.07 billion. That's past analyst expectations of $1.79 billion we also saw earnings per share of $0.98 versus expectations of $0.71.

And really, what has to do here, or what this has to do with, is the growth that the company has seen in its free-to-play "Call of Duty" franchise-- that's "Call of Duty, War Zone." They've tied in the other "Call of Duty" properties into this so that each time, they're going to sell one of the larger "Call of Duty" games, it will tie into War Zone in some way. Now, War Zone basically prints money. It's similar to "Fortnite" in that it's free to play, but players purchase things like skins, special blueprints for guns in the game. And that goes directly to the company's bottom line.

And then I just want to point out while the Blizzard end of things was a little bit light, as far as users, the King side of things-- that's their mobile gaming division-- did incredibly well. They saw an average year over year revenue up 22%. And that's just interesting as a result of the fact that, look, the pandemic has had people stuck inside. That doesn't mean, though they were putting down their phones and not playing those games. In fact, they played games at a faster clip than prior to the pandemic.

So, obviously, some really interesting numbers here. Most impressive overall, they have 258 million active users in that mobile segment, 150 million in the Activision Call of Duty segment. So really big beat there for them.

SEANA SMITH: Dan Howley, thanks so much. And the Street is happy with it with shares up over 6 and 1/2%.