Over the past few years, I’d been under the impression that the consoles made more profit for game developers than PC did, mostly down to how poor some PC ports have been as well as GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2’s later PC releases. As it turns out, that may not actually be the case according to Activision Blizzard’s latest financial reports.
PC More Profitable Than Console
As shared by dsogaming.com, the latest financial reports for Activision Blizzard have shown that PC is a more profitable platform than both the Xbox Series X and PS5. Over the last six months, the PC market has made $1.25 Billion whilst the console market has made $1.19 Billion. This pricing is the opposite of June 30th 2022 where the Consoles came on top with $859 Million compared to $716 Million on PC showing a solid change in climate. Now I’m not entirely sure of what has caused this shift however I’d hazard a guess that COD returning to Steam may have played a large part in these numbers as many users may have avoided Battle.net similarly to the way they avoid Epic or other stores.
Mobile Still The Key Moneymaker
Another bit of information here is that unsurprisingly mobile games are the big moneymaker for Activision with a $1.9 Billion income in the last 6 months. This income likely comes from both Diablo Immortal which has some very predatory micro-transactions, as well as Call of Duty Mobile which garners 51% of the entire daily active users for Call of Duty. We may hate the current micro-transaction climate, but if they’re making a solid profit there is no reason for them to stop using this business model.
Did you find this surprising? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
