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Destiny had around six million monthly active users before Bungie parted ways with Activision

Destiny had around six million monthly active users before Bungie parted ways with Activision

Newly-independent sci-fi MMO Destiny boasted in the region of six million users when prior to developer Bungie acquiring the publishing rights from Activision.

According to the games giant's latest call with investors - as transcribed by Seeking Alpha - Activision had 41m monthly active users for the three months ending March 31st, 2019. COO Collister Johnson told shareholders that "around half of the quarterly sequential decline [was] due to the exclusion of Destiny monthly active users".

For the previous quarter, Johnson said Activision boasted 53m monthly active users, meaning there's been a decline of 12m quarter-for-quarter. If around half of this decline is the result of the company no longer counting Destiny users, then the title had in the region of six million monthly active users prior to developer Bungie acquiring the publishing rights for the game and going independent. That's around 11 per cent of Activision's total monthly active users for that period. 

That deal was worth $164m in GAAP revenue and $20m in net bookings, per Activision Blizzard's SEC 10-K filing. During the firm's last financial call, Johnson said that not owning the Destiny IP limited how much money Activision Blizzard could make from the series.

For the last quarter, Activision saw revenue of $317m, an increase of two per cent year-on-year, with the publishing calling out Call of Duty digital spend - both in-game and on older titles - as well as From Software's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

"Q1 saw the highly successful release of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the resulted Activision's approach of selectively partnering with top quality developers, to leverage our publishing and marketing scale and expertise," Johnson told investors.

"We couldn't be more pleased with the collaboration's execution and the response from suffers critically acclaimed title from gaming communities worldwide"

The Blizzard side of the business saw revenue of $344m, with Overwatch's userbase dipping slightly quarter-for-quarter. 

"Blizzard monthly active users were 32 million, lower year-over-year reflecting the gap since the major content launch," Johnson explained, "and the fact that we are still in the early innings of expanding our in-game content capabilities."

He continued: "Overwatch monthly active users saw a single-digit percentage sequential decline in Q1, due to the fact that Q1 was a relatively quiet quarter for in-game content and consumers had increased choice in the team-based category this quarter. That said, the community's enthusiasm for Overwatch was again evident in how they embraced both the archives, storm rising event in April and the new workshop mode that went to public testing last week."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.