STAT | $1.11 billion – Amount of revenue Activision earned in the first quarter of this year, down from $1.32 billion last year; the company projects revenues of $4.22 billion for the full year, compared to $4.3 billion in 2013
STAT | $1.12 billion – Amount Electronic Arts earned in the first quarter of this year, and revenues for its fiscal year (ended March 31) were $3.58 billion; EA predicts $4.38 billion in revenues for the new fiscal year
Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …
STAT | 51 million – Number of PlayStation 4’s sold by 2016, according to research firm IDC, making it the leader among next-gen consoles; IDC also believes Xbox One will be the leader in North America once it unbundles the Kinect, which IDC expects to see in 2015
QUOTE | “With 48 million subscribers through Xbox Live (silver and gold), Microsoft has a bigger audience than DirecTV.” – Nancy Tellem, head of Xbox Entertainment Studios, talking about why she thinks their original content will do very well
QUOTE | “We’re taking PC gaming, Windows gaming, and Xbox gaming, and bringing those a lot closer together.” – Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, in the same interview where he said “Absolutely” when asked if he’d support selling off the Xbox division
QUOTE | “I think mobile is mainly geared toward the multimillion dollar corporations…which can probably put 10 times the amount into marketing that they put into the product itself .” – Teddy Lee of Cellar Door Games, explaining why he thinks PC and mobile are less indie-development-friendly than consoles
STAT | $230 million – Amount Nintendo lost for its fiscal year ended March 31, due to lower-than-expected sales of the Wii U and 3DS; overall sales were $5.62 billion, down 10% from the previous year and well under what Nintendo forecast in January
QUOTE | “This is gonna be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in VR.” – Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, talking about how the company’s ambitions have scaled with the Facebook takeover
QUOTE | “Crowdfunding is very difficult, and much more difficult now that it was even a year ago.” – Designer Julian Gollop, talking about the difficulty he had Kickstarting a remake of his 1985 Spectrum game Chaos.
STAT | 142% – Amount that King Digital’s profits jumped for the first quarter over last year’s, to $127 million; however, the stock price dropped 9% over investor worries about Candy Crush Saga sales slowing
STAT | 19% – Amount game and toy revenues for Sega Sammy Holdings increased last year, up to $981 million; their best-selling game was Total War: Rome II with 1.13 million copies sold
