In terms of revenue, the games sector achieved high growth in the Corona year 2020, with record sales in various areas. Most of the revenue was earned digitally ($126.6 billion out of $140 billion), with mobile clearly leading the way with $73.8 billion (in second place: Free2Play on PC with $22.7 billion in revenue).
One of the companies that has noticeably increased its value over the past year is Activision Blizzard. No wonder. It beat expectations in every quarter (here's its Q3 2020 financial report), with three brands - Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and World of Warcraft - surpassing the $1 billion mark in net bookings. With Shadowlands, Blizzard even briefly pulled off the most successful launch in PC history (later topped by Cyberpunk 2077). As a result, the 16-year-old MMORPG swung into first place on the revenue PC charts for the month of November.
Add to that the huge revenue generated by microtransactions. In the third quarter alone, over $1.2 billion came in through in-game sales. Players spent the most money on Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare. It's clear that all of this has a positive effect on the company's value on the stock market. The Wall Street Journal currently quotes Activision Blizzard's share price at 94.60 US dollars per share. The company's stock market value is $73.51 billion.
For comparison: for publisher Bethesda and Zenimax, Microsoft had to put "only" 7.5 billion US dollars on the table in September 2020. In the summer of 2019, there was also speculation regarding a takeover of Activision Blizzard. At the time, the trend of the share price clearly pointed downwards, the value of Activision was estimated at 37 billion US dollars, and companies such as Disney and Apple were mentioned as possible interested parties. One and a half years later, one or the other responsible person might wonder whether this deal should not have been dared.
