World of Warcraft Boosts Vivendi Game Sales to $1.5 Billion

Break out the champagne and party favors, $1 billion Euros (or one-point-five billion USD) constitutes a record for Vivendi Games, which posted 2007 revenues up 27% over 2006. Blizzard Entertainment alone accounted for $1.2 billion of that total, up a whopping 58 percent over 2006's booty-gathering. The driving force behind the boost was of course Blizzard's The Burning Crusade expansion, released in January 2007 to amorous reviews and growing consensus that WoW is more than a temporary fluke.

World of Warcraft's subscriber base alone increased by roughly 2 million over 2007, reaching 10 million users in January 2008.

Just wait until Wrath of the Lich King hits, 4Q 2008, though with that late of a release, it's hard to imagine Blizzard besting its 2007 take in 2008. Then again, with StarCraft 2 potentially incoming...

While Blizzard grew, Sierra and Vivendi's mobile games arm didn't, declining 29 percent with only $303 million in combined revenues. According to Vivendi, "each of the business segments were impacted by unfavorable currency exchange movements." So but for the exchange issues, Blizzard would have done better and Sierra/Vivendi Mobile not as poorly.

Overall, Vivendi's year over year revenues grew by $2.4 billion to $32.2 billion in 2007, up from $29.8 billion in 2006.

Comments

They owe all their success to Mister T -- foo!

ImaPhake

January 31, 2008

9:21 PM PT