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Activision Blizzard wants to bring of all its franchises to mobile gaming

In a recent quarterly earnings call, executive leads of Activision Blizzard expressed interest in continuing to invest in mobile gaming with more of its franchises.

TJ Denzer

November 2, 2020 11:18 AM

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Mobile gaming is a contentious subject when it comes to traditionally console or PC-driven franchises, but that doesn’t stop the market from being almost absurdly successful in a lot of cases. Activision Blizzard has stirred its share of divisiveness in the field, but its simultaneous success has the company wanting to venture further into mobile gaming territory. In a recent earnings call, Activision Blizzard leads expressed interest in bringing all of the company's franchises over to mobile.

Activision Blizzard President and COO Daniel Alegre, Activision President Rob Kostich, and further Activision Blizzard executives commented on the matter of mobile gaming investment in its recent Q3 2020 earnings call, posted on the Activision Blizzard investor relations website. According to both the conference call and the company Q3 2020 earnings report, mobile gaming was huge for Activision, due in no small part to the continued success of King’s Candy Crush Saga and Call of Duty: Mobile throughout the year. The earnings report also noted a wealth of interest in the mobile port Crash Bandicoot: On the Run, which is slated to launch in March 2021.

Based on this success, Daniel Alegre and other executives on the call stressed a desire to continue to invest further into the mobile gaming space. Apparently, that means moving not just Activision Blizzard’s popular franchises, but apparently all of its franchises into mobile gaming.

“We need to make sure that we're enabling our franchises on the billions of mobile devices that are available right now,” Alegre said. “That's by far our biggest opportunity, and we're investing meaningfully to capitalize on this and to take all our franchises to mobile over time. That's really, really important for us.”

When it comes to Blizzard franchises, many will immediately call to mind Blizzard’s somewhat tumultuous announcement of Diablo Immortal (“You all have phones right?”), but there’s little doubt that the overall company’s success in other matters is a driving factor. Overwatch on mobile seems like an inevitable thing, as does mobile ports of Warcraft and StarCraft, but it will remain to be seen.

Regardless, with success under its belt and further mobile titles on the slate, it would appear that Activision Blizzard is going to continue expanding its reach in mobile gaming. It looks like in addition to current and ongoing projects, we can expect to see some new forays into mobile gaming with popular Activision Blizzard franchises soon enough.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.