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Activision-Blizzard makes lots of money, no update on Blizzard earnings

Activision-Blizzard has released their third-quarter numbers for the financial year of 2009, and as you might expect for the company in charge of Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and World of Warcraft, business is brisk. They were expecting to bring in around $700 million, and ended up pulling in around $50 million more than that. It's good, we guess, to be the king.

Blizzard, in particular, laid claim to three of the top five selling PC games in North America on the good side, and on the bad side, Activision acknowledges in the press release that they're happy to have WoW back online in China, but a little worried about the troubles it's seen over there lately.

Strangely enough, there is no information in the earnings about how much money World of Warcraft has pulled in for the company, or any updates about subscriber numbers. Usually, that gets at least a mention, so maybe, with subscribers certainly down in China, Activision-Blizzard wants to keep that under their hat for now.



If Blizzard's profit within the company is down (especially during the all-important holiday season, and especially since they had a huge release planned for this coming quarter that got pushed off to next year), maybe that would explain the recent push for a little extra profit. Not to blame the Activision overlords at all (as we said the other day, Blizzard's core team has never been against this move), but it makes sense that when the parent company needs big financial figures and the division within the company is underperforming, you'd start to pull out the big profit guns for the holiday season.

Of course we can't know what they're really up to (and obviously none of this is professional financial advice), but if Blizzard wants to up profits for the next quarter, this seems like the time and way to do it.