Activision: Farmers Could Kill WoW?
No, not those kind of farmers, but rather the 82 million+ users currently growing the garden of their virtual dreams on Facebook's wildly popular Farmville sim.
Activision-Blizzard's annual 10k report, filed on March 1 and analyzed by Robert Purchese over at Eurogamer.net, is chock full of worrisome anecdotes about the future of their massively multiplayer behemoth as well as some interesting tidbits regarding payment models.
While the report stops short of painting a completely dire picture, Acti-Blizz clearly considers the growing social gaming scene a major threat to its stranglehold on the massive genre.
"A substantial portion of our revenue and profitability will depend on the subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game category," proclaims the report. "If we do not maintain our leadership position in this category, our financial results could suffer."
Sound like common sense? Maybe, but it should be interesting to watch the current market leader adapt to the rapidly expanding online gaming space.
