Activision Blizzard a Pandemic Success
Video game titan Activision Blizzard said Thursday its quarterly earnings soared beyond expectations as players flocked to Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush.
Activision Blizzard reported revenue of $2.41 billion in the final three quarters of last year and net income of 65 cents per share, higher than analyst forecasts.
The US-based company had revenue of $1.99 billion in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic had people hunkered down at home turning more than ever to video games and streaming television for entertainment.
"In a year filled with adversity our extraordinary employees were determined to provide connection and joy to our 400 million players around the world," chief executive Bobby Kotick said in an earnings release.
"They accomplished this as well as generating record financial results for our shareholders."
Activision shares were up more than 8 percent in after-market trades.
The Call of Duty franchise racked up a record year in 2020, with 128 million people playing the video game monthly in the fourth quarter, according to the company.
A version of the combat-action game tailored for smartphones and tablets had its best quarter ever, quickly becoming a top download after its launch in China in December, Activision Blizzard reported.
Strong player engagement was also seen at World of Warcraft and its King mobile game focused unit, according to the company.
Some 240 million people monthly played King mobile games, with its most popular title being color-matching challenge Candy Crush, Activision Blizzard reported.
The company boasted that Candy Crush was the top money making franchise in US app stores.
Video games have been seeing exceptional growth during the pandemic which has shut down real-world activity and kept billions indoors.
NIST Graded Our Post-Quantum Cryptography. Zero Failures.
NIST's Algorithm Validation Test System generated test vectors nobody had seen, we answered them over the ACVP protocol, and NIST graded the result: 2,130 cases across ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in every parameter set offered, zero failures, demo certificate A11025. This is what that proves, where we deliberately drew the claim narrower than NIST's own matrix, and why the FIPS 140-2 sunset on 21 September makes the distinction between being graded and grading yourself worth understanding.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
People treat the Jack Sparrow line as a joke. The attribution is a joke. The sentence is not. Forty years in markets says the same thing Epictetus said in 125 CE and Robert Merton named in 1948: the event is finite, and the story you appoint to govern it is not. This essay walks the quote back to its actual sources, draws the loop that turns a feeling into an order, and sets out the four places a rule written in advance cuts the loop. Faith is not a hedge. It is a stance.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.