I find it interesting that PS4 outsold Xbox One almost 2,5:1 and yet Activision got 17% of revenue from Sony and 11% of revenue from Microsoft.
So, Activision got way more money from average Xbox customer then from PlayStation customer?
Or Act got proportionally more XBox than PS customers. Or a combination of both.
But it doesn't matter how you read it(or what the real reason is) - I'd say it's
encouraging to see that console userbases aren't completely uniform after all (whether in terms of brand-following and/or spending habits). It says that respective consoles maybe aren't 100% interchangeable after all (even though MS/Sony marketing sometimes makes it look like they are).
Still it does not make very much of a sense right?
This is literally just a rehash of 'but their tie-ratio is bigger' arguments from 20 years ago (which was usually the case for consoles with less units on the market).
Statistically - smaller userbases DO tend to monetize better. And also not everyone monetizes their userbase equally (eg. see Nintendo or Apple for masterclass on that - Sony and MS got nothing on that), but in the end that's
irrelevant outside of discussing growth opportunities.
Eg. to use a relevant example (especially for below topic) - King IPs make in excess of 2B$/year (With original Candy Crush doing like 1B out of that by itself), which makes puts them right up there with the most successful F2P publishers - perhaps ever. But if you look at average user-spend, it's actually really low (by F2P standards) and their conversion rates are fairly bottom tier (IIRC less than 5%) also.
On the other end - we have World of Tanks, which at its peak got to around 400M/year (less than half of CC), but their conversion rate was something absurd like 30%, which also meant far fewer users were needed to hit that revenue.
You can read the above in two ways:
CC has tremendous potential to grow on the back of improving its monetization - eg. for every % they increase, they could make another 200M/year.
WoT had tremendous potential to grow on the back of increasing its userbase, with every additional million contributing 300k more paying users!
Which one is 'more achievable/important' depends on a countless factors - and there isn't any one answer. But as a general rule, most business leaders will pick 'more users with opportunity to squeeze money from them' over 'less users but we monetize them super well' as the better growth path (which is usually reflected in stock markets too).
I think king is an insane money maker right?
Around 30% of total Act revenue last I recall. Depending on how the rest of it shakes down - they may well be bigger than entirety of Blizzard portion.