There is no other way to put it, 2021 was a bad year for Activision Blizzard. Naturally, the negative image that the company suffered throughout 2021 (and continues to) was going to affect its games. For example, even though Call of Duty: Vanguard was still one of the best-selling games of the year, there was a steep drop-off in sales from Sledgehammer Games’ return at the helm compared to Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War from 2020. In addition, Activision Blizzard’s latest earnings call suggests that Blizzard lost a substantial amount of users across all its games.
According to Blizzard’s Monthly Active Users (MAU) stats from the company’s Q4 earnings call, Blizzard lost a whopping 5 million users in 2021. What’s surprising is that the drop-off happened even though Blizzard released games such as Diablo 2 Resurrected, World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic as well as World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. In total, the MAUs of Activision Blizzard across the board went from 435 million at the start of 2021 to 371 million once the year ended.
One year after the release of Shadowlands, Blizzard lost 5 million MAUs (from 29m to 24m) despite launching two games (and getting a lawsuit).
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Many have been quick to blame World of Warcraft’s lack of engaging content as part of the reason for the decline. In particular, fans pointed out that Shadowlands failed to live up to the expectations. However, World of Warcraft is still Blizzard’s biggest seller. Most likely, a significant portion of the drop-off comes from Blizzard’s other games such as Overwatch.
When you think about it, Blizzard hasn’t exactly released a whole new game since 2016. As much as expansions, content patches, and remasters help increase the longevity of existing IPs, companies benefit better from the release of a new game as the hype usually spills over to its other franchises.
If it’s any consolation, the next few years are looking bright for Blizzard. Later this year, Blizzard is expected to release the much-maligned Diablo Immortal and an unnamed Warcraft mobile game. Meanwhile, recent reports suggest that a beta version of Overwatch 2 is coming in March or April.
In addition, Diablo fans can look forward to Diablo 4 within a year or two as well. Finally, Blizzard just confirmed that it’s working on a new IP with another insider claiming that the studio is also sitting on another “secret” project.
It will be interesting to see how Blizzard’s timeline changes following the Microsoft buyout. At the risk of jinxing it, we don’t think that things over at Activision Blizzard will get worse under new management.
