Despite only publishing a handful of games, the combination of Activision Blizzard has some of the biggest franchises in the planet with the likes of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. They already reach nearly half a billion customers, roughly 350 million if you want to pinpoint closer, but half just isn’t enough as the company’s longstanding CEO wants it all.
Speaking at the CNBC Evolve Los Angeles event, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said that with streaming and gaming become more open to other areas of the world, there’s really no reason the company can’t eventually reach 1 billion people. He also thinks it’ll happen fairly soon, within five years in fact, meaning he sees 650 more customers coming in half a decade.
“Today we have roughly 350 million customers in 190 countries, there is not a good reason why that number shouldn’t be a billion in the next five years. It starts with more frequent release of content, taking franchises that we have and growing them onto new platforms. And this is probably the single biggest change in the business in almost 30 years that I can recall, which is that up until very recently, five years ago, to play games you had to spend $300 for a PlayStation or an Xbox or $1,000 for a personal computer. And when games became available on phones, the market exploded and the audience size went from a few hundred million to billions of potential consumers.”
It’s clearly quite an ambitious goal for even a company that’s as big as Activision Blizzard. But if streaming does end up making it big and hits developing countries as much as many hope, it’s not entirely unrealistic.
