They do.  It's called acceptable accounting practices.  The less money they say they make, the less taxes they have to pay. 

I don't know why everyone hates him but if you ask me Kotick is probably the smartest person out of the whole video game industry. He may say some brash statements that piss people(gamers) off but in reality he's usually dead on with what he says. He's a business man and you need a business man to run a business. But he also knows you have to give the consumers what they want. He's good at finding a balance. People may hate him for "milking" franchises but if we didn't get a new COD every year most of us would be pissed. 

They either have low contributions due to higher variable costs or they simply have higher fixed costs than you may think..or it could be both as in high variable costs and high fixed costs.

Activision isn't a very well run company...Kotick basically squanders alot of what Blizzard makes in profit, but the Blizzard guys don't really care, since they get their bonuses and anyway...and due to the nature of their merger, they can always look to do a Bungie with Activision.

For me not having a clue you seem it hard to find facts to prove me wrong. You have time to find a nice pic but not time to link to actual data or facts. I guess we can all see who is wrong here

I actually meant that question, does Kotick run all of Activision-Blizzard?  Or does he just run the Activision portion?

Kotick should be getting nice bonuses...

Bobby runs everything Activision/Blizzard.  But I would say that Blizzard has much more control than most developers in a large publishing organization.

If you are looking for links on the internet that will tell you the exact margins for any particular item, you will be looking for a long time.  Margins vary from product to product and from day to day.  I ran Best Buy stores for 8 years, and i can tell you exactly how unprofitable video games are.  Like it has been mentioned, most of the margins on video games are very low (cost is $52-$56 on a retail price of $59 with some costs at the $48 that has been mentioned).  The difference is that when the retailers sell it for $35, they have an agreement with the supplier/video game company to lower their cost of the item to the new price point only for the # of units sold that particular period of the sale.  the retailer gets a credit or cash back depending on the deal.  Most every item in the weekly ads have been deals "paid for" by the company that makes the product to ensure that their product is featured in the ad at the price that they want it at.  There are certain companies that will only agree to help pay for the advertising(called co-op) if they get to choose the price in the advertisement.  

Regardless, video games generally do have extremely small margins 5-20%.   The games themselves generally are money losers after you factor in the cost of labor/shipping/other overhead costs.  The real money in the video game category comes from the add ons.  They are mostly items like accessories(chargers,controllers, storage devices) or memberships(netflix,xbox live).  Just so we are sure that everybody understands how margin is calculated let's show an example.  Item A costs the retailer $50, and he sells it for $60.  The margin is $10 or 20% of the original price to purchase it.  So, the retailer gets a 20% margin if they sell it at $60.  Margin has nothing to do with other variables such as overhead(electricity, cost of retail space, insurance, labor, etc...), it is simply the percent of profit from the original cost of a particular item.  If you want to average out all of the items sold in a store and figure out the profit margin for the whole store, it works the same.  But, if you want to discuss the bottom line profitability of the store, then you take all of your margin dollars and subtract the overhead costs to get the overall profit of the store.  Most Best Buys have an overhead cost between 13-16%, and their overall margin is about 18-22%.  If you had any idea on how little it takes to make any retail location unprofitable, you would be very surprised.  Why do you think that they push warranties and accessories(these two items usually have 30-50% margins) at you every chance they get??

fixd

Businesses buy new companies or other things to lower profit to lower taxes they have to pay.