Activision Blizzard today announced its first-quarter 2017 results, revealing that the PC was the most profitable platform in this three-month period. It’s also worth noting that Overwatch has generated over $1 billion and is now the 8th billion-dollar franchise in Activision Blizzard’s portfolio.

As we can see, the PC platform has generated $566 million in the first quarter of 2017. And while this is lower than the console revenue, we do have to note that the console category includes a lot of console platforms. As such, the most profitable singular platform is undoubtedly the PC.

It’s also worth noting that the PC platform generated $166 million more than last year’s quarter. In other words, there was a 42% increase, whereas consoles saw a 20% decrease in sales.

Obviously, these results are mainly due to Overwatch and Hearthstone. Nevertheless, these stats show how important the PC actually is for Activision and Blizzard!

Source: DSOG - http://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-pc-is-the-most-profitable-platform-for-activision-in-its-first-quarter-of-2017/

Really it's more of the Blizzard side that makes them more money on PC than the Activision one, which has games like CoD, which aren't all that popular or liked as much on Steam (not hard to wonder as to why).

Recent game releases from Blizzard
- Overwatch: Windows, PS4, XBox One (May 2016)
- World of Warcraft Legion: Windows, OS X (August 2016)
Activision
- Cod Infinite Warfare: Windows, PS4, XBox One (November 2016)

1.7 billion in revenues in the past 3 months with no game releases? What am I missing. Does WoW still make that much money?

Overwatch does make some, Hearthstone is probably making a lot and yes, the last WoW expansion was super successful and I guess WoW got a nice boost in subscribers. 

IW is still in every top 10 in the us

Apparently it does.

Despite this, Blizzard has managed to maintain healthy subscriber numbers during the game's more than 12 years of existence. At its best, it held North of 12 million paying customers, equating to roughly $180 million per month in subscription revenue, or $2.15 billion per year. Currently, it's estimated to have somewhere between 9 to 10 million active players.

http://www.gamerevolution.com/features/world-of-warcraft-leads-industry-with-nearly-10-billion-in-revenue

Ha-yea. The oppurtunism.

Not only for Activision but in overall profits PCGaming makes more profits now than any console (yes LOL and other f2p games help a lot with this).

Not the only publisher to experience this either recently. Looks like an overall industry trend.

Blizzards I.P has some stupidly big presence on PC, which is the main reason for it. Overwatch, Hearthstone, World of WarCraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Heroes of the Storm have all done well and continue to have an active playerbase.

I'd go as far as to say that over a third of PC revenue is generated by only five titles.

LoL, WoW, and Hearthstone alone should easily outpace the entire Xbox brand.

I need to find the threads of people claiming Overwatch would not be the giant success I predicted.

the article tries to note PC>CONSOLE

but reality is its because of blizard software that have popular pc games like WOW etc

if you look at general AAA releases like prey doom cod etc and all the rest of them theres no comparison

ps. is overwatch really that good