Activison's Next Game Launch Could Earn Billions
By Sam Mattera
May 4, 2015
Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ: ATVI ) is close to launching its first multiplayer online battle arena, or MOBA. After months of testing, the company is scheduled to formally release Heroes of the Storm on June 2.
The game might not be as popular as the next Call of Duty or World of Warcraft expansion, but Heroes of the Storm could provide some surprising upside for Activison shareholders in the quarters to come.
The market for MOBAs is enormous and growing
MOBA is a rapidly growing video game genre, that is highly competitive and extremely popular -- both in the U.S. and overseas. The market for MOBAs is currently dominated by two games: Riot Games' (owned by Chinese Internet giant Tencent) League of Legends and Valve's DOTA 2. Both titles are among the largest revenue-generating massively multiplayer online, or MMO, games in the world -- a class that includes Activision's World of Warcraft and Hearthstone.
Valve is private company, so DOTA 2's numbers are difficult to come by, and Tencent does not break out the performance of League of Legends directly. But, according to data released by SuperData Research last year, League of Legends brought in more revenue than World of Warcraft during the first nine months of 2014 and is on pace to regularly generate more than $1 billion per year. DOTA 2 was considerably less popular, but still made the top 10 in global MMO revenue through that point last year. Heroes of the Storm, then, could conceivably give Activision a game to replace World of Warcraft when interest in the decade-old title finally subsides.
