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Activision Making More Off Phone Games Than Console And PC

Activision Making More Off Phone Games Than Console And PC

A solider with a rifle stands near a large, brown orc and both are in front of a screenshot of Candy Crush.

picture: Activision / Blizzard / King / Kotaku

Here’s a sign of the times: Activision has confirmed via newly released financial documents that it made more money on its phone games last quarter than it did on all of its console and PC games combined.

As spotted by tweaktown, Activision’s quarterly report was published last week and sheds some light on how its biggest games across PC, console, and mobile are doing financially. And because of games like Devil Immortal, Call of Duty Mobileand Candy Crush Sagathe beleaguered Call of Duty publisher’s making a lot of cash off phone games. In fact, more than half of its total earnings for the second quarter of 2022 came from mobile titles and not console or PC games.

According to the report, about 51 percent of Activision’s total earnings from the Q2 2022 period came from mobile games. That adds up to a total of $831 million in mobile game earnings. Meanwhile, its console games earned around $376 million and PC games brought in a bit less, $332 million. Finally, it made $105 million from events and esports.

What you might not expect, especially if you don’t realize how massive mobile gaming has become over the last decade, is that of the $831 million made off phone games, most of it came from King’s titles and not stuff like Call of Duty Mobile. In the report, Activision says that King titles like candy crush and FarmHeroes brought in over $680 million.

ReadMore: Lawyer To Pay Activision For Not Playing Call Of Duty

What these numbers reveal is that for big publishers like Activision, the future is likely one where it invests even more resources and money into mobile games and focuses less and less on console games. In an era where AAA games are more expensive to make than ever, take years to createand often flop, mobile games have become a lifeline for large game companies looking to keep their heads above water.

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For Activision it’s especially important as Call of Duty continues to lose millions of players and underperform. Seeing as the company has spent years focusing much of its energy on Call of Duty—at one point even having every studio it owned working on the franchise in some capacity—it’s likely it will seek to diversify into mobile more, not less, moving forward.

It should also be noted that Activision’s hugely successful mobile games are one of the main reasons Microsoft began the process of buying the company earlier this year following a huge, public fallout after the company was sued over years of sexual harassment and discrimination.

in some way, Call of Duty and warcraft are more like bonuses that Xbox gets top of King and his money-printing games.

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Halo 2’s ‘Impossible’ $20,000 Challenge Finally Conquered

Halo 2's 'Impossible' $20,000 Challenge Finally Conquered

Master Chief stands next to Sergeant Johnson in Halo 2.

screenshot: Bungie/IGDB

They said it was impossible and, for nearly two decades, that seemed to be the case. But last night, a streamer named Jervalin beat Halo 2‘s “LASO deathless” challenge, earning a cool $20,000 in the process. Talk about finishing the fight.

Let’s rewind. Earlier this summer, the YouTuber Charles “Cr1tikal” White Jr.. posted a $5,000 bounty to beat Halo 2 on the highest difficulty setting, with every bonus challenge modifier turned on, without dying. In the 18 years since Halo 2‘s 2004 release on Xbox, no one had ever published evidence of completing the challenge. White’s challenge stipulates that the whole run is streamed, either on YouTube or Twitch. By July, no one had successfully stepped up to the plate, so last month, White tacked an extra $15,000 onto the bounty.

Most observers keeping tabs on the challenge had their money on Jervalin—a relatively private streamer who’s picked up a modest following for setting world records on a variety of Halo challenges—being the first person to complete it. Sure enough, late last night, I’ve crossed the finish line. (Here’s the archived stream.)

Bungie/Jervalin

Neither White nor Jervalin could be reached for comment in time for publication.

Jervalin was remarkably chill for finishing what some people, including White Jr., have called the “hardest challenge in all of gaming,” addressing viewers in the even-handed tone you’d use while moving on to the next addendum in a mostly empty community board meeting.

“All right, chat,” he said. “I think we did it. I think we fucking did it. Imagine that. Two years ago, I said, ‘I think this is impossible.’ Imagine fucking that.”

Whether or not Halo 2‘s “LASO deathless” challenge really is the “hardest… in gaming” is, of course, a subjective measure. But it’s definitely up there. You have to activate all of the game’s skulls, or gameplay modifiers that typically ramp up the difficulty. The Catch skull, for instance, makes enemies toss grenades more frequently. Famine, meanwhile, means enemies drop half the ammo they usually would. Mythic doubles the health of all enemies, while Angry increases the enemy’s fire rate. Blind removes your HUD. Assassins turns enemies invisible. (It’s not technically there skulls, however. For the challenge, Envy is left off, because that one grants you invisibility too, which does not make Halo 2 more difficult, for obvious reasons.) All together, when you turn every skull on and play on Legendary, the game’s highest difficulty setting, you more or less create a set of conditions that ensures you die instantly if you take any damage.

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Jervalin had to rely on a few exploits to finish the challenge. To wit: He brought a banshee, a violet-colored aerial vehicle with a powerful cannon, into the final boss fight against Tartarus on the “Great Journey” level. That final fight takes place on a series of circumferential platforms hovering over an abyss. With pinpoint precision, he used the banshee’s cannon to send waves of foes careening off the edge as they spawn—before they get a chance to really even fight.

I’ve been covering the Halo community for a while now, and can’t recall a time where I’ve seen players pretty unanimous in an opinion, let alone a positive one. Sure, halo-infinitethe latest game in the series, has its issues, which players are not shy about criticizing. But there remains a reverence among even the biggest names for Bungie’s original games since the mid-2000s, and the mind-bogglingly impressive feats players are able to pull off.

The run garnered praising desde Halo streamers like Remy “Mint Blitz” and Luc “HiddenXperia.” Emanuel Lovejoy, the coach for Cloud 9, arguably the best professional Halo team on the planet right now, called Jervalin to “legend.” so did Spacestation Gaming’s UberNick. the Halo pro Kyle Elam noted how yesterday’s scrims—basically, matches between pro players that don’t count toward the official seasonal record—were put on pause so players could collectively watch Jervalin get it done. “Gonna need Jervalin to make a Twitter so we can actually @ this legend [clapping hands emoji],” Halo esports analyst and caster Alexander “Shyway” Hope said. It has been a genuine delight to witness such universal acclaim from all corners of the community.

But the most heartwarming moment—the sort of moment that proves Este, not the toxicity that inhales so much oxygen out of the room, is what video games are all about—happened in the final seconds of the stream: Jervalin’s family runs into the stream, embracing him in an almost suffocatingly tight bear hug. $20,000 is nice. That’s nicer.

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Technology

Game Broke After Spending $100,000

Game Broke After Spending $100,000

A screenshot of Diablo Immortals shows jtisallbusiness' Barbarian fighter.

screenshot: Blizzard / jtisallbusiness / Kotaku

Devil Immortal‘s pay to win mechanics have been controversial since the game launched back in June. Now they’ve also apparently broken the game for at least one YouTuber who reportedly spent over $100,000 on beefing up his Barbarian character. The player’s win rate is seemingly so good the game won’t even match him against other players, torpedoing his prospects of competing in the latest Rite of Exile end game event.

over the weekend, Devil Immortal YouTuber jtisallbusiness asked viewers if he should try to refund his $100,000 account as a result of the issue. He claimed that he spent so much money immediately following the game’s release that he was able to easily overpower almost every opponent in the game’s PVP Battlegrounds mode. As a result, he had hundreds of wins and only a few losses, pumping up his MMR (match-making rank) so high it became impossible to queue with anyone else.

“I would say it’s probably around, somewhere around 48 to 72 hours somewhere in between that of only trying to queue for a Battleground and never being able to get one,” he said.

Jtisallbusiness contacted Blizzard about the issue almost a month ago, and said he was eventually told the problem would be addressed in a couple weeks. Now, however, his clan of him OneTimes is competing in the Rite of Exile to defend its Immortals title against other players as part of Devil Immortals elaborate end game. The only problem is Jtisallbusiness can’t join them. Part of the questline requires participating in a standard Battlegrounds PVP match, but because of his matchmaking limbo he was unable to qualify.

“So basically I’m stuck as the clan leader in the Immortals clan not being able to queue us up for Rite of Exile at all,” he said. “I can’t do anything about it.” Adding to his frustration from him is the fact that he’s trying to make money off Devil Immortal as a streamer and content maker, an effort now seemingly stymied by his early spending spree (other videos are devoted to showing off his collection).

For many other players in the community, however, it’s a chef’s kiss moment for everything they hate about the game’s monetization. “Congratulations, you just ‘won’ in a p2w game,” reads one of the top comments on his YouTube video discussing the issue. “Can’t complain about that, you got what you paid for.” Others shared similar sentiments, and the video itself was downvoted thousands of times.

Players on Reddit, where links to it were being passed around, were equally unmoved. “I know it’s his money from him and people can do whatever they want with theirs but come the fuck on man. 100k?! On Devil Immortal?!” wrote one person. “When someone’s Devil character is worth close to my entire mortgage,” wrote another.

Blizzard and jtisallbusiness didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s also not yet clear how the situation will affect the rest of his clan, which includes players he said have each poured thousands of dollars of their own into the game. Once the Rite of Exile is completed, the top 30 challengers are pitted against a single Immortal who is transformed into a raid boss. One thing seems certain: It will not be Jtisallbusiness.

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