Video-game publisher Activision Blizzard has revealed that 16m people have signed up to play its first-person shooter Destiny.
The player numbers have been published alongside information on the company’s full-year earnings for 2014, which revealed revenues of US$4.81bn; slightly less than the US$4.85bn Activision Blizzard made in 2013.
“(The year) 2014 was another successful year as we achieved record results and introduced new franchises with outstanding gameplay, expanded on exciting new business models and continued investing in some of the world’s most important entertainment franchises,” said Bobby Kotick, the firm’s CEO.
“We delivered record earnings per share which increased more than 5pc from the previous year, double‐digit revenue growth, and record high margin digital revenues that represent an all‐time high of 46pc of total revenues (all non‐GAAP).”
Released last September, Destiny arrived in a din of hype, though the reception from critics and fans was relatively lukewarm. GameSpot described the piece as “a multiplayer shooter that cobbles together elements of massively multiplayer games but overlooks the lessons developers of such games learned many years ago”.
Still, it proved to be the third top‐selling new release in North America and Europe last year and now boasts 16m registered users and active players who are playing the game an average of more than three hours per day.
Activision’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the latest instalment of the publisher’s popular first-person shoot ’em up series, was the top selling video game of 2014. It was a return to the top for Call of Duty. The 2013 edition, Call of Duty: Ghosts, was comfortably outsold by Take-Two Interactive’s open-world crime epic Grand Theft Auto V, but prior to that, a version of the game has topped the year-end sales charts each year since 2008.
Destiny image via Shutterstock
