Listened to conf. call yesterday. Some lame-o comments from memory (should have written them down; please feel free to correct):
The call was pretty low-key.
They are predicting some significant revenue growth, I believe over 40% for the next year. Sorry, should have written it down.....
As you can see from the financials, good revenue growth without a big third party release this quarter, but a slightly wider loss.
Quake III is now scheduled for Q3 (no surprise there).
Consoles are big, big, big (ditto).
They are predicting an installed base of 500,000 Dreamcast machines by Christmas.
Again, call seemed low key but fairly bullish. Kotick and Co emphasized holiday positioning....growth of pc market...usual bs.
One comment of my own....the pc market may be growing, but Activision is also releasing pc games that can only be played on high-end machines (e.g., heavy gear and other dark side engine games which are hardware only). I'm not suggesting that this isn't the right thing to do because hard core gamers want the bleeding edge games, but I would argue that the expensive (i.e., high ASP) game market will not significantly expand due to purchases of $400 cyrix boxes. Certainly there may be an impact on the Cabela games and the Expert Software games, but these are lower ASP.
I'm sure I missed most of the important points, but I was trying to bill some time as I listened ;-)
-Scot |
