Activision and Blizzard’s sales were down in both divisions during the third-quarter of the fiscal year. Revenue was down by 15% with net bookings down by 27% for Activision, according to GamesIndustry.biz.

While the company actually posted profits, they were still down, as noted by The Gamer, compared to the previous year. What’s more is that between June and September the company saw a 47% year-over-year decrease in revenue, with the third quarter topping $209 million compared to $253 million in 2018. This has been a trend for the company in the last several years, as noted in their investor report, with 2018’s third-quarter being down from 2017, and now 2019 is down from 2018.

Blizzard also saw a massive downturn as well, with a 38% year-over-year drop in revenue to just $394 million for the quarter compared to the figures posted in 2018.

Monthly active users were also down, with engagement down 11% for Blizzard compared to the previous year, and Activision losing 22% of its monthly active users compared to last year.

King, meanwhile, hasn’t shown quite the disparity in losses compared to Activision and Blizzard, with their quarterly revenue only down by 1% compared to the previous year and their monthly active users only dropped by 6%.

As noted in previous coverage, Activision has seen a steep incline in active users with Call of Duty: Mobile, which proved to be one of the company’s more successful ventures. They racked up more than 100 million users and generated more than $53 million during the game’s launch.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the reboot of the 2007 outing, also performed better than Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 from 2018, but that game launched during Activision’s fourth quarter, so we won’t see the results of those figures until the next quarterly financial report. It’s likely that Activision will have performed well during the fourth quarter of the fiscal year given Call of Duty: Mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile both performing better than last year’s outing.

However, the real story will be with Blizzard and whether the company’s negative press surrounding their allegiance to the Chinese State party will have affected sales throughout the third and fourth quarter for the company, or if people will have forgiven them and gone back to purchasing microtransactions and DLC packs from Blizzard as if nothing happened?

We’ll find out exactly how much the censorship and human rights abuses played a part in Blizzard’s sales during the next quarterly financial report, but Activision certainly didn’t perform well during the third quarter even without any censorship controversies fueling a change in revenue intake.

(Thanks for the news tip Ebicentre)