will it be considered successful for Activision-Blizzard. Will Diablo 4 find a way to make a billion dollars a year? If it does, then. All indications pointed to a second expansion that would do even worse, which is why they killed it. The sales of the first expansion were nowhere close to the sales of the original game. Diablo 3 did not have the microtransactions, loot crates or annual expansion/full game model that would make it into a billion dollar franchise. This is what a company like Activision-Blizzard considers "successful". Sports titles also make billions a year in revenue. A game like GTA5 makes billions a year in revenue. Even other franchises like Call of Duty make well over $1B a year in revenue. So that's well over $1B a year in revenue. WoW was also in development since 2000 and has made roughly $1.5B every year since it's release in 2004. How much does a franchise bring in on an annual basis. This annualized revenue is what companies like Activision-Blizzard really care about. Now all of a sudden it's not $1.8B in revenue, it's really around $100M a year in revenue. But you have to consider the time from when development started (2000) until now - a period of 19 years. This would be spectacular for most companies. Without getting into details, let's just assume all of those got the full $60 right into Activision-Blizzard's grubby little hands. To a casual observer, a game selling 30M copies sounds good. Last updated at 14:00:17 UTC Weekly Help Desk RAGE Loot Thread Trade ThreadĬontext is everything.