Blaugust 2025: Buried Under an XBox

If these blog posts are starting to feel like I'm stalling, and not really on my normal content coverage, you're absolutely correct.  Due to out-of-town swim meets, a later vacation, and work commitments, I haven't played any video games since August 2nd.  I'm finally going to get some play time tomorrow, so you can expect a resumption of the normal content starting tomorrow.  

However, we're moving the middle Joarling back to college on Monday of next week, so I'm still not going to be back to my normal pace of game play for another week or two.  In the meantime, in my earnest desire to continue to participate in Blaugust, you're getting other stuff!

I'm a finance and accounting person by background and work for a large, global public company.  Some of the more well-read blog posts that I had several years ago were regular analyses that I used to do of Activision-Blizzard's regular earnings calls and public filings.  There was a lot of good information in there about the number of subscriptions or monthly active users.  You could generally figure out how much money they were making off of the game and how that compared to their other gaming properties.  Gradually, even with Activision-Blizzard, as the company acquired other companies and expanded its game offerings, the information became diluted and buried among other details.  So I stopped doing them at one point.

Here's a link to one that I did back in 2016:  Analysis of 2nd Quarter Earnings

I woke up this morning thinking it would be interesting to see if anything could be located about World of Warcraft within its new corporate overlord, Microsoft.

Broadly speaking, Microsoft reports its financial information under three particular business segments:  Productivity and Business Process, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.  Those first two segments include things like Windows and Microsoft 365, Azure, LinkedIn, Dynamics, etc.  

The last segment, More Personal Computing, includes Windows OEM and Device revenue, such as Surface tablets, plus advertising and search revenue, and finally, Xbox content and services.  

So, where is Activision Blizzard in this array of business segments and reporting categories?  It's under Xbox content and services.  It seems like a sad and unfortunate ending for our beloved game and brand.  Call of Duty can at least be played on an Xbox (I think), but it seems like an odd place to have World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and, of course, Candy Crush.  

So my hunt for data about World of Warcraft came to a crushing end, finding it even more hopelessly buried than it was in the final days of Activision Blizzard.