Activision’s fiscal report for 2009 contained some seriously juicy news. First, there’s the scandal at Infinity Ward. Second, there’s this. The report included statistics regarding the company’s revenue sources, revealing that a large majority, like 68%, come from just three franchises: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Guitar Hero. The report also noted that WoW accounts for a whopping 98% of Blizzard’s revenue.

The obvious concern is for one of those franchises to flop. One bad Call of Duty and suddenly Activision doesn’t look so stable. As the company puts things, “Due to this dependence on a limited number of franchises, the failure to achieve anticipated results by one or more products based on these franchises may significantly harm our business and financial results.” I would say so, fellas.

We already know that rhythm games are on the decline and WoW hasn’t grown in more than a year. No wonder Blizzard’s trying to push Starcraft 2 out the door by mid-year.

Source: Kotaku

Alongside the release of Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 there’s a war of numbers breaking out. Analysts are trying to be the first to pin down a sales estimate, a number that has so far varied by several million units. At first it was Ben Schachter claiming 7 million for day one. Michael Pachter thinks Ben’s crazy, and estimates just 4 million copies for the first day. I’m inclined to trust Pachter, since even he puts things over the top at times.

Whatever the real number, it has a lot of zeroes, and that’s got to make Activision pretty happy. Most analysts still think the 12 million unit estimate for the quarter through December is conservative. That puts total sales by year end somewhere around $700 million, which is just obscene. By comparison, Halo 3 just made it through 8 million units in its first 3 months. As a throwback, Joystiq also mentioned that Street Fighter II, which literally everyone I knew owned, sold 6.3 million units total worldwide.

Hopefully the end of the quarter will bring some hard and fast numbers for us. Until then, go throw some knives at some people. It’s insanely fun.

Christian Del Adamo’s plan was simple enough – buy a stolen Modern Warfare 2 bundle before it released, crack the game code, and sell illegal copies for profit. Del Adamo was going to use donations to get the bundle, which he would later repay with copies of the game. He was even talking to a hologram maker to make his copies seem a little less shady. And it all would have worked out if it weren’t for that damn internet.

Activision got word of the idea, which Del Adamo had apparently posted to sites Activision watches, and contacted IPCybercrime.com, who then tracked down our thief using Facebook, of all things. Poor guy had just turned 18 in August, too. Welcome to trial as an adult, Christian.

Detectives in LA busted another guy who admitted to stealing a crate of the console bundles from a retail store and then selling them for $800 on Craig’s List. I’m not sure why I expect these people to show some discretion but I do. Then again, they are trying to steal, copy, and sell what is about to become the biggest entertainment launch of all time, and they’re posting about it publicly. Assuming they’re somewhat interested in gaming, shouldn’t decades of stupid villains have taught these guys something?

Source: Venture Beat

Now that Modern Warfare 2 is less than a week away, it seems the world is obsessing over any aspect of the game it can find. We’ve had offensive ads and offensive content, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping the masses of Call of Duty fans from flocking to stores to pre-order. Gamestop told Game Hunters that MW2 is now the most pre-ordered game it has ever sold.

Activision has really pulled out the stops to get people interested in the game. Sure Modern Warfare was great, but it’s more than just the game. Walmart, for example, will be selling copies of the game that have been autographed by the dev team to the first 20 people at each of its stores. Details like that really get the nerdy blood flowing, almost as much as the prospect of knife throw kills. If I had the chance at an autographed copy of the game if it meant cutting out the knife throw, you can bet I’d stick with the knife throw.