News: Activision bares their corporate soul at the quarterly conference call.
Activision released their financials for their third quarter (October 1 - December 31, 2005) today and the results were not good. Net income for the three months was $67.9 million, compared to $97.3 million last year. Naturally, Activision blamed this shortfall on the next-generation console transition.
But rather than let this news get them down, Activision rolled off a ton of new announcements and speculation that should make everyone happy.
But first, the bad news. Due to disappointing sales of the PC version, the console (PS2, Xbox and GameCube) editions of The Movies have been canned. Color me disappointed.
Now, on to the good news. Activision has a ton of games planned for 2006 starting with movie-based titles X3: The Game (PS2, Xbox, GameCube, Xbox 360, PC, DS, GBA) and Over the Hedge (PS2, Xbox, GameCube, PC, DS, GBA) in May.
Now in the fall things really get interesting as Activision has plans for a new Tony Hawk, a new Call of Duty, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PC), and an action RPG currently known as Marvel Legends. A spinoff to the Tony Hawk series, Tony Hawk: Downhill Jam, will also be released during this time. Downhill Jam is being geared towards the younger set, but that's all we know at this time. To round out the year Activision says we'll see five PSP games, three more Xbox 360 games (in addition to X3), three PS3 launch titles and one Revolution launch title.
Looking further ahead, Activision announced that they have procured the game rights to The Transformers live action movie and they will have a game ready alongside the movie's Summer 2007 release. This will be after the one-two punch of games based on Spider-Man 3 and Shrek 3 in May. In addition, 2007 will also see more releases from the Tony Hawk series, the Call of Duty series and the X-Men series.
Executives also speculated that we may not have seen the last of the Gun games. That's right, there's a very real chance Gun II will saddle up and ride someday.
We'll have more on all of these games very soon.