The financial outlook for Blizzard is very good according to the latest Q1 statements issued by the company yesterday. The company took in $1.4 billion in the first quarter of 2011 as compared to $1.3 billion for the same period last year. The strength of the financial earnings is largely due to World of Warcraft, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Starcraft 2. Interestingly, WoW subscribers dropped over a half million since late 2010.

Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, stated, "With over $1.4 billion of GAAP net revenues and $0.42 of GAAP EPS our record first-quarter performance was driven by digital sales and the continued strength of Activision Publishing's  Call of Duty and Blizzard Entertainment's  World of Warcraft franchises.  Digital content continues to represent a significant portion of our revenues and increased by about $100 million year over year, enabling us to deliver record first-quarter operating margins and earnings per share.   The  Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike content pack shattered Xbox LIVE launch records, surpassing 1.4 million downloads in the first 24 hours alone,(1) and Blizzard's Battle.net service continues to grow its service offerings.  To date,  Call of Duty: Black Ops players have logged more than 1.2 billion online hours of online gameplay."

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In addition, Blizzard indicated that it will be working to streamline the release of World of Warcraft expansions to get them out more quickly:

"We need to be faster at delivering content to players," he added. "And so that's one of the reasons that we're looking to decrease the amount of time in-between expansions."

When asked if this decrease might mean we'll see expansions lighter in content than in the past, Morhaime said the company is not ready to talk about the content of its upcoming expansions, saying only that "we are looking at ways to speed up the development process."