Mobile is now Activision's biggest platform thanks to Call of Duty: Mobile, more spin-offs to follow
Call of Duty: Mobile helped bring millions of new people to the franchise, and turn the platform into Activision's biggest.
Call of Duty: Mobile is, of course, a free-to-play game available on smartphones, which means the barrier to entry is a significantly lower compared to the premium, console/PC Call of Duty games.
Nonetheless, Activision revealed in its earnings call for Q4 of FY2019 that the Call of Duty player base has gone from 40 to 100 million following the launch of Mobile. As a result of this, mobile is now the company's leading platform.
Not much of Call of Duty: Mobile's revenue was represented in Q4's earnings, but Activision is banking on the game's long-term success in monetising those millions of players, and the many others who will join in 2020 and beyond.
The publisher also sees an opportunity to sell in-game ads, a standard tactic with free-to-play games, but it has yet to roll those out in a major way. The popularity of Call of Duty: Mobile worldwide allows advertisers access to demographics that would otherwise be harder to reach.
Thanks to this success, Activision has realised there's gold in them mobile hills. The company is already working on "high quality mobile games for all of our most important franchises."
