Remember when we (Az) were doing a breakdown of that oddball grouping of Destiny and Hearthstone? Trying to figure out what percentage of the pie was Destiny and what crumbs HS contributed?
Giving HS credit for crumbs was grossly overestimating things.
But hey, recycling existing art assets at the expense of your brand is still profitable, so that’s nice.
Hardcore Casual 
That doesn’t actually conflict with any of the other data at all. In fact, it proves the reported “$500m in Day 1 revenue” was a lie at the time – 6.3m units after a full month is $378m at $60/each. Considering actual Day 1-5 revenue was $325m, you can’t really even imply that it drank much more of Hearthstone’s milkshake.
Ultimately, this copies-sold data point actually gives us zero new information to use. We already knew Hearthstone + Destiny = $850m in 2014, and we also already knew Destiny ended the year between 9-13 million players. All that the 6.3 million copies solid in September tells us is that Destiny struggled to push another 3-6 million copies over the course of the following three months.
Yeah my first thought was “damn, console gamers getting burned if 6.3 million sales in a month is $500 million in the first day!”
$500m day one was only a lie if every copy sold was the base $60 version, which I somewhat doubt. Also going forward, don’t forget the game also has paid DLC, as well as a season pass offered.
And I’m sure they get a cut of those Destiny-themed XBones as well.
$500m / 6.3m = $79.37. I’m not sure if there was a “legendary edition” tier or whatever, but the math does not come close to passing the sanity check. It’s actually even worse considering the 6.3m is for-sure the sales for the whole month, forcing the average price per copy even higher to meet the $500m figure.
As for the DLC and bundles and such, it’s inconceivable that that revenue was not included in the overall revenue picture for Destiny in the Activision Blizzard investor reports.
The current expansion legendary edition is $90, the season pass is $30, and Gamestop right now lists two of the DLC packs prior to Taken King at $20 each (not sure if there are more). Didn’t Google enough to see what the original legendary edition cost, though I seem to recall a version with the physical helmet being like $120 or $150
So if you are someone who dropped $150 for a version, my guess is you also spent the $30 for the season pass, pushing you to $180 ‘day one’.
Someone who got just the base edition for $60 and buys one DLC or the season pass is now above that $79 average too.
What sanity check are the numbers not passing?
The first DLC was released Dec 9th 2014, so that’s not particularly relevant to the Day 1-5 numbers, which were already reported as being $325m regardless. I’m not going to spend any more time Googling whether the Season Pass was available on Day 1-5, but the sanity check is precisely the implicit claim that over half of all Destiny buyers also bought the Season Pass and/or Legendary editions (to push the average price to above $80). And again, that’s not taking into account that unless we assume Destiny sold all 6.3m copies in the first 5 days – something Activision Blizzard certainly would have been shouting from the mountains – and zero copies for the remaining 15 days of September, that means the average price has to be even higher to fit the “Day 1 $500m” claim.
It’s all weasel language and we’ve known all this time. The 6.3m figure is more of a concrete figure than we’ve had up till now, but it otherwise signifies nothing of consequence in terms of Hearthstone.
As an aside, I’ve also come to realize we can’t even really use Destiny’s “registered or unique users” figure for any math, because Destiny can be bought as a used game. There is no EA-esque Online Pass (other than technically the DLC). In other words, one player buys Destiny for $60, sells to GameStop, and suddenly we have two unique users in the stats forever.
That’s interesting about the used game aspect. I would have assumed to start playing you have to register your copy, and once registered, it can’t be used again.
Sadly $80 per box was very close to the UK pricing. Xbox and Dony online stores were selling for £54.99 (although most other retailers were between £40 and £50) and exchange was around 1.60 USD/GBP at the time.
“Based on extraordinary audience demand, retail and first party orders worldwide have exceeded $500 million for Destiny,” said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard.
That’s pretty clearly not actual sales to customers, so both the $500M and $325M figures can be correct, just looking at slightly different points in the chain.