My guess is to why they are no longer reporting subscription numbers is because it's not relevant to the industry anymore. No one else has anywhere near those numbers and every time they report them, it generates nothing but negative press and pushes stock value downward. You simply can't compare WoW and a F2P micro-transaction game. What's worth more? 5.5 million subscribers at $12 a month or $.75c a download? What looks better to the news: a downward trend in subs before an expansion, or number of downloads of an ap?

Sorry folks, we only made $780 million in profit this quarter, that's three months for you non-economic news reporters that spin it as a bad thing even though we're on track to earn like billions and billions. This wasn't the three months that included Christmas where everyone on earth spends out their arse so yes, it's down compared to that quarter's earnings. Stock drops 6% on WoW news a week before Mr. Moneybags stock holder can sell 10,000 shares to buy his granddaughter an island full of ponies and gets mad that he has to sell 10,600 shares now and forces B/A to expand, expand, expand!

There has to be something there that Bliz/Activision wanted that they are not telling us. Something worth nearly six billion dollars to get their hands on and it's not talent. You don't buy talent through a stock buy-out. The talent, just became rich or was already rich when candy crush had it's IPO. The company they built isn't theirs anymore, and half the people that are not getting rich will simply quit because they feel betrayed. The rest will get fired because they are now redundant. In a year they will be lucky if they retain 20% of the workforce that is there now. These are the people who needed the job and have nowhere to go now that the market is flooded with all the talent that left earlier. I'm drawing all this from what I saw happen when I worked for Dell, and they bought out companies.

I don't know. Is it worth 5.9 billion to buy a mobile gaming company because that is where the market is headed? You could spend 1/10th that and just hire all the talent away from everyone with million dollar per year contracts. Candy Crush past the game, doesn't have any value. You don't have books, film, toys and other merchandise to capitalize on. My guess is it's got to do with the only thing that's been reported. The 500 million users per month. They must see a plan to reach into their wallets.