Activision’s financials round-up.

Activision have reported record profits of $503 million for Q1 FY2011, up from $381 million last year. Sales were also better than expected, up from $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion.

I bet you can guess why, too. That’s right, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft continue to serve as massive earners for the publisher, and they’ve no intention of slowing down.

There’s a new Call of Duty game in the works, one that will be microtransaction based and tuned for the Asian market, and – while it’s not clear what Beachhead will be – it’ll be launching alongside it. It is thought that it may be some form of stat tracking service that’ll work across all Call of Duty titles, though.

As for this side of pond, Activision said that we’ll have to wait for more details on the next big Call of Duty game, rumoured to be another title in the Modern Warfare series. Details will be announced “in the coming weeks”, and given that E3 is less than a month away, all bets are off. They did manage to slip in some hype, thank god.

“The creative excellence and sheer scale of the game we are making,” said Hirshberg, “and the unprecedented online universe that will accompany it will reset the bar for this genre, giving players a new level of immersion, connectivity, community and, of course, epic action. The game has exceeded every internal milestone and we look forward to sharing it with you soon.”

On top of that, the next Call of Duty will receive Activision’s “largest integrated marketing and retail campaign,” effectively mirroring EA’s comments about Battlefield 3.

As for Diablo 3, beta rumours were spot on. Blizzard are beginning company wide testing this week, and an external beta will kick of in Q3 calendar (between July and September). Mike Morhaime revealed that the studio are pushing for a 2011 release, but “will not compromise the quality of the game in order to hit a window.” Earlier in the earnings call, however, Activision mentioned that if no Blizzard title launches in 2011, two will in 2012, presumably Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm.

There are customary mentions of the upcoming Transformer’s movie tie-in game and Spyro. Bungie’s upcoming game is also given a passing mention, but there are no new real details – and as the studio says they won’t be at E3, it looks like we’ll be waiting a while for more.

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