Skylanders on track to exceed $500m this year

Activision's popular Skylanders IP has been making a major splash in both the toy market and video games, with 30+ million toys sold to date, as revealed in the earnings announcement. Activision said on its investors call that it's confident that sales for the franchise will blow past $500 million by the end of the year. Activision Publishing boss Eric Hirshberg stated, that they "expect to easily cross the $500 million mark in life-to-date sales in 2012."

"This year Skylanders offers us multiple expansion opportunities. First, simply catching up with toy demand for our best-selling family franchise, Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure. Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure was the number three best-selling video game for Q1 and for our internal estimates we believe that it was also the best-selling action figure line outpacing even Star Wars," he boasted.

"To put our performance in perspective, Skylanders has over $100 million in sales in the first quarter alone, which exceeded what Rovio, creator of Angry Birds, reported in total company revenues for all of 2011."

"As strong as a start we've had, the global toy industry is an over $80 billion opportunity, and we have plenty of room to grow. Even after shipping over 20 million toys for 2011, demand was so high following the holidays that we were out of stock for much of the first quarter."

Hirshberg also noted that there were over 1 million registered users for the web-world surrounding the game. Skylanders for the iOS has also been doing well, now that Activision is pushing to grow the franchise outside of the game.