"Call of Duty" franchise boosts Activision Activision Blizzard, the world's largest video game publisher, reported fourth-quarter sales and profits ahead of Wall Street expectations, powered by the continuing success of its Call of Duty franchise and a new children's game that sold more than 20m associated toys. The company also revealed it was stemming subscriber losses to its World of Warcraft online role-playing game and said it would begin targeting Facebook as a major gaming platform. The Santa Monica-based company reported fourth-quarter revenues of $2.4bn and earnings per share of 62 cents, ahead of analysts" expectations of $2.2bn in sales and 56 cents. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was the industry's best-selling game in 2011. Released in November, it achieved $1bn in sales in its first 16 days. The company also benefited from the success of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, the best-selling title last year for six- to 11-year-olds. More than 20m "smart" action figures, which interact with the game when they are placed on a "Portal of Power" pedestal, were sold during the fourth quarter. A sequential loss of 800,000 subscribers to 10.3m for World of Warcraft which concerned analysts in the third quarter, fell to a 100,000 loss in the fourth. The company has ignored Facebook and social gaming to date, but Bobby Kotick, chief executive, suggested in an interview with the Financial Times that this was about to change. "Facebook continues to make great investments in making itself more robust and interesting for us as a gaming platform, " he said. We definitely view Facebook as a very significant new opportunity. Activision would compete with its main rival Electronic Arts and newcomer Zynga on Facebook. EA is also mounting a challenge to World of Warcraft with its Star Wars: The Old Republic online game. But with downloadable content, such as map packs for its Call of Duty games, Activision is ahead in digital revenues. It said they reached $1.6bn and accounted for 34 per cent of total sales in 2011. Its recently launched Call of Duty Elite online service had grown to 1.7m paying subscribers by the end of January. For 2012, there will be a new Call of Duty game and a follow-up Skylanders game called Giants for the holiday season. Blizzard, the creator of World of Warcraft, plans a number of releases after no new titles in 2011. Activision forecast revenues of $4.5bn for the year, virtually flat compared with 2011 and slightly below analyst forecasts of $4.567bn, as it predicted a negative $200m foreign exchange impact. Its shares rose just over 1 per cent to $12.80 in extended trading in New York.