Hearthstone Reaches 30 Million Players

Blizzard Entertainment's free-to-play collectible card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has reached a new user milestone. The game has now seen 30 million players, according to a tweet from the game's official Twitter channel on Tuesday.

The user milestone was achieved following two major Hearthstone developments in April: the release of the Blackrock Mountain expansion and the game's arrival for phones.

Being a free-to-play game, Blizzard doesn't make money from installs alone. Importantly, the company did not specify how many of those 30 million players have actually spent any money on the game. But Blizzard is no doubt happy that Hearthtone, which reached 20 million players in September, continues to grow.

Activision Blizzard will report earnings for its latest financial period tomorrow, May 6, when the company is expected to talk more about Hearthstone's business performance. Ahead of the earnings report, industry analyst Doug Creutz of Cowen & Company writes in a note to investors that Hearthstone has been a significant money-maker for Activision Blizzard.

Citing App Annie data, Creutz writes that Hearthstone has regularly found itself near the front of the top-grossing charts on iTunes and Google Play. The game is also performing well on PC, he said, noting that Hearthstone has driven an estimate $250 million in revenue across all platforms in the past year.

"The game's recent performance is being buoyed by the release of the Blackrock Mountain expansion pack, which began rolling out content in early April," he said. "Additionally, we do not know to what extent the smartphone spending is incremental to or cannibalizing the existing PC/tablet base. Still, we view the performance as a very positive indicator for the trajectory of the game."

For more on Hearthstone, check out all 31 cards featured in the new Blackrock Mountain expansion.