Vivendi Games earnings WOWed again

It's becoming routine every three months or so--Vivendi announces its latest financial report and owes a lot of its earned cash to World of Warcraft.

The French conglomerate reported a 0.3 percent increase in sales for the company's third quarter, shy of the 1.8 percent increase analysts expected. For the three-month period ended September 30, Vivendi pulled in 4.89 billion euros ($6.2 billion), down from an estimate of 4.96 billion euros ($6.2 billion).

Once again, it wasn't the company's mobile phone or music group (which includes the world's largest music company, Universal Music Group) that shined brightest for Vivendi, but rather its games division.

Led by the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, Vivendi Games' sales jumped 15 percent to 182 million euros ($232 million) from the same period the previous year, making it Vivendi's fastest growing sector--not bad for a PC game that is almost two years old. Vivendi also singled out Scarface: The World Is Yours as a solid seller.

Vivendi Games looks to add even more WOW-related revenue in early 2007, when the game's first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, is released.