Loss, View Weigh on Activision

Updated from 4:54 p.m. EST

Activision (ATVI) reported a loss for its fiscal second quarter, after a year-ago profit, as sales fell 28%.

Still, the company's results topped the Street's expectations Wednesday. And bucking a trend in the industry, the company reaffirmed its guidance for the current, holiday quarter and for the full year.

Investors, though, focused on the negative. In recent after-hours trading, the company's stock was off 49 cents, or about 3%, to $16.32.

In the quarter ended Sept. 30, the video-game software publisher lost $13.2 million, or 5 cents a share. In the same period last year, the company earned $25.5 million, or 10 cents a share.

Sales slipped to $222.5 million in the second quarter, from $310.6 million a year earlier.

On a conference call, Mike Griffith, CEO of Activision's publishing division, blamed the sales decline on tough comparisons with last year. The company had a big hit last year with Spider-Man 2, which helped boost sales and earnings, he noted.

Wall Street had expected Activision to do significantly worse. On average, analysts polled by Thomson First Call were expecting the company to post a loss of 7 cents a share on sales of $203.8 million.

The company in July predicted a loss of about 8 cents a split-adjusted share on $200 million in sales.

Looking forward, the company reiterated the third-quarter guidance it gave back in July; the company expects to earn about 52 cents per split-adjusted share on $790 million in sales. For the fourth quarter, the company expects to earn 5 cents a share on $226 million in sales.

Activision also repeated its full-year earnings estimate of 52 cents a share, but raised its revenue outlook to $1.48 billion from $1.47 billion.