Mike Snider

USA TODAY

Activision Blizzard heads into Friday's release of its blockbuster video game franchise Call of Duty on a roll.

The arrival of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, expected to be the biggest-selling video game of the year, comes just hours after the Santa Monica, Calif.-based game publisher Thursday reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings.

Activision Blizzard, the No. 1 U.S. game publisher, reported earnings per share of 26 cents, compared to 17 cents in the July-September period a year ago. That beat estimates of 8 cents, based on analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. Net income rose 57% to $199 million

Revenue from Blizzard games such as Overwatch and World of Warcraft: Legion and an update to Bungie game Destiny helped the Santa Monica, Calif.-based game maker boost third-quarter revenue 58% to $1.57 billion. Revenue matched Wall Street expectations.

The company also increased its full year outlook for revenue to $6.45 billion, up from $6.4 billion.

"Looking forward, we expect continued momentum from all of our growth strategies, especially our esports initiatives and our integration of in-game advertising," Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said in a statement accompanying the earnings release.

Activision Blizzard (ATVI) shares dipped about 1% in after hours trading Thursday $43 -- a sign that investors may have wanted an even rosier outlook.

The stock had hit all-time highs in recent days — topping out with an intraday high Oct. 25 of $45.55 — and is up 14% for the year. Analysts have expected Activision to raise and beat its full year 2016 forecasts, in part because so many of its games have done so well this year.

World of Warcraft: Legion matched the franchise's first-day sales records of 3.3 million for the franchise upon its Sept. 8 release. And online action game Overwatch has doubled its audience to more than 20 million since its launch five months ago. Revenue from Call of Duty: Black Ops III game remained high.

Beyond that, mobile games such as Candy Crush Saga, made by Activision unit King Digital remain among the top-grossing casual games on Android and iOS devices.

Thanks to growing revenue from King games, Call of Duty will account for less of Activision's full-year revenue than in the past — about $1.5 billion of the expected $6.5 billion for 2016 — estimates Michael Pachter, Wedbush Securities managing director, equity research.

That's welcome news for Activision because this year, Infinite Warfare has some tough competition. Electronic Arts, the No. 2 U.S. game publisher, has two highly-rated recent releases out now: the World War I combat game Battlefield 1 and futuristic fighting game Titanfall 2 (each like Infinite Warfare are available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PCs). "Battlefield and Titanfall got great reviews, so we have to see if COD holds its own," Pachter said.

Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg admits "it’s obviously great when our portfolio across multiple divisions performs well, but certainly Call of Duty remains a tent pole."

This year's release is developed by Infinity Ward, the studio that founded the Call of Duty franchise in 2003 and brought the franchise out of past world wars and into the fictional modern-day conflicts with 2007's Modern Warfare.

In another giant step for Call of Duty, much of Infinite Warfare takes place in space with epic space craft battles and infantry skirmishes reminiscent of Star Wars and the more recent Star Trek movies. "This game is in a whole new setting for Call of Duty being that much of it takes place beyond Earth’s atmosphere," Hirshberg said. "And that has allowed for some incredible innovations like Zero-G combat and space dog fighting. At the same time, we’ve made sure to make it feel gritty, militaristic and real, like a great Call of Duty game should."

The video game marketplace needs some big AAA games, says DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole. Overall, U.S. game software sales have been down 12% for the first nine months of the year, but Call of Duty and other big games will improve that so sales will only be down 7% for the year, he says.

Mobile and free games with in-game transactions continue to grow, but in the U.S., Cole says, "you have a consumer base willing to wait at midnight to plunk down $60 or more the day (a AAA game) releases. ... For certain games that freemium model can really work, but it doesn’t replace the huge AAA model."

Helping drive the U.S. video game market to an estimated $17.7 billion this year, up 5% over 2015, is demographics, he says. "What we are finding is that consumers get introduced to video games when they are young and continue to play games into adulthood," Cole said. "In 1996, almost all 10-year-olds were heavy gamers and they continue to play as 30 year olds today."

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.