Two years ago, 150m iPhones sold and $10bn in annual App Store spending could not persuade Bobby Kotick to take an interest in mobile gaming. The chief executive of Activision Blizzard, the world’s largest video games company, still worried that mobile games were all one-hit wonders, like Angry Birds and Flappy Bird, at a time when its latest Call of Duty title was minting $1bn on its first day on sale.

“Right now we just don’t see anything that would suggest that changing the way we approach investing against mobile would be a good idea,” Mr Kotick told analysts on an earnings call in 2013.

At the beginning of the decade, when many in the industry were chasing after Zynga’s FarmVille and other “social” games for Facebook, Mr Kotick had made a similarly counterintuitive move by launching Skylanders, a range of interactive toys. Sparking copycats from Disney to Nintendo, Skylanders became a $3bn franchise selling 250m action figures, while Zynga’s business has shrunk into irrelevance.