Activision is certainly not enjoying the recent report about their upcoming Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Research firm Sterne Agee is indicating that AW could be even less of a seller than Call of Duty: Ghosts was last year.
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Reporting from Cinema Blend, "Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said this week that they expect Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare to ship 15% fewer copies than Ghosts in the fourth quarter of the year." Now, that's still a large amount of unity; 17 million compared to 20 million, but a loss is a loss.
Now, the situation may have more to do with Ghosts than with Advanced Warfare. Bhatia states that players were disappointed in the title, and since you are only as good as your last game/movie/etc, they may be skeptical of yet another CoD title.
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Sales for current gen software is down across the board for both PS3 and Xbox 360. Ghosts had the unfortunate circumstance of being released during a new console year, and people are still stuck on whether or not to buy one of the pricey new systems. Since Advanced Warfare is both next and last gen, players will hold off on purchasing the game until they've made a firm decision on whether to upgrade or to stick with what they got.
There is hope, though. The word of mouth for Advanced Warfare has been good, even if the pre-sales have not been what Activision may want. The shake-up of the storyline, which puts players in a warlike future filled with all sorts of fun new goodies is sure to appeal to most gamers. The delay of Battlefield: Hardline, the series' direct competitor, should prove a helpful boon, as well.
17 million copies as opposed to 20 million copies is the video game equivalent of record execs complaining that all of Michael Jackson's post-Thriller albums didn't sell as well Thriller. Of course they didn't, but they still sold like hotcakes. There will never be a time when CoD does not sell well; whether it sells up to expectations is another thing.
I've liked what I've seen of Advanced Warfare, it's fresh, it's different. Now, it's a stacked few months of game releases this autumn, but we can all make room for this.
