Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was bigger in its first week than Call of Duty: Ghosts.

That’s according to Activision based on GfK Chart-Track figures and its internal digital figures. We are still awaiting the official report from the stat tracker to confirm the claim.

It’s actually a little hard to compare the Call of Duty numbers this year to last year. Advanced Warfare was on sale for an extra day this time around (sort of), while Ghosts arrived in 2013 before Xbox One and PS4 had launched. So that game had a longer sales tail thanks to the arrival of the new consoles.

So the real test for Advanced Warfare will be how it performs in the coming weeks.

But it’s nevertheless a decent performance for Call of Duty, which combined with a good Metacritic score, flies in the face of analyst predictions that the franchise was in terminal decline. One retailer told us this week that 'the demand for Call of Duty came, just a bit later than usual'.

“We are very happy with how much fans have embraced Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare as evidenced by an increase in combined retail and digital sales year-over-year in the UK,” the company said in a statement.

“While it’s still early, we think we have a great game that’s fun, engaging and will keep people playing for some time to come. Welcome to a new era of Call of Duty.” 

We will update the story once the official statistics have been made public, including details as to whether the game was up both in terms of units and revenue.