It seemed like Call of Duty’s day-one sales record streak would come to an end when they were forced to premiere their new game, Ghosts, across six different platforms not all available at the same time. It was all but confirmed when the numbers Activision released the next day boasted of a billion dollars worth of units shipped, not sold. But now, they’re finally saying it out loud.
CFO Dennis Durkin had this to say during Activision’s earnings call:
“Today, we announced that we had shipped into retail more than $1bn of Call of Duty: Ghosts globally on day one based on an average wholesale price. As expected, due to the console transition and digital distribution, this number is down versus last year.”
“This year, the sell-through curve will be different than in past years due to the multiple launches of new hardware later in the month and more days between our launch and the high-volume Black Friday at the end of the month.”
Previously, Call of Duty had outsold its past installment on day one by tens or hundreds million dollars more with each new annual release, ultimately culminating in $500M day one sales of Black Ops 2 last year. This year, however, their record was snapped, or rather obliterated, by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V which had $800M in day one sales. Activision claimed that they wanted to “take their throne back” from Rockstar with Ghosts, but given the next-gen console landscape of the Xbox One and PS4, that wasn’t likely going to be possible.
Many players are probably holding out another few weeks to pick up copies of Call of Duty: Ghosts for the next-gen systems they’ve preordered. It’s why sales aren’t anywhere close to GTA V, but also not at Black Ops 2′s level either. The same is true for other franchises like EA’s Battlefield 4 and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 4, where sales are down ahead of the release of the new consoles.
Still, I think it was somewhat disingenuous for Activision to blast out misleading headlines touting “ $1B in sales” when the number of games shipped is not in any way a meaningful comparison to the number of games sold.
source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/11/08/activision-admits-call-of-duty-ghosts-didnt-outsell-black-ops-2-at-launch/
