FLOP: be unsuccessful, fail, not work, fall flat, founder, misfire, backfire, be a disappointment, do badly, lose money, be a disaster, meet with disaster, come to grief, miss the mark, run aground;

Pick your definition of flop from above. To me the COD series since WAW were a lot of the above.
Maybe next year to commemorate the start of the WW1 they might try something different.

The fact that so many people for so many years kept buying the same old tosh over and over again is beyond me.
I do enjoy some FP shooters but geez. COD is overkill, but it is business and as long as you can find the %$"&* sell them the grass.

This is a great day for gamers.

Battlefield will supersede Call of Duty on the long run. That much is obvious by now. I think.

I assume figures were corrected a bit here, but the USA launch of BLOPS2 was 5.5m first week. Ghosts will probably get to 4-4.5m once you include next gen versions first weeks. It's a decline yes, but expected given how much of the consumer dollar GTAV reaped prior to its released. COD, BF4, AC4, FIFA14 are all suffering from GTA's dominance (And also artificually lower due to next gen console launches). I think the tail-end of a console cycle will also see software fall a bit too.

I doubt COD is really dying, it's just a year where circumstances conspire to take some of its marketshare and lower its sales. If PS4 and Xbox One kick into full gear straight from this Xmas then I've no doubt next years COD version will outsell Ghosts and be more in line with BLOPS 2 sales - unless something else which feels more 'truly next gen' comes in and explodies similiar to how MW did all those years ago. Something not atypical of a console launch in all honesty.

Several factors :
- people waiting for next-gen (easily a million, maybe two)
- BF4, which is obviously superior
- Series fatigue
- Lesser metacritic score

People are most likely waiting for next gen versions, which they realize would be shit, and the next COD would probably be a bigger flop unless Treyarch turn it around.

well the usa pre-orders show that CoD has about 1 million of pre-orders alone on next gen consoles. if those pre-orders alone turn into sales 3.9 million first week. of course that number will be bigger with sales from first week. but yeah call of duty is declining.

You are missing something, the people are saving to buy their new consoles. So intead of 300-500 dollars available to buy ONLY games, people have to pay for their new console and buy some games, and CoD is not the first one in their lists. CoD is not the only game that will suffer, many of the end of the year releases will sell less than expected because the people are buying new consoles, and they can only expend so much money on videogames.

Half of it will be holdouts, half of it will be series fatigue.

Most companies would love to have their games flop if that's the case.