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Activision expects sales of this year’s Call of Duty “to be consistent” with last year’s Advanced Warfare, suggesting it may not be a direct sequel to the record-breaking Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
Sales of Advanced Warfare are believed to be down on 2013’s Ghosts, but while Activision appears to be blaming the decline on falling software sales on Xbox 360 and PS3, you’d think it would be feeling more confident if this year’s game marked the return of Black Ops.
Both Black Ops and Black Ops 2 remain the franchise’s biggest-selling titles.
“I don’t think [the fall in sales] is franchise-oriented,” Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg said during the firm’s Q4 earnings call last night, “and just to level set here, [Advanced Warfare] was the #1 game for the sixth consecutive year in North American, and we’re now well past $1 billion in sell-through.
“And as we’ve just announced, we’re off to a great start with our DLC season on Advanced Warfare, which is up double digits both on Season Pass and on a la carte DLC sales and engagement is higher than it was a year ago.
“Also, Advanced Warfare is a great game. It was really well received by both critics and fans, and it created a lot of positive buzz for the franchise. And we attach at franchise high-levels to the next-gen consoles which I think is what matters most when we’re looking towards the future. So I actually think the franchise ended the year in a great place, and we entered 2015 with a lot of momentum.
“2014 was the height of the console transition,” he continued. “So I think to compare it to years when we were selling — when Call of Duty was able to sell to a much larger and more stable installed base is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Our 2015 guidance on Call of Duty’s new release is flat year-over-year, but we still have a fairly conservative planning assumption. We have Treyarch developing the game. We’ll have a larger installed base of next-gen hardware to sell into, and we believe our Q4 new release can be one of our best games yet. So we think the future is bright.”
Activision announced last night that an “exciting new” Call of Duty was in development at Treyarch for release later this year. The game is said to be “loaded with innovation”.
But while Treyarch’s plans for the game remain unclear, recent rumours point toward a return to 2008 sub-franchise World at War. More will be revealed “soon”.
Source: seekingalpha.com
