Analyst Says Call of Duty Retail Sales Down 27 Percent From Last Year
So how is Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare doing when it comes to sales? Well, two things happened late last week.
Activision sent out a press release trumpeting the fact that Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Destiny were the best-selling console games of the year in the U.S. and that Call of Duty was the best selling console title in November for the sixth consecutive year. As usual, Activision did not provide hard numbers to back that up.
An analyst crunched the NPD retail sales data for November and declared that Call of Duty retail sales were down 27 percent over the same time last year, despite the fact that Advanced Warfare has generally received better critical reactions than Ghosts. This would make the third straight year Call of Duty sales have declined, according to a report in gamesindustry.biz.
“November NPD was released last night and Activision NPD sales fell 22% year-over-year in the month, with Call of Duty down 27%. This is disappointing data following first week Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare sales showing a year-over-year increase. NPD data does not include digital copies or international sales, which, if included, would lessen the year-over-year decline, but we believe this data suggests potential for Q4 revenue upside is now very low,” Piper Jaffray analyst Michael Olson said in an announcement that his company would be lowering its price target for Activision-Blizzard stock.
Of course, digital sales are becoming a much bigger part of the picture, and international sales are significant, too. Unless Activision decides to release all of its internal numbers, and don’t count on that, we may never know the complete picture for sure.