Call of Duty: Ghosts not declared biggest entertainment launch of the year
For the past four years, the day after the launch of a new Call of Duty game has seen Activision boldly declaring its latest man-shooter the new biggest entertainment launch ever. This year, the broken record skipped. Perhaps due to staggering success of Grand Theft Auto V, Activision has changed this year's boast. $1 billion of Call of Duty: Ghosts has gone out to stores, the publisher said, declining to mention how much it actually sold.
For the past four years, the day after the launch of a new Call of Duty game has seen Activision boldly declaring its latest man-shooter the new biggest entertainment launch ever. This year, the broken record skipped.
Perhaps due to staggering success of Grand Theft Auto V, Activision has changed this year's boast. $1 billion of Call of Duty: Ghosts has gone out to stores, the publisher announced this morning, declining to mention how much it actually sold.
Curiously, unlike the past four years, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said in today's announcement that it is "too early to assess sell-through for Call of Duty: Ghosts."
Activision declining to give actual sales figures means we can reasonably deduce that the launch probably brought in less than GTA V's $800 million, as it would have gleefully shouted about that. Cod Blops 2 sold-through $500 million on its launch day last November, for reference. We shouldn't be hasty to declare much more than that, though.
Let's not go calling CoD dead just yet. We can say it's probably sold less than $800 million, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's sold less than Blops 2. Activision might simply be so set on this "biggest entertainment launch of the year" hype that it's taking a new tack now GTA V has ruined 2013. Even if it were faring worse than Blops 2, some would-be players will be holding back on buying Ghosts until the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 launch, too.
While our review found Ghosts to be, you know, another Call of Duty game, scoring only a 6, the franchise is huge and has such great inertia that it'll take a lot to stop it.
Ghosts has still set some uninteresting records, though. It's retailer GameStop's "most pre-reserved next gen title," and the average player session for Ghosts on Xbox 360 is longer than in Cod Blops 2 or Modern Warfare 3 on their launch days. Beggars can't be choosers.
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replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, Call of Duty: Ghosts not declared biggest entertainment launch of the year.
For the past four years, the day after the launch of a new Call of Duty game has seen Activision boldly declaring its latest man-shooter the new biggest entertainment launch ever. This year, the broken record skipped. Perhaps due to staggering success of Grand Theft Auto V, Activision has changed this year's boast. $1 billion of Call of Duty: Ghosts has gone out to stores, the publisher said, declining to mention how much it actually sold.-
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It is supposed to be new, but also a regression by most reports. I heard it somewhere being compared to the early Madden games where it felt like most of the work had been spent on trying to get it up on a new platform rather than gameplay mechanics and content, as evidenced by the removal of many popular modes and a less focused single player campaign.
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That'd be wrong though. There are tons of cool new things - several fun new MP modes and the new SQUAD mode is quite interesting, as well, I think.
I suppose it's not ever going to be entirely fresh or totally different and new though, is it? Why would they change what's worked over and over?
I mean look at Nintendo, cranking out Mario after Mario...ad nauseum. If that's good enough for people, COD should be too, over and over.-
I'm not sure the Nintendo analogy is good, as while the character is the same they do try to push the series forward in almost every cases (with maybe NSMB2 on the 3DS being the only exception, and even then it was a good game). I'm completely fine with COD for what it is, as I've bought *every* single one from COD1 on, but I want at least some consistency from year to year (i.e. as good as or better than previous years). If the public opinion is that this new one is as good as previous entries than I will probably be in.
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new graphics engine? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_Engine
Call of Duty: Ghosts features an upgraded version of the MW3 engine seen in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
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A lot of articles just parrot what press releases and marketing tells them.
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A lot of whoosh in this subthread
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How is the sp?
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All signs point to "end of an era," as predicted.
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You mean the trend where the new COD and the new BF tripped and landed on its face during it's release?
Try the internet? Maybe google? /shrug-
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You're really missing the point here. But that's okay, there's better things to worry about.
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Not really much of an argument. Bro-shooters have jumped the shark.
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It's interesting watching this release from the inside. There's momentum to discussion and opinions. Some of that momentum is based on fact, wishful thinking, and conformity, it's the nature of (people on) the internet. After new hardware is out of the gates and the dust settles with the game sales after a few months we'll see what folks are playing.
People play what's fun for them and their friends. That's never going to change regardless of internet discussions on resolution or re-used animations.
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I was wondering how long you could stay out of these conversations.
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Activision doesn't know how to be a gracious second-place publisher. While some business types may say that's a good thing, it really isn't.
2009-era Chris Remo on Bobby Kotick: "He doesn't want anyone else to have ANY dollars AT ALL... 'There was someone who was making money off of this, and it wasn't me. And that had to be put right.'" -- Idle Thumbs 43 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB0Tg8bCCPM#t=49m58s )
It also didn't help Infinity Ward that Skyrim and Battlefield 3 came out the year that Modern Warfare 3 released, and again that GTA V and Battlefield 4 came out this year. In past years, so many other FPS game studios have complained about having to compete against Call of Duty, but it looks like the tables are turning a little bit, between franchise fatigue and games from adjacent genres dampening the press release of "WAAAAGH!! Biggest Entertainment Launch!" A bit of humility is good for a company in the long run
"They'll do the same thing they did with Guitar Hero. As soon as they start to lose to another franchise, or feel like their numbers are not justifying their insane marketing costs, they will be like, 'OKAY! Brakes on! DONE! Maybe we'll make another one, or we'll farm this out to one of our lower tier developers, and we'll keep making them for the audience that still cares'... but it won't be their big investment anymore. That's how Activision rolls; they wait until something's not popular anymore, and they shovel it off, and they find their next thing." -- Alex Navarro, Giant Bombcast 11-09-2010, 69 minutes
I don't think it'll be that dramatic, since Treyarch is halfway into making Black Ops 3 or whatever their next Call of Duty title to release November 11, 2014 will be; also, we still have yet to hear about what Raven's been doing, aside from being a supporting studio for Call of Duty. But not having a day-one sales extravaganza announcement, and having to pump out a sell-in number to keep the press satiated suggests that this could be a downtick for Call of Duty sales, that the apex was at Black Ops 2.-
You think about this too much.
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Portal. Instead of men shooting little penis heads at other men, a single woman shoots a giant vagina against walls over and over again to "free herself".
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