Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare might not be the smashing success that is expected from a new game in the venerable FPS series. While it has surely sold millions of copies, according to a new report from CNBC, sales are way down compared to previous years. Citing just physical retail sales, CoD: Infinite Warfare sold 50% less than its predecessor, Black Ops 3.
Before we get into this, it is very important to note that this is just physical retail sales. This means digital are completely excluded, and with more and more gamers buying digitally, this drop isn’t totally unexpected. Still, while there has been a rise in the last year in terms of gamers buying digitally, it is not quite enough to compensate for this large of a drop. The only other large factor that could influence sales is that there was no PS3 and Xbox 360 version of Infinite Warfare, though other countries have shown this to not have a large impact.
According to Doug Creutz an analyst for Cowen, sales for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare were 17% lower than Activision’s expectations, based on NPD data. This same data showed sales for Infinite Warfare were 50% down compared to last year’s Black Ops 3.
These figures are all for the US, which seems to correlate with info from the UK, which showed a 48% drop compared to BO3. “Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’ blasts to the top of the All Formats Chart with the second biggest release of the year (behind FIFA 17). However, it’s not enough to outperform last year’s ‘Black Ops III’ launch week with sales down 48.4%. There is no Xbox 360 or PS3 version this time round, although even comparing just PS4 and Xbox One; sales are still down by 43.6%.”
So it definitely seems that sales are on a downward trend, but the power of Call of Duty is still very strong. The game is still topping sales charts and racking up millions of units sold. It will be interesting to see the final numbers after a few months, and how this will impact future entries in the franchise though.
Published: Dec 9, 2016 02:00 pm