Analyst: Call of Duty suffering a case of "shortened tail"
PiperJaffray analyst Michael Olson says big name games not maintaining lifetime sales
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Analyst Michael Olson, of PiperJaffray, has pointed the finger for low retail revenues at the Call Of Duty series' falling lifetime sales.
While no-one can dispute the success of the series, he argued the games aren't selling as many or for as long as previous iterations.
"We believe big name titles are no longer able to sustain 'fat tails.'" he told Gamasutra.
"This 'thinning tail' phenomenon is driven by 1) casual gamers leaving the market, 2) a steeper pre-sale and up-front curve, and 3) cannibalisation from the pre-owned market."
He pointed out that the latest Call Of Duty title, Modern Warfare 3, will probably sell less than half of Black Ops total, and coming in as the eighth largest selling game in March 2012, as opposed to Black Ops fifth place spot last year.
He also predicted a 26 per cent drop in software sales when NPD Group results are published later today.
Would not suprise me at all. Activision and EA seem to have a very narrow view of games and have used these franchises to sustain them for far too long.
I don't think it's so much a case of casual gamers leaving the market and causing the thinning tail as it is normal and hardcore gamers simply getting fed up with being sold the same thing year on year. After all COD was never a game that casual players were into in any numbers.
The dinosaurs of the industry are starting to go the way of the last set i.e. towards extinction. Closing their studios one by one to try to maintain an artificially high profit margin based on a small set of dwindling franchises.
Never has the cliche "adapt or die" been so true.
Posted:A year ago