Call of Duty franchise is "review-proof"
Low critic scores won't harm sales, but Titanfall and Destiny may pose threat
Media reviews of the Call of Duty franchise have no impact on sales of the games, as critics become bored of analysing the latest in Activision's yearly first-person shooter release.
That's according to Doug Creutz of Cowen & Company, who notes that while Metacritic scores for Call of Duty: Ghosts are hovering around the 74 per cent mark they come too late to influence pre-orders and pre-sales figures.
"We think CoD has become such an embedded franchise that it is somewhat review-proof," he said. "We think of CoD as being like EA's Madden NFL, which continues to sell similar unit numbers year in and year out, regardless of reviews; Madden's Metacritic has ranged as low as 78 in recent years.
"Given that CoD changes only incrementally from year to year, we think reviewers have become increasingly less likely to give very high review scores due to a certain degree of ennui with the franchise."
He also suggested that Call of Duty's main competitor - EA's Battlefield 4 - "didn't exactly cover itself in glory" with an average Metacritic score of 80 per cent on Xbox 360, but again, reviews are unlikely to impact sales.
The biggest threat to Call of Duty and Battlefield's dominance is likely to come from new IP next year, with Titanfall and Destiny pretenders to the throne.
"Our concern lies more with next year, when Call of Duty will face competition from several new next-gen shooters, including EA's Titanfall and Activision's own Destiny," said the analyst.
"To the degree that Call of Duty may become a bit of a 'been there done that' experience for gamers, we think it is vulnerable to losing share as new product enters the market; even if a lot of that share goes to Destiny, as a third party title it will carry a lower margin for ATVI, and we think bullish 2014 EPS estimates assume Destiny will be more incremental than cannibalistic."
People have been saying the series will taper off every year (including me until I let go of what the franchise used to be in the early days), but it never does. It may not change much but it's still worthy of a AAA release with each title taken on individual merit, and that's clearly what people want otherwise they wouldn't buy it.
Peak sales for the series are 26 million across PS360 on MW3, but Blops II capped out at 22.5 million. That's a lot of lost sales over just a year. So yes, sales decline is a serious concern for Activision. If Ghosts doesn't rebound back to higher than at least Blops II Activision will have a problem on their hands. These games are insanely expsnive to make and advertise, and they need these sales.
I can't honestly see why Ghosts would get a low score. It's got a good solid campaign and it's an extremely fun game to play online with both the old and new modes.. I'd like to think that maybe future Call of Duty games will go in the direction of being developed along the same sort of lines as Bungies stunning looking Destiny IE: a single player campaign with huge story lead online battles that have drop in drop out multiplayer.. either that or a return to it's roots with a new WWII title..
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Pete Thompson on 6th November 2013 6:07pm
Activision has the correct idea. Put enough design and content into CoD X to call it a new game - no need to redesign or revolutionize. Now hype it up across the internet, put out snazzy collector's editions, have people prepay for the DLC by selling annual passes - PROFIT!
People who say Activision needs to get it together need to explain to me why doesn't EA need to get it together with Madden X. That game has seen less change and revolution in more iterations than the history of CoD Modern Warfare/Black Ops combined. But EA really pumps out the sales for Madden in terms of sports games (in addition to their NHL line).
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Anthony Chan on 6th November 2013 6:11pm
Would be useful to see some numbers either way.
Taken at a little before 9pm, GMT.
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