According to analysts at Cowen And Company (via Joystiq), Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is expected to sell 40 percent fewer copies than last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts, and 70 percent fewer than Call of Duty: Black Ops II in 2012. Looking at those kinds of numbers, analysts from the company are speculating that the franchise's best days are behind it.
The analysts are using pre-order figures from Amazon to make their predictions, and don't take into account digital pre-orders or pre-orders at retailers like GameStop, Best Buy and Wal-Mart.
"We continue to believe CoD will be down meaningfully vs. last year," the analysts say in their report. "With the franchise facing two consecutive significant year on year declines in sales, we think it is prudent to assume it has peaked."
That doesn't mean Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will be a failure, not by a long shot. Cowen And Company are quick to point out that Advanced Warfare looks to be a better game than last year's Ghosts and that when dealing with a game franchise the size of Call of Duty, the game is still going to sell well. Really well. Advanced Warfare is expected to outsell Destiny (a game also published by Call of Duty parent company Activision), despite Destiny being the most pre-ordered new video game franchise in history.
While some claim that pre-orders are becoming less of a factor in determining how a game will sell, Cowen And Company disagree.
"This aligns with what Activision and GameStop both would like to believe - Activision because it gives an alternative explanation for slow preorders, and GameStop because it ignores the elephant in the room that a significant portion of sales are digital, which they aren't seeing the preorders for. We believe that preorders remain by far the best leading indicator of a title's likely ultimate sales."
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare launches on Nov. 4 for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Players who pre-order receive the "Day Zero" edition of the game, which will be released a day early on Nov. 3 and grant players a double experience points buff in multiplayer for the day.
