Call of Duty Sales Starting to Slacken

[News Portal]

Economic analysts are saying that the Call of Duty franchise is starting to slow down in sales. Sales of Modern Warfare 3 are reportedly behind where Black Ops was this time last year by 4.2 percent, despite having a better launch. These same analysts suspect that casual gamers are the cause, suggesting that they are now less likely to buy games at retail and more likely to use their consoles for other media and video streaming.

Source: Gamasutra

Read full article by GON News

[Ash_Williams]

Maybe all the 'pro' gamers are going back to CoD4.. Which is true considering MW3's multiplayer is a steaming pile of cow phat.

Bring on Black Ops 2!

[GroggDogg]

people can use statistics to prove anything they want, forthty percent of people know that

[nafem]

Maybe all the 'pro' gamers are going back to CoD4.. Which is true considering MW3's multiplayer is a steaming pile of cow phat.

Bring on Black Ops 2!

pro gamers player COD? news to me

[Ash_Williams]

CoD4 is still a professional game, CS1.6, CS:S and CoD4 are 3 of the most played pro FPS games..

[SilenceOz]

I bought Black Ops cause I enjoyed MW2 the multiplayer was fun
Black ops wasnt as good though.
I only bought MW3 cause I wanted to see the story to end, MW3's multiplayer blows though.
But I can safely say I have 0 Interest in BO2 and Activision will sell one less copy of COD this year.

[InAUGral]

They are blaming casual gamers for not buying COD maybe they should look at how similar the last three games have been then ask themselves why sales are lower.

EDIT: On a slightly related note Ive been playing COD2 a fair bit in the past week and it has plenty of well populated servers (most you cannot join because of ping but some let you in) but COD2 has more players right now than the last 3 COD games combined.

[jerichosainte]

No Surprises here, we all knew it would come at some stage.

Although I have started to play some blops and cod4 again, at least the core gameplay is not as glitchy as some recent releases *stares at DICE*.

[>XaartaX<]

casual gamers are the cause, suggesting that they are now less likely to buy games at retail and more likely to use their consoles for other media and video streaming.

No! Piracy is to blame! /sarcasm.

[Faint_Man_Australia]

I might be the first to point this out, but as stated in the article initial sales were better. Couldn't that possibly mean that the people who would have bought it now already have it?

[Kinky Kel]

Call of Duty 2 so far, and in my opinion, will always be the best of the franchise. This modern warfare is rubbish. Haven't enjoyed a single one since CoD2 .. I've bought and played each of them with a slim hope that they've improved on the previous iteration. Sadly they're getting worse and worse.

[cyclobs]

you mean people are getting sick of paying for the same game over and over and over and over again?

amazing!

[RSOblivion]

LOL the analysts are so out of touch with customer satisfaction that they are unaware of it's rather bad reputation.

Black Ops 2 looks like it will be the first in a while to be an improvement over the last 4 lemons release (2 by IW and 2 by Treyarch). CoD 4 was the last truly good version, though I still think CoD 2 and CoD 5 WaW were probably better in terms of player base though CoD 5's balance was miles out of whack.

They need a better engine (CryEngine?) and some care for the actual game design rather than just re-releasing the same engine with one or two small detail updates and a bunch of rehashed maps as DLC.

Hell if they checked the numbers correctly and measured each platform independently they'd find that popularity on Consoles may have soared but player levels are down. The number of PC players is woeful (used to have full servers all night in CoD 5 and 4, whereas Black Ops tended to shut down about 3am, however MW2 and MW3 were both dead by 1am in Australia due mainly to the lovely (damn broken) p2p systems used.

[Mugsy]

Haven't touched competitive multiplayer in CoD as I find Battlefield to be the better competitive environment.

Ironically, the COD games have progressively improved at being co-op games... WaW being the best one still with an almost complete campaign co-op mode and Nazi Zombies in the one package. (was heaps glad I picked it up for $10 on PS3!)

MW2's spec ops was somewhat lacking from what I've heard and Black Ops only had Nazi Zombies with no campaign co-op. MW3's spec ops has 16 meaty missions from what I've read which is pretty decent and something I could live with. Now if the sequel to Black Ops would only have campaign co-op and a Nazi Zombies mode that support split screen online... it's not fun playing with just two people.