Call of Duty: Ghosts Sold Less Than Black Ops II At Launch

A few days ago, Call of Duty: Ghosts launched to a very willing public. Statistics were released by Activision claiming that they made $1 billion worth of copies at launch. Well, surprise, surprise, they’ve turned around and said that this wasn’t exactly true. These statistics were based on sales to retailers and not to consumers. Activision have since said that, at launch, Ghosts sold less than Black Ops II.

As we have said for more than a year now, console transition years are volatile and hard to predict, and this year is proving no different.

Today, we announced that we had shipped into retail more than $1bn of Call of Duty: Ghosts globally on day one based on an average wholesale price. As expected, due to the console transition and digital distribution, this number is down versus last year.

This year, the sell-through curve will be different than in past years due to the multiple launches of new hardware later in the month and more days between our launch and the high-volume Black Friday at the end of the month.

That said, it's a very solid achievement and shows the tremendous confidence our retail partners have and the strength of the game and franchise heading into this holiday.
- Dennis Durkin, Activision CFO

Call of Duty: Ghosts is not alone as Battlefield 4 and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag have sold less copies on launch this year than their past iterations. Could this be because of the next-gen consoles being released very shortly? We, along with the rest of the industry, are expecting to see an increase in sales once the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are released later this month.