Call of Duty Advanced Warfare Pre-Orders Drop

The death of an industry legend is being reported at multiple sites this evening after an industry analyst revealed that the pre-orders for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare have plummeted compared to last year’s Call of Duty: Ghosts. Wishful thinking aside, it’s probably still not the death of CoD, and the franchise will still continue to sell more than your favourite games for quite some time to come.

Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz today revealed that pre-orders for Advanced Warfare were down 50% over Ghosts – a drop that pretty much indicates something massively wrong with Activision’s power franchise. It’s important to question the figure – this came out of an investor meeting and is by no means an official figure. Creutz knows more than the average gamer, and he’ll have insiders at Activision, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that number is 100% correct. It’s also seemingly without the context of the rate at which these pre-orders happen over time. 

At the same time, pre-orders are generally down for everything. Even the latest iPhone sold at its usual rate but less were earmarked ahead of time. With midnight launches becoming more and more common, and publishers ensuring new titles are well stocked, the incentive to order ahead of time reduces. This is especially true for Advanced Warfare, which has no really interesting pre-order bonuses.