While a drop in sales for the latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise was indeed anticipated, the number of sales Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare drew upon release was well below expectation, and indeed concerning for Activision.
Coming in at half of last year’s Black Ops III sales, Infinite Warfare’s slump does not bode well for the continuation of Infinite Warfare as a mini-franchise within the overall Call of Duty series.
According to analysts, Infinite Warfare‘s retail sales for November 2016 were just around 50 percent of Black Ops III‘s first-month figures. Take note that retail sales are basically physical copies bought, and those sales do not take digital sales into consideration.
Many of those who did buy a physical copy of the game predominantly bought the $80 edition that came bundled with Modern Warfare Remastered, which, as of this writing, costs $20 more than the base game.
What’s more, a significant portion of Call of Duty‘s player base is on console. Since this is the first Call of Duty title not released for the Xbox 360 and PS3, the market would undoubtedly be smaller for the release.
However, there is a CoD following within the PC community, and comparing numbers on PC through Steam, the data from SteamDB, coupled with the latest console sales figures, is quite telling of the game’s overall performance.
For instance, as of this writing, Black Ops III has over 5,900 concurrent players online, with over 6,800 players at peak in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, Infinite Warfare has over 4,600 concurrent players, with over 5,100 players at peak in the last 24 hours. That means a game that came out a year ago is still beating the newest game in the Call of Duty franchise — a game that came out just a month ago.
Other than the inclusion of Modern Warfare Remastered, most of the press that met Infinite Warfare’s announcement was fairly negative for various reasons.
While Infinite Warfare seems to be the most different-looking Call of Duty game in a long while, it has also somewhat alienated its core audience with its gameplay being different than that of the usual CoD fare (even more so than Advanced Warfare) and many considered it’s gameplay to be encroaching a bit on the territory of Halo and Titanfall.
It being released around the same time as Battlefield 1 didn’t help either. And while released earlier this year this Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch has been steadily impressing FPS fans, and undoubtedly pulling some players away from CoD’s core playerbase.
However, while it’s not like Activision will go bankrupt with this recent disappointment, it still doesn’t bode well for the future of the Call of Duty series.
