Activision Boasts $1 Billion 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' Day One Sales

The battle for bragging rights at video games’ top table continues, with the announcement by Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI) that sales of Activision’s latest first-person shooter, Call of Duty: Ghosts, exceeded $1 billion on its first day.

This number, and this announcement, is clearly intended to reference and invite comparison with the $800 million launch number for Take-Two Interactive’s Grand Theft Auto V, and the billion dollars its sales figures reached within three days of release. However, the two are not meaningfully comparable.

The figure of $800 million for Grand Theft Auto V was for retail sell-through, rather than sell-in – that is, around 15 million people purchased a copy of Grand Theft Auto V to play.

The total sell-through for Grand Theft Auto V has not been broken out, but Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick said at Take-Two’s last earnings call that sell-in was at 29 million – considerably more than a billion dollars’ worth of inventory.The $1 billion for Call of Duty: Ghosts reflects sell-in – that is, the number of copies of Call of Duty: Ghosts shipped to retailers. Put another way, retailers expect that this number of copies will provide them with a sensible balance of risk between overstock and running out of copies in individual stores.

For accounting purposes, once a copy of a game is sold, it is sold – the retailer is then generally at liberty to dispose of it as it wishes – so, that $1 billion of retail stock will be sold at varying price points over time. In certain exceptional cases the publisher may offer retailers financial incentives to discount stock, but this “price protection” is considered in business and accounting terms extraordinary (a recent outbreak at Square Enix was one of the reasons for President Yoichi Wada’sdeparture earlier this year).

It is also worth noting that the $1 billion figure from Activision reflects not only copies of the game for  Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, for which Grand Theft Auto V  has so far been released, but also retail copies for Windows PC and Wii U, and copies for next-gen consoles that will already be in the retail pipeline, even if the average gamer does not yet own the hardware to play them on.

Apples and shooty, shooty oranges

Sales to next-gen platforms will be particularly interesting, in light of the ongoing controversy around the 720p resolution of the Xbox One edition and reports of frame-rate issues on the PS4 version (which may of course be patchable by the time the average gamer gets his or her hands on it). Notwithstanding the froth to which a scandal-hungry games media and overwrought platform enthusiasts has beaten these questions, they will have some effect on sales, or at least on sell-through, for both platforms.

Nonetheless, asking “are these figures as impressive as those for Grand Theft Auto V” is not unlike asking “ is this mountain as big as Olympus Mons?” The answer is going to be no, but the details are important. Call of Duty: Ghosts was produced in far less time than Grand Theft Auto V, and at a lower cost. Buyers of  Grand Theft Auto V had been waiting for a new GTA game for five years; Call of Duty games have a strict annual cycle.

In all, this statistic does what Activision needs it to – show confidence in its highest-earning retail franchise, and give them an injection of momentum as they go into their Q3 earnings call. At the time of writing, shares in Activision Blizzard were up 0.5%, at $16.62.

Call of Duty: Ghosts available now on Xbox Games Store

Call of Duty: Ghosts is available to download today through the Xbox Games Store, making the Infinity Ward-developed first-person shooter one of the first high-profile games to be available digitally for Xbox 360 day-and-date with the retail version.

Like the boxed copy, the downloadable Xbox 360 version sells for $60. The download will take up 7.51GB of hard drive space, according to the listing. Call of Duty: Ghosts for PlayStation 3 is also available through the PlayStation Store today for $60 as part of Sony's Day 1 Digital campaign.

All Xbox One games will be available digitally day-and-date with their retail counterparts, including Call of Duty: Ghosts, which hits Microsoft's next-generation console as a launch title on November 22.

Call of Duty: Ghosts, featuring a franchise-first Extinction mode, launched today for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and Wii U. Xbox One and PS4 versions will follow at launch later this month. 

Will 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' Beat Out 'Grand Theft Auto 5'?

$800M in a day. I thought it was a typo when I first read that Grand Theft Auto 5 had sold that many copies in 24 hours. Call of Duty: Ghosts has a steep hill to climb if Activision wants to regain its collection of sales record crowns from Take Two and Rockstar, and now here on release day, the question is…can they do it?
Call of Duty has consistently surprised everyone with each iteration constantly outselling the last, at least initially. Every year, day one totals grew larger and larger, ultimately culminating in Black Ops 2′s colossal $500M first day haul that seemed like it could never be touched. Until Grand Theft Auto 5, that is.


Grand Theft Auto stunned everyone with its $800M atomic bomb which broke nearly every record on the books by a mile, and it hit a billion soon after. It’s also important to keep in mind this was only across two consoles, the Xbox 360 and PS3, making the total even more impressive. It seems there’s something to be said about waiting five years between releases instead of one or two like most series, and millions of gamers were excited to conclude this current console generation with another fully-fledged GTA title.
But now we have Call of Duty: Ghosts, a game that’s in the unique position to possibly sell more copies than any other in history. Why? Because A) it’s a Call of Duty game and B) it’s coming out across six different systems over the course of the next month, and that’s simply unprecedented. Those two factors could combine to result in some absolutely mammoth sales for Ghosts, and I’m looking forward to hearing the numbers as they’re released.
Being cross platform will hurt it in the short game, however, and I would actually expect “day one” sales of Ghosts to come nowhere near those of Grand Theft Auto 5, and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were quite a bit lower than Black Ops 2′s take as well. Analysts are saying that judging be preorder data, they expect sales to be 10% lower than Black Ops 2 in the first quarter of release. This has to do with competition from titles like Battlefield 4, but also possibly the arrival of next gen, which has both positive and negative potential sales effects.
There’s going to be a segment of the gaming population that’s going to wait to get the game on next generation consoles that are being released in a few weeks, the PS4 and Xbox One. If they can hold off on their COD itch for that time, they’ll experience the new game first on those systems. That said, with Call of Duty offering a $10 “upgrade” fee to get a version of the game for the new consoles once you’ve already bought it for last-gen, that might be enough for avid fans to want to get their practice time in now before the “main event” on next gen. Players should note however, that whatever time they put in to unlocking items and ranking up will not transfer to their next-gen copy should they trade it in.

But in terms of overall sales, Ghosts is sitting in an unprecedented position. Back when 360 and PS3 first game out, Call of Duty wasn’t the sales monster it is today. But now? With six platforms to sell across and interesting in gaming at all time high? Ghosts could certainly set some records outside of day one sales, as I think Rockstar will keep that crown for a fairly long time. In terms of lifetime sales, however, Ghosts could easily come out on top with its wide range of availability and mammoth fan base. Though many are still hoping GTA 5 will come to next-gen consoles someday, which could level the playing field.
Ghosts does arrive with its fair share of controversy. “Resolutiongate,” as it’s being called, has overwhelmed the narrative of the Ghosts in the gaming press and across forums filled with rabid fans and anti-fans. It may seem silly, and the issue is more about the capabilities of the Xbox One rather than the game itself, but it could have some sort of sales blowback.
And then there’s the quality of the game itself. Ghosts is meant to be a reinvention of the Call of Duty franchise, a completely new sub-series breaking away from the Modern Warfare and Black Ops strains. But so far, reviews have been decidedly mixed, more so than past games which have generally seen review scores fall all the time. Granted, it’s not the best idea to rely solely on Metacritic to choose whether or not you’ll buy a game, but it’s a metric that can’t be avoided in the industry and it does drive sales. Currently, the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are sitting at 78 and 75 out of a hundred respectively, and both are some of the lowest scores the series has ever received. The main criticism from the press is that despite this “Ghosts” makeover, very little has changed at all. Fan scores are barely above 2/10, which should be taken with a boulder-sized grain of salt, but it does represent at least some level of frustration about the game.
Perhaps fans and critics will like the game more on next-gen, but better graphics (or higher resolution) don’t seem to be the main issue. It’s gameplay, and so far it seems that the game hasn’t tried to make as many meaningful leaps forward as it needs to in order to keep things interesting. Fans do listen to review scores, despite what they may say, and perhaps middling reviews will be enough to convince those who are on the fence to skip it.
While I do believe that Ghosts has the potential to break records with an unprecedented six platform launch, if the game isn’t up to par with past installments and doesn’t move the series forward enough, they might squander this once-in-a-generation opportunity.


What do you think of the game so far?

@Paul Tassi