Call of Duty: Ghosts down 19% on Black Ops II

Activision’s Call of Duty: Ghosts may be the best-performing next-gen launch game, but it is still falling far behind predecessor Black Ops II’s commercial success.

That’s according to Cowen & Company’s Doug Creutz, as reported by VentureBeat.

Upon further reflection, we think the [Call of Duty] numbers are a bit more troubling than they first appeared,” Creutz stated. While the year-over-year gap is only 19 per cent thus far, that includes two extra weeks of sales for the 360 and PS3 versions [of Black Ops II].

Against 2011’s [Modern Warfare 3], where the difference is only one week, the title is down 32 per cent life-to-date.

We don’t think it is out of the question that the title could wind up comparing down 20 per cent to 25 per cent year-over-year [to Black Ops II], which is appreciably worse than the down 10 to 15 per cent that we think is baked in to guidance.”

Activision has already gone on record to blame the next-gen console transition on both low Call of Duty: Ghosts pre-orders and sales, the latter of which were down about 50 per cent in the UK prior to the launch of PS4 and Xbox One.

Note that Call of Duty is far from the only IP to have suffered during the transition.

MCV last month revealed that while Call of Duty’s average review scores have been declining, sales had until this year been on an upward trend.