‘I’m going to call Battlefield 5 as the top selling game for 2016’

Analyst Michael Pachter has said that 2016 presents EA’s best ever opportunity to dethrone Call of Duty from the top of the annual software charts.

Speaking in a recent episode of Pachter Factor, the analyst predicted that gamers’ who felt let down by 2014’s Call of Duty: Ghosts will be looking for an alternative to next year’s Infinity Ward title.

Infinity Ward had some shuffling of staff, they bought in my good friend Dave Stohl to run the studio. He is an extremely talented executive producer, he’s one of the original Treyarch guys, he’s good, he knows what he’s doing,” Pachter said.

But he inherited that Infinity Ward team. They did a bad job on Ghosts. If ever there was a year that somebody could knock Call of Duty of its perch at the top, it is this year because I think gamers who were burnt by Ghosts are looking for an alternative. I encourage EA to take advantage of the opportunity with Battlefield 5 if only DICE could get multiplayer right.

DICE… are clearly learning with whatever mistakes they made… I was quite surprised by the low Metacritic scores for Star Wars but DICE I think will get Battlefield 5 right. So I’m going to call Battlefield 5 as the top selling game for 2016.”

Pachter added that the prediction is a big stretch”, adding: It’s going to take some real power from EA. They’re going to have to make a better game than COD and Infinity Ward are going to have to mess it up. I hope that Dave and the IW guys take the challenge and prove me wrong.”

Pachter also predicted that 2016’s COD will not be Ghosts II but will possibly” be Modern Warfare 4.