Wednesday, November 14, 2007

CALL OF DUTY 4, IS BEATING HALO 3 WORLDWIDE SALES. WOW!!!!

Analyst: Call Of Duty 4 To Match Halo 3 Sales

Most times, video game industry analysts say some pretty logical things. Like, "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock will be a big title for Activision," and Halo 3 will be huge." Yeah, those predictions make perfect sense. Others, while somewhat controversial, have a foundation based in some potential validity, like "the PS3 will eventually win this generation," and "no Grand Theft Auto IV could hurt the holiday season." But others...we just gotta scratch our heads and wonder.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is definitely a huge game, but we never thought it would be Halo 3-huge. Sure, it's sold out all over the place and the reviews are sky-high (so far), but can it really end up selling as much or even more than Bungie's massive title? According to Nollenberger Capital Partners analyst Todd Greenwald, yes, it can.

"Thus far, the game has an average score of 9.5/10 on Metacritic.com, which is almost unprecedented and puts it on par with Halo 3," he said. "It certainly is the highest-rated game Activision has ever created. Keep in mind, CoD4 is launching on four times as many platforms (Xbox 360, PlayStation3, PC, DS) as Halo 3 (360 only). Halo 3 has so far sold about 4 million units. A year ago, Call of Duty 3 sold about 3 million units, and we anticipate this year's version could do four million or more." (source- EscapistMagazine)

He makes a good point in the fact that CoD4 is a multiplatform title, which obviously means it has greater sales potential than an exclusive title like Halo 3. But the latter is the fastest selling entertainment-based product, whether we're talking about games, movies, books, music, whatever, so can this really be true? Microsoft expects to sell 10 million copies of Halo 3 (albeit not in 2007)...will Activision boast similar numbers with CoD4? We realize Greenwald is only talking about this year, though, so we suppose it's feasible.

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