Analyst: Black Ops 2 sales a 'cause for concern,' downgrades Activision

Joystick: "Sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 are on a trend to be down 15 percent from last year's launch of Modern Warfare 3, financial analyst Arvind Bhatia of Sterne Agee posits. Modern Warfare 3 sales were down 5 percent from the previous year's Black Ops, and if this scenario plays out again Bhatia calls it 'a cause for concern' for Activision-Blizzard."

[pixelsword]

Blops goes plops?

Nah.

[Captain Tuttle]

Nice.

It's a good game though, not the best but solid.

[LAZL0-Panaflex]

Bops 2 is best one yet.

[SyWolf]

If Call of Duty becomes less profitable then Activision will just move on to the next franchise that they will milk into the ground.

[FarCryLover182]

What else do they have to milk?

[Captain Tuttle]

Skylanders, don't doubt the potential of that IP.

[SolidDuck]

It still sold more than prob any other game this year. I'm sure they will continue to milk it next gen. And assuming they make a new engine for next gen machines, the hype will prob be outrageous like always.

[ShoryukenII]

Yeah, if they were to choose a time to decline, this would be perfect. With a new engine, they can easily bounce back next gen. I don't think they'll be able to keep it up though.

[ufo8mycat]

LOL Cause for concern.

I am pretty sure a lot of developers/publishers that make much better games would love their games to sell 10M+.

The fact that sales are down for this game (though still damn high compared to other games) is a GOOD thing.

I think some casual gamers are slowly (finally) beocming sick of palying the same game for the past 5 yrs

[JasonXS12]

I know I have. Modern Warfare 3 is the last one for me. Disappointed with Black Ops 1 so I won't buy BO2. MW2 was the last good CoD I played.

[Outside_ofthe_Box]

That is ridiculous. You can't expect CoD to keep surpassing it's sales with each iteration every single year to infinity. That isn't realistic at all. Sales were eventually going to drop at some point. At the end of the day BO2 out sold all games this year. Don't know if you can do any better than that.

[cyclonus007]

At the end of the day, Activision is a business that must answer to the stockholders who demand constant growth every quarter, every year. They expect these results from management and if they don't get them, heads must (and believe me, they will) roll.

Yes, Call of Duty is the highest selling game of the year, every year, by far. But slipping sales figures for a franchise may signal consumer fatigue and when that takes hold it sales are more likely to keep slipping not rise again.

It spreads like wildfire from that point on. If sales on the #1 selling franchise over the last few years start to show a decline, that is a sign that the bubble is about to burst. Therefore stockholders will lose confidence and dump their shares before Activision stock price starts to fall which, ironically, causes the stock price to fall even further.

[nukeitall]

The problem is that we don't know if there has been slipping in sales. On the other spectrum, it made $100 million more on the first day than MW3 which is a 25% increase.

If people were really concerned about one franchise taking a too large pie slice of the overall profit, they should have been concerned a long time ago, not now.

This is a great time to buy ATVI. However, I ain't buying, because they are too large so the upside is too little relative to the risk.

[extermin8or]

seriously they just downgraded after the game made 500 million in less than a week wtf

[lorcraven]

I've always seen the sales of a sequel more dependant on the satisfaction of the previous title. Telling me that less people bought blops 2 because of how they felt with their mw3 purchase. I remember feeling mw3 a very weak.

[GTRrocker666]

Turning into Guitar Hero are we?

[kevnb]

are you kidding me? The sales went down a bit from last year, but hey are still incredible.