Call of Duty Players Might Spend 200 Dollars on Future Games

Call of Duty: Black Ops has been the best-selling video game of 2010, picking up the mantle from another game in the series, Modern Warfare 2, which had the same title in 2009, and one analyst says that this kind of brand loyalty could mean even higher revenue for publisher Activision in the near future.

Arvind Bhatia, who is an analyst watching the video game industry for Stern Agee, has said that at the moment more than 27 million gamers are playing Call of Duty-branded games and that the publisher believes that many of them have enough loyalty to the series to spend around 200 dollars for future games in the franchise.

The number includes the initial sales, which will probably stay at the current price point of 60 dollars, and the money that could be spent on downloadable map packs and on other add-ons.

Bhatia says, “If we assume 20 percent of the current online players,(around 5.5 million, double their spending on Call of Duty over time, that would be an incremental $500 million in revenue at fairly high margins.”

The analyst sees this possibility as the main reason for the focus that Activision puts on Call of Duty and on its reluctance to invest in new intellectual properties.

Of course Activision must be careful in how it steers Call of Duty, making sure that it does not end up like Guitar Hero, another franchise that got a lot of releases in a short while and has been essentially canceled this year because of the so-called “brand fatigue.”

Activision has already confirmed one Call of Duty release for late 2011, although no official name is known and no developer has been linked to the game.

The publisher has four different development teams working on the Call of Duty franchise at the moment.