14 DAY TRIAL // The THQ-published and Kaos Studio-made Homefront first-person shooter has just been released and has received a fairly poor reception from critics and gamers, but at least one industry analyst believes that the game might still sell pretty well, despite a disappointing Metacritic average score.
Doug Creutz, who is an analyst for Cowen and Company, has said, “It is clear that Homefront has not lived up to expectations in terms of game quality.”
He added, “While this will likely hamper the title's ability to achieve breakout success, we still feel reasonably confident that it will achieve sales of 2M units, and see no reason to change our estimates at this time.”
THQ was hoping to establish a new franchise with Homefront, creating a series of games in the first-person shooter space that might at some point rival Call of Duty from Activision Blizzard and Battlefield from Electronic Arts.
The shares of THQ went down significantly after the Homefront launch, but Creutz believes that the sell off is too big of a reaction and that the publisher will bounce back.
He cites the previous experience of Medal of Honor, the game that Electronic Arts launched last fall and which benefited from development input from DICE, which also had a mediocre Metacritic score and still managed to sell more than 5 million units all over the world.
Homefront tells the story of how the American resistance fights back against an invading North Korean force and both developer and publisher initially said that they aimed to tell an inspirational story while delivering solid shooter mechanics.
Prior to launch, Danny Bilson, an executive at THQ, has said that the future of Kaos Studios is linked to the performance of the game although he never mentioned how many copies it needs to sell in order to become a success.