14 DAY TRIAL // An analyst watching the video game industry for PiperJaffray believes that the decline in overall sales for the most recent installment of the Call of Duty series is another reason for the recent slide that the video game market has seen in the United States.
Michael Olson says that Modern Warfare 3, the Call of Duty title that was launched in November last year, is not maintaining the same “long tail” when it comes to sales, which was registered for its predecessor, Black Ops, released during 2010.
In March 2011, the Call of Duty game managed to be the fifth best-selling game while, for the March 2012 period, estimates show that Modern Warfare 3 will only occupy eighth place in the NPD Group supplied software chart.
The analyst stated, “We believe big name titles are no longer able to sustain 'fat Tails'. This 'thinning tail' phenomenon is driven by 1) casual gamers leaving the market, 2) a steeper pre-sale and up-front curve, and 3) cannibalization from the pre-owned market.”
Olson is in agreement with other analysts who believe that March will see a big slide in sales on both the hardware and the software markets, with the overall decline coming to about 26 percent when compared to the same period of 2011.
Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan says the decrease will be of 23% while Doug Creutz of Cowen and Co. is estimating a drop of 22 percent for the same period.
Apart from the thinning tail of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, March 2012 is also suffering because the biggest launches of the month, Mass Effect 3 from BioWare and Street Fighter x Tekken from Capcom, have failed to deliver the same spectacular sales as Dragon Age II and Pokemon Black and White.
Analysts believe that the video game industry slide will continue in April with a bounce projected for May.