Sales of Black Ops 2 are currently looking to be down 15 percent on last years launch of Modern Warfare 3. Which itself was down 5 percent on the previous years Black Ops launch. This is despite it's incredible $500 Million first day sales.

Analysts are calling this trend “a cause for concern” for Activision-Blizzard as the Call of Duty franchise is responsible of 45% of Activision's earnings.

Players and reviewers have become increasingly complacent regarding the latest Call of Duty releases, going so far as to call Treyarch and Infinity Ward, lazy. Shorter single player campaigns and the same old game engine being the most common complaints.


David Vondehaar recently had to defend the use of an ancient (in gaming years) gaming engine. “Anybody who comes at the engine needs to remember it's the 60 frames they love in the first place," he asserted. "And we can make it beautiful - that's through years and years of working with the engine, improving upon it and improving the pipeline and improving our approach, our lighting rendering.”

"People like to talk about the engine, but the truth of the matter is that this isn't like something that was invented six years ago. At this point that engine doesn't resemble anything like any engine - we've ripped out the UI system, the rendering and the lighting are all new, the core gameplay systems are all new.”

Posted: Nov 30, 2012 12:33 pm
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum