Actually, Call of Duty pre-orders spiked 385% last week

As it turns out, Call of Duty had a pretty good Gamescom after all.

You may recall that yesterday we published a story about pre-order spikes during Gamescom.

Amazon UK revealed to us the impact Gamescom had on its big games and the numbers surprised us a bit. It revealed that Project CARS enjoyed the biggest pre-order spike of the show (in percentage terms, we might add), just ahead of Rise of the Tomb Raider.

We were surprised by the Top Ten not because of who was in it, but rather who wasn’t. Namely, Call of Duty.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare had suffered lower-than-usual pre-orders, and Activision tried to counter that at Gamescom with the announcement of a Day Zero edition. The Day Zero edition lets customers play Call of Duty an entire day early if they pre-order.

That, combined with generally positive press coverage about the game’s new multiplayer, meant we would have thought pre-orders for that game would have gone through the roof. But it didn’t even make Amazon’s Top Ten.

Well, as it turns out, we were right to be surprised. Because Amazon had, in error, left Call of Duty out of the list.

In truth, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare pre-orders rose 385 per cent on Amazon last week. That’s a bit more like it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the game was pre-ordered well. That’s just a percentage increase. 385% of one would only be (just under) four pre-orders, for example. But if we were betting people, we’d say it probably did ok.

Amazon gave us the real Top Ten pre-orders for the week earlier today, and Advanced Warfare came in at fifth and sixth overall. The top four places were all various SKUs for FIFA 15. Which suggests to me that FIFA may have also been missing from the original story.

My advice? Ignore that original piece. It sounds like it was all just nonsense.