Call of Duty pre-orders UP year-on-year

Video game pre-orders are on the decline, but Activision says that Call of Duty: Black Ops III pre-orders are bucking the trend.

Specifically, it says that pre-orders for its upcoming shooter – which comes out this Friday (November 6th) are better than those placed for its predecessor Advanced Warfare.

We couldn’t be more excited about the launch this Friday,” Activision Publishing president and CEO Eric Hirshberg said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

We have strong momentum indicated by a number of factors, but just to name a few, the growing engagement around the past Black Ops titles, the significantly year-on-year lift in pre-orders, consumer sentiment around our marketing assets which is more positive for Black Ops III than any Call of Duty title on record, a great partnership with Sony across consumer, trade and custom PS4 bundles, and our ranking as Neilson’s Number One Most Anticipated Title of the Year.”

Overall Call of Duty revenues are up too, both year-on-year for the company’s last quarter and for the year-to date. Hirshberg credits the increase to: Higher Advanced Warfare selling, deeper engagement from our community, driving up performance on season pass, DLC and the new consumable micro-transaction feature Supply Drops and strong catalogue sales of Black Ops.

Added Hirshberg: In fact, monthly active users for Black Ops II grew quarter-over-quarter again to a new record of nearly 12m monthly active users. And on today’s level of engagement for a game, that is now three years old, and only available on old-gen.”

MCV also revealed last week that both Black Ops II and Advanced Warfarewere among the UK’s best-selling digital console games in September.

In April an MCV survey found that UK video game orders are in decline – a trend that first came to light when Hirshberg admitted a year-on-year pre-order decline for last year’s Advanced Warfare.