Halo 5, Battlefront and Syndicate sell below expectations

GameStop reports about lower than expected sales of major game blockbusters. Seems like things are not going just as great for most game AAA-publishers.

Biggest game distribution retail network GameStop spoke about the not so great sales of Halo 5: Guardians, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and Star Wars Battlefront during the firm’s Q3 2015 earnings.

Star Wars Battlefront

GameStop CEO Julian Raines believed that “the quarter was challenging due to underperformance of Halo and Assassin’s Creed late in the quarter and lack of sales acceleration from hardware price cuts during the quarter.”

COO Tony Bartel added that the Star Wars Battlefront sales also fell short of expectations.

We’re not going to quantify it in actual number. But we had high expectations that diminished somewhat as it got closer, and then it failed to hit those lowered expectations.

GameStop

Halo 5

Retailer believes that the sales will go up after the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in December. GameStop still believes that Battlefront may become the strongest title for the holiday seasons.

One might believe that the sales of these games are still great, thanks to the digital distribution. However GameStop says that Halo 5 performed similar to other titles on digital platforms. There’s no data to confirm this. The retailer believes that all the titles released during this period performed not that great.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

Microsoft previously stated that Halo 5 became the biggest launch in the history of Xbox One and brought in over $400 million in global sales (games and hardware). Electronic Arts expects to sell 13 million copies of Star Wars Battlefront by March 2016. However the reviews of the game Review scores, however, are not that great. The game also performed worse than FIFA 16, Black Ops 3 and Fallout 4.

Fallout 4

GameStop states that Fallout 4 and Black Ops 3 sold very well and met GameStop’s projections. Bethesda’s RPG already became a big hit on Steam, becoming one of the most well-sold titles of the season. We don’t know the exact numbers yet, but this RPG did sell over 500k units during the 1 week in UK.

It’s pretty easy to see the slow decline of retail games, but there’s still sales being made. Especially in terms of consoles. PC on the contrary remains mostly a digital realm with Steam dominating the distribution landscape.

Do you think we will see more digital game being released every day? Will there be a shift towards the release of games in Brick and Mortar stores? Some publishers are already doing that and it’s interesting to know if indie devs are really interested in getting to the brick and mortar stores?

Source: seekingalpha.com (via videogamer.com)

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