In a special report that looked at pre-order numbers for upcoming AAA titles this year, Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz also talked about pre-orders for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Killzone: Second Front/Shadow Fall and Dead Rising 3 are the strongest exclusives for their respective consoles.
But what about multiplatform games? While Call of Duty: Ghosts pre-orders saw 59 percent of consumers choosing the Xbox One version, Watch_Dogs saw 80 percent of pre-orders for the PlayStation 4 version while Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag PS4 pre-orders made up 71 percent of the numbers.
Creutz stated that, “One of the conclusions we have come to is that the importance of review scores is actually vastly overstated, at least as far as a predictive measure of sales. We believe that core gamers are actually well able to determine likely high (and low) quality games before launch due to the enormous amount of pre-launch press coverage and promotion that AAA titles receive, and that pre-orders are thus actually fairly predictive of a game’s quality.”
Creutz also added that “we have never seen an eventual hit game pre-order weakly but then get bailed out by a high Metacritic score. Bad preorders equal bad sales, pretty much always, in our view.”