Speaking during an investors call yesterday, Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg claimed that the games industry is facing a “secular downturn” in pre-order numbers.
Hirshberg had the following to say to investors during the call:
“You guys [investors] can see the same thing we see industry-wide, that there’s been sort of a secular downturn as it relates to pre-orders, thanks in part to the rise of day one digital and the decline in previous-gen consoles.”
“We think that’s happening due to a number of factors, things like increased digital consumption, particularly on the next-gen consoles, titles being widely available on day one and the decline overall for demand on previous-gen consoles.”
Hirshberg’s sentiments seem to be right ‘on they money’ given that pre-orders no longer offer the value that they used to in a pre-digital age. This is why games like Alien Isolation offer increasingly ridiculous pre-order incentives, in order to allow companies to bypass word of mouth and reviews and lock in as many units before official launch as possible.
Still though, when a company in confident in their game and doesn’t push pre-orders to a ridiculous extent, like with Activision’s upcoming Destiny, it really shows, and Hirshberg seems to agree:
“Purchase intent is similarly at an all-time high and rising when compared to any other new IP, and we had 4.6 million players in the beta with almost universally positive sentiment,” he said.
“Overall, we’re really pleased with the performance of the Destiny beta. We’re pleased with the broad range of metrics that we look at to gauge momentum and our chances for success.”
It seems as though providing mass access to beta gameplay, as evidenced by the Early Access trend, may be a better way to drive mass sales than ramming pre-orders down the consumers throat. In a world where information is passed on quicker than ever and its increasingly more difficult to hide shallow gameplay and subpar performance with any game post-release, it just seems to make more sense to show off to the gaming public what matters most in a game, and that’s certainty not pre-order incentives.
Daniel Horowitz
@horowitzcentral
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