Pachter Says Battlefield 3 Has No Chance Of Topping Next Call Of Duty

You know what, I can't believe I'm doing this, but I'm actually going to step in and defend the guy. We all know he doesn't know anything about what makes a video game good or bad... but he DOES know what he's talking about when it comes to numbers. He's not talking quality, he's not even apparently claiming CoD is a better game. He's just talking about the installed fan base. And frankly, I agree with him that in well known series... Installed fan base is going to have more affect on your sales than which game is technically better.

Black Ops has reportedly sold 18 million copies. Bad Company 2 has reportedly sold 6 million copies. Battlefield 3 would need to sell THREE times the amount of BC2 to get into the same ballpark as Black Ops. I highly doubt Battlefield 3 is going to sell 3 times the copies of its predecessor. So I don't think Pratcher is wrong, nor do I think he's out of line to suggest this outcome.

Stickiness Factor, Power of Context, The Law of The Few, and Technology Convergence. Four concepts that tell you exactly why Pachter is nothing more than a Jack Thompson style person: a random putz who gets some modicum of notoriety.

1942 and BF2 created a strong community, was highly successful in its time, and was both fun and relevant somewhat to the times. Battlefield 3 has multiple new technologies converging on it. I mean these are only a few things to consider and they alone indicate that this game will probably be explosively successful. When it comes out, this game is gonna get tweeted, put on peoples facebook accounts, and discussed all around.

Business Analysts do not have any techniques to make these kinds of predictions, thus he can only randomly say that. You guys should just stop posting his comments, they've always been worthless.

Part 1

I'm not bashing Battlefield here. I don't even play either of the two series. But when you're talking about established numbers, it seems pretty clear which of these games is likely to sell more copies. If the gap between sales figures was smaller I'd agree with you, but it's huge.

These numbers come primarily from VG Chartz and Wikipedia

Battlefield 1942 - 3 million copies sold (as of 2004)
Battlefield 2 - 3.6 million copies sold
Bad Company 2 - 6 million copies

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - 16 Million Copies
Modern Warfare 2 - 21 million (4.7 million in 24 hours)
Black Ops - 21 million copies (5.6 million in 24 hours)

Part 2

Those numbers speak for themselves. I realize that Battlefield 2 and 1942 are from long ago when games just didn't sell as much as they do today, but even adjusting for inflation of the market, it seems very unlikely that the Battlefield series has a chance of pulling in larger numbers than the Call of Duty series. Black ops sold almost as many copies in 1 day as Bad Company sold in it's entire lifetime, and MORE than Battlefield 2 did in 6 years.

Again, I'm not bashing on Battlefield, I'm not saying it's not going to be a better game. It very well could be. But even if it's the best shooter ever released, that would not guarantee it would be able to surpass trending sales of the Call of Duty series.

I can't find the sales figures for the previous call of duty games, but I can venture to guess they were way less. This again reinforces my point though. The previous games most likely had a pretty similar following to Battlefield, social networking, context, and the technology coming to bare all created that monster. It's not like they're just slapping together a bunch of premade parts and calling it a sequel here, there is some serious hardware swirling into Battlefield 3. I stand by my point, but I will say its perfectly rational to say it probably won't meet 16 million.

The same reasons that I argue Battlefield 3 may be successful are the same exact reasons Modern Warfare was successful, it alone didn't sell itself by design.

Oh I'm not saying Battlefield 3 won't be successful. Far from it. I think it's going to do extremely well, and any new technology they can bring to the table is excellent in my books. I'm just saying I don't think Pratcher is talking out of his ass. What he's saying (this time) at least makes sense, and is backed up by previous sales figures.