Anthem ain't doing so hot at retail
Out of tune
www.pushsquare.com
According to Ahmad, ANTHEM only managed to sell around ten percent of the copies that the original
Destiny did back when it launched in 2014. Perhaps even more damning,
Mass Effect: Andromeda'sfirst week sales were more than double that of ANTHEM. Neither example paints a particularly pretty picture.
According to Wikipedia (not sure why that article doesn't include numbers) Destiny made $325 million in it's first week. Some reports (based on data from a lawsuit) suggest that Destiny in fact made $547.6 million in it's first month. Doing reverse math that means Destiny sold (approximately) 9,100,000 copies in it's first month of release.
Comparing Destiny's worldwide numbers against the UK trend for Anthem does not paint a pretty picture.
10% of 9,100,000 copies is 910,000 copies, which is a remarkably bad start for a game trying to get to 6,000,000 copies sold before 3/31.
According to Wikipedia, Destiny sold nearly 90% of it's copies for it's first month in the first five days on release. Additionally, they wound up with nearly 20,000,000 players which doesn't exactly equate to 20,000,000 copies sold (resales, rentals, piracy, etc) but it took them years to get there. Nearly 50% of all copies sold were sold within the first month.
If Anthem is on a similar trajectory, they aren't on track to get to 6,000,000 copies sold by 3/31, they are on track to get ~1,200,000 copies. They are not on track to get to 6,000,000 copies in their
lifetime, and that's even assuming that Anthem gets a three year life of support like Destiny did (it won't). At this rate, they'll be lucky to break 2,000,000 unless something drastic happens.
10% of $547.6 million is $54.6 million, which is a shockingly low number. There isn't a lot of data around Anthem's production costs, but it's been allegedly to have been in development for at least 3 years plus a huge marketing budget - it's unclear how much money it would need to be "successful" but I'd wager that it's a lot more than $54 million.
Obviously the UK could be an outlier and sales reporting is pretty bad overall, but even if EA is telling the truth and half of the sales are digital (and unreleased, untracked) it still puts them in an incredibly poor place. But, if American sales even resemble what the UK trends look like, it looks like Anthem might be dead on arrival.
www.mediamarkt.de
