And while it's still probably true that the earlier lack of marketing and the release date aren't really doing Battlefield 5 any favors, it also might not be selling as badly as we thought.
On August 14, an analyst at Cowen said that "pre-order sales of Battlefield V have been weak." What we didn't know at the time, is that Cowen only sources their information from one place. That place being the GameStop best-seller chart.
Earlier this afternoon, VentureBeat's Jeffrey Grubb noted that Cowen's prediction models only use this best-seller list from GameStop. It does not take into account any other retailer in its forecast predictions. Initially, Grubb believed that Cowen utilized only Amazon sales figures for their models. Then he noticed that Cowen switched earlier this year to using GameStop best-seller charts.
It's also interesting to note here that pre-orders for Battlefield 5 are actually trending better than those for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 on the Amazon UK site, where it is possible to pre-order a physical copy. How are sales figures for Battlefield 5 actually doing? It's not actually possible to tell due to the secrecy behind digital sales. We may only know about sales figures once sales milestones are hit by the game and EA releases a celebratory press release, or when their quarterly reports come in.
I'd like to apologize for the previous news post about this. I put a bit too much trust in an analyst I never heard of prior to that day and unwittingly contributed to this odd anti-Battlefield circle jerk that's going on.
