Destiny Tops $500 Million in Shipments 24 Hours, Biggest Launch for New Franchise - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 10 September 2014 / 10,576 Views
Activision announced the company shipped more than $500 million of Destiny at retailers and on Xbox Live and PSN. That is the biggest opening for a new franchise in video game history.
While the game is the biggest launch for a new IP, it is also one of the biggest launches for any game. Call of Duty: Black Ops II opened with $500 million two years ago. Grand Theft Auto V has the biggest launch in gaming history with $800 million and more than 11 million units sold.
"Based on extraordinary audience demand, retail and first party orders worldwide have exceeded $500 million for Destiny," said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard. "This industry milestone marks another blockbuster success for our company and demonstrates our unique ability to create some of the most successful entertainment franchises in the world. The success of Destiny, along with the recent introduction of Blizzard Entertainment’s Hearthstone, is further validation of our unique capabilities to create great entertainment franchises from the ground up."
Activision had invested $500 million in the game, including development and marketing. The investment has clearly paid off in just 24 hours. More than 11,000 retailers opened at midnight around the world for the Destiny launch.
"Since the beginning, we’ve been confident that our investment and belief in Destiny would pay off. But not many people believed we’d be able to say it did so on day one," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. "Destiny is officially the biggest new franchise launch in our industry’s history. It’s also the highest-selling day one digital console release in history."
"We have more confidence than ever that Destiny will become one of the iconic franchises of this generation and Activision’s next billion dollar brand. Most importantly, it’s just a great game which we can’t stop playing. A big thanks to our incredibly talented team and partners who helped make this happen; most importantly, our partners at Bungie."
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A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. Outside, in the real world, he has a passion for the outdoors which includes everything from hiking to having received his B.A. in Environmental Studies. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Wow. Just after Watch Dogs broke the record not too long ago. I have a feeling we'll see the record broken several times this generation, as the budgets for AAA games and the general scale of the marketing required to insure the games are profitable inflate to previously unheard of proportions. The fact that we've seen this already happen twice tells me there will be several AAA titles that will perform like this, and they won't even necessarily be very good games, just games that the companies needed to perform well so they invested enough to make sure of it.
I am looking forward to see the console sales for this week.
Can't wait to see the 1st week numbers. 8 millions at least.
another shit game but with a very good marketing.
as soon as i recived my white ps4 with this game i put on ebay.
in your opinion maybe but just because you don't like it you don't speak for everyone, anyone find her comment a bit you know bait like!
The game still hasn't broken even. It probably needs to sell close to $1 billion to actually become profitable.
Umm. . . no. The budget was much less. Some say it was 500 million, though Bungie says it was nowhere near that amount. Companies don't spend billions of dollars on game development, at least not yet.
500M was for the game, marketing and the future. So it's already profitable
Even if it hasn't, it will probably get there this week. In terms of sheer numbers, it's still an industry record.
lol, so says the armchair expert at budgets. Most blockbuster films today cost around $100-250 million to make (source: boxofficemojo.com). For a video game to cost more than a blockbuster film is ludicrous, you sir must not be very aware of the world.
Here's the skinny http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649. Interesting $500 million from $140 million budget.
You'd make a very good analyst Binary Solo, keep up the good work. ;)
You have a rather wild imagination of how much cash actually goes around in making a video game. To give you an idea of scale, the most expensive media production would have to be blockbuster films which tops out at $300 million. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films, boxofficemojo.com) Video games on the other hand are rather tame usually under 50 million, except for a few outliers like The Old Republic (God bless its poor trodden soul) $200 million, Destiny $140 million, Defiance and Disney Infinity. Very good analysis, Mr. Armchair Analyst keep it up!
