Anthem has been marketed as the Destiny killer following the hype train approaching its release. It was pretty quickly made evident though that the game didn’t exactly do what people thought it would. Since Anthem sales only made 10% of the sales that Destiny originally had in its own launch week. Not looking good for Bioware
The source of this analysis did add that the comparison was made with the sales both games had in the United Kingdom. Destiny 1 was a very popular MMO shooter in its Prime days despite the many flaws of the game.
To be more specific regarding the sales comparison of both sales. Destiny sales amounted to about 417,000 copies within the launch week in the United Kingdom.
If Anthem only made 10% of it in their own launch week, that means Anthem only sold 40,000 copies in the United Kingdom. Not something EA wanted or most likely anticipated either in that sense.
One thing to note from this comparison of statistics is that this is the physical copy market of the game. Meaning CDs in stores. Physical copies were more popular back during the timeline of when Destiny 1 launched, so it does make sense that they made far more.
Today’s market is more digital than it’s ever been before so you’re less likely to see physical copies selling in as big of numbers as they once did.
Contrary to that point, Anthem sales still didn’t perform that well in the digital market either. The game’s flopped worse than Mass Effect Andromeda even.
This is despite the supposedly overwhelmingly positive response that the open demo of the game that was held before launch.
Destiny had been the go-to space set futuristic shooter game. Its competition spanned in a few places such as with Titanfall and the turn that the Call of Duty franchise took into more futuristic shooting.
Anthem was the proposed and prophecized “Destiny killer” but at this point, even WarFrame is a tougher challenge to Destiny, and that’s free to play.
Regarding a slightly different perspective to this topic, Destiny might not actually need something to put it down anyways.
The failure of Forsaken, an expansion of Destiny 2 and the drop in stocks/belief in Blizzard Activision’s ability to manage the franchise has induced somewhat of a downfall. Destiny 2 isn’t nearly as popular as Destiny 1.
