Xboxist

No big Surprise: Medal of Honor Dominates at Retail

The holiday shopping season is always about big winners and mediocre disappointments, as publishers jockey for positions near the top of the sales charts. Faced with the high risk of developing creative new IPs, the industry tends to go for safe, established franchises that they know will perform. Medal of Honor is just such a franchise, and it is performing as well as EA shareholders could have hoped.

Co-developed by EA's Danger Close Studio in Los Angeles and DICE in Stockholm, Medal of Honor launched yesterday with strong momentum and early internal indicators show that the game is off to a great commercial start. In the U.S., retail response has been overwhelmingly positive with midnight launch events at nearly all Gamestop locations nationwide and with major mass merchandising retail chains already exceeding their Day 1 forecasts.

"We anticipate Medal of Honor to be one of the biggest video game titles launched this year," said Bob McKenzie, Senior Vice President of Merchandising at GameStop. "This underscores how video gaming has emerged as mainstream entertainment."

Medal of Honor launches today in Europe and the UK, and it is expected to achieve similar sales numbers over here, where gamers are beginning to embrace first-person shooter and action titles from America. But with only a decent Metacritic score of 76 (compared to Modern Warfare 2 with 94%), it is clear that the quality of the game might not match its sales performance, as is often the case with fall blockbusters.

As you already know, Medal of Honor leaves the WWII theatre and enters the modern setting of war-torn Afghanistan. The game is told through the lens of a small band of fictional characters within the real-life Tier 1 Operators, a relatively unknown instrument of the U.S. Military.

What other games would you like to see succeed during the 2010 holiday shopping season. Let us know what we should be buying in the comments below.