During the financial call for investors and analysts held today Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg gave his insight about the earliest performance signals of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, expressing confidence for future sales:

I think the first directional comment we can make is that we think we have a great game, and that's probably the most important thing. As you noticed it's our first three year development cycle, which is an important strategic shift we made in terms of the approach. Our first new lead developer in a decade, new innovations that we embraced and championed across every mode of play... Those decisions have paid off.

As far as performance, as I said before, day one started at midnight this morning, so unfortunately it's obviously too early for us to tell, but here's what I can tell you. We were pleased with the results of our day zero edition. Purchase intent is meaningfully up versus last year. There's great positive sentiment from reviewers. Positive sentiment from consumers on social media is also up. We've got great buzz overall on the game and Advanced Warfare was the most pre-ordered game of the year.

We also have some trends in the console transition working in our favor, with a lot of next gen consoles that we're hoping during the Holidays. Call of Duty has historically high attach rates to the next gen, so we think we'll have strong sell-through as the next gen installed base ramps up towards the Holidays. On all, we expect Advanced Warfare will go on and become the biggest game of the year based on a lot of positive momentum and a lot of positive indicators, most important one being that it's a great game.

The buzz for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare seems generally positive so far. Time will tell whether Sledgehammer's labor of love will put the game at the top of the year's sales again, but so far so good.