Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg believes that, despite forecasts about low sales figures for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the game is going to perform rather well thanks to digital copies that are sold across both PC and consoles.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is this year's installment in the first-person shooter series published by Activision, this time coming from developer Sledgehammer Games, and is set to introduce a wide variety of changes to the core recipe. From the future setting to the new story line and the many multiplayer enhancements, the game is going to stand out from the other titles in the series.

Due to these big changes and to the not so great performance of last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts, however, analysts have chimed in in recent months to speculate that Advanced Warfare won't perform all that well.

Advanced Warfare is going to sell well, especially digitally

Activision CEO Erich Hirshberg, however, begs to differ and tells GamesIndustry that the intention to purchase Advanced Warfare is well above the one seen with Call of Duty: Ghosts last year. Throw in the great increase in social media presence and interaction and the executive is confident in the new title.

A main reason why analysts are wrong, according to Hirshberg, is that they use just pre-order figures from retail stores and don't factor in digital copies that are sold via Steam, PlayStation Store, or Xbox Live Marketplace.

"Preorders are a good barometer for day one, but I don't think they reflect the overall demand for the product," says Hirshberg. "[They] don't represent what they used to - because of the move to digital and all the ways people can buy the game."

The console generation transition is eliciting changes

Hirshberg also mentions that, due to the current transition between console generations, things are a bit tougher but he hopes that, through offers like the free upgrade process for Advanced Warfare from PS3 to PS4 or Xbox 360 to Xbox One, the migration can be accelerated.

"Console transitions are hard to manage for companies like ours," he says. "But if you have to have a set of problems, I'd rather have those problems be that adoption is going faster than expected and (older) software is dropping faster than expected, because that points to the future."

Advanced Warfare is already available as part of the Day Zero offer and the regular version of the shooter launches today, November 4, worldwide across PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.