Analysts at Cowen And Company have examined Amazon's pre-order tallies for the upcoming Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and have concluded that the game will probably continue the series' trend of declining returns.

"Advanced Warfare is now pacing almost 40 percent behind last year's Ghosts and almost 70 percent behind 2012's Black Ops 2," the analysts note. "We continue to believe CoD will be down meaningfully vs. last year. With the franchise facing two consecutive significant year on year declines in sales, we think it is prudent to assume it has peaked."

Cowen And Company preemptively argues against the idea that pre-orders are no longer a determinant of total sales by pointing out that 2014 has seen the record for most-preordered game broken twice, first by Watch Dogs then by Destiny. Clearly people are pre-ordering games, the analysts believe, but it appears that the Call of Duty series - which normally accounts for "a significant percentage of overall preorders" - is no longer attracting pre-order cash at the same rate it did even as recently as three years ago.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is out November 4th for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One and Xbox 360.