Modern Warfare 2
Activision has just announced that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has annihilated every Call of Duty before it.
Modern Warfare 2 has sold $800 million worth of copies in just its first three days of release, beating out Modern Warfare 3 in 2011 (yes, the naming order gets complicated with these). MW3 previously had $400 million of sales on day one, then $775 million within five days before hitting a billion dollars in sales in 16 days. Modern Warfare 2 should easily do that by the end of its first week. The only game to top it is GTA 5, which did $1 billion in three days.
As they tend to do, Activision is trying to put this in context with a bit of an apples to oranges comparison with the movie box office:
“The blockbuster opening tops any of the biggest worldwide box office openings of 2022, surpassing ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ and ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ worldwide box office openings combined.”
We are talking about $70 copies of a video game not $12 movie tickets, however, the fact that the game can convince people to spend that much is of course its own achievement.
Modern Warfare 2
How did it do it? For starters, Modern Warfare is the most popular sub-series in the Call of Duty pantheon, but in addition to that, the game is just…quite good, when it’s not enduring technical issues. Before launch, the campaign was released early, and everyone was marveling at its photorealistic graphics that at times, looked almost indistinguishable from reality. And now that multiplayer is here, that aspect has attracted many fans as well, with some saying it’s the best entry in the series in years, more so than Cold War and Vanguard at least. And maybe over the last Modern Warfare, as well.
What I am most interested to see in the wake of this $800 million weekend and what will be a billion dollar haul by probably Friday is how it factors into the ongoing dispute between Microsoft and Sony over the acquisition of Activision Blizzard and Microsoft’s pending stewardship of Call of Duty. Sony will point to these astonishing figures and say that no one console manufacturer should have that much sales power exclusively in their hands. Microsoft, meanwhile, will reiterate their commitment to continuing to release Call of Duty on PlayStation indefinitely, as they will say that these kinds of figures wouldn’t be remotely possible without the game being sold on PS4 and PS5.
In fact, in an interesting twist, once Microsoft does get a hold of Call of Duty and puts it on Game Pass, it’s possible we could literally never see sales this high again, given that most Xbox sales will be taken out of the equation, with that playerbase opting to play on Game Pass instead.
Also, it’s important to consider the price increase to $70 here, as Modern Warfare 3 was $10 cheaper at $60 back in 2011, and I think we are going to see less and less resistance to that new “standard” game price point, something Activision and Sony have both been championing.
There is no disputing how impressive this is. These are absolutely astonishing numbers for a series that many believed was past its prime. We’ll see how this factors into Microsoft and Sony’s ongoing spat, and how fast it races to a billion in sales. Stay tuned.
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