Honestly, from looking at these numbers you’d think that the Modern Warfare series was a religion. Considering the series’ fan-base, that assessment may not be too far off. In a statement released earlier this week by Activision, Modern Warfare 3 has made nearly $800 million dollars in just 5 days. This breaks the previous record held by its predecessor, Call of Duty: Black Ops, which made $650 million dollars in the same amount of time. On a related note, Modern Warfare 2 made $550 million dollars. So it’s safe to say that the series’ sales will continue to grow with each iteration, and for the Call of Duty line, not even the sky is the limit.


Infamous Activision CEO, Bobby Kotick, had this to say about their latest success:


"Call of Duty has become the first entertainment property in history to set five-day launch records for three consecutive years across all forms of entertainment. Life-to-date retail sales for the Call of Duty franchise have exceeded $6 billion worldwide, which makes Call of Duty one of the most valuable entertainment properties in the world.”
It’s truly unbelievable just how far along this series has come in the last couple of years. It’s really a testament to just how far the competitive online scene has come, with gaming events like Major League Gaming (MLG) being at an all-time high, attendance wise. Yet, can we truly pin all the success just on people’s innate desire to compete? One can probably come up with many reasons for the popularity of these types of games, but when you put your mind to it, it may just be the theme.


War games have always been held in high regard, both for their serious theme and correlation to real life. Even though many people play games as an escape, there are also those who like to do realistic things that, because of certain circumstances, they just can’t do in real life. Whether it’s building a farm (Harvest Moon), getting that perfect job (The Sims) or going into a real war situation (Call of Duty, Medal of Honor), realistic themed titles have, and still do, play a pivotal role in the gaming industry.


Apparently, high sales numbers isn’t the only record that Modern Warfare 3 has broken. Within the first week of launch, players had already put in over 7 million hours into the title. I personally know this to be true just from the sheer number of high level players I saw when I first got online (wish I had that much time to play games). Another record that was broken was for most players logged into a game at one time, which was done on November 8 when 3.3 million users were logged into Modern Warfare 3 at once.

Posted: Nov 19, 2011 10:05 pm

Source: http://gamergaia.com/pc/2161-modern-warfare-3-generates-775-million-in-under-a-week.html