Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick was understandably eager to brag, ”With $775 million of sales of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in its first five days, 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.”
Microsoft released some impressive stats regarding the Xbox 360 version, which dominated Xbox Live in the past week. According to the company, more than 7.0 million multiplayer hours were logged playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 by the end of launch day, November 8, a 19% increase over last year’s 5.9 million multiplayer hours logged playing Call of Duty: Black Ops last year’s launch day. Over 3.3 million unique gamers played Modern Warfare 3 in one day on November 8, which is up from 2.6 million unique gamers for Black Ops in its launch day. Finally, Modern Warfare 3 set a new record for concurrent players on Xbox LIVE with 3.3 million simultaneous users on November 8 - which is downright amazing; Bethesda had bragged about 280K concurrent users for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on Steam.
Unsurprisingly, the game also set the record for concurrent users on PlayStation Network, though no figures were released by Sony. SCEA president Jack Tretton still announced, ”In just over a week, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has been hugely successful on PlayStation 3, and continues to drive millions of gamers globally to PlayStation Network with its unprecedented and engaging online multiplayer experience.”
Is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 worthy of the unprecedented sales numbers? Let us know what you think.
