Categories: Gaming

Modern Warfare 3 breaks previous five-day sales record, grossed $775 million

Modern Warfare 3 may have iterated rather than innovated, but it's still a great game

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 generated gross revenues of $775 million in its first five days after worldwide release, breaking previous sales records set by Call of Duty: Black Ops this time last year.

To help put this into context, in its first five days after launch, Modern Warfare 3 has earned more than any other book, movie, music album or video game ever released during a similar period. Some $400 million in revenue was earned in the first 24 hours alone.

Last year, Call of Duty: Black Ops grossed $650 in its first five days. Similarly, one year previous to this, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 grossed $550 million. The franchise is the first ever entertainment property to set five-day launch records for three consecutive years.

To date, the series has earned the game’s publisher, Activision, over $6 billion worldwide, making it one of the most valuable entertainment properties ever.

Microsoft has also released some impressive Xbox LIVE statistics. In the game’s first 24 hours, some 3.3 million unique gamers accumulated over seven million hours of online play on Microsoft’s platform, up 19% on the previous release.

The only record still held by last year’s release, Call of Duty: Black Ops, is its six-week sales record of $1 billion – something which Modern Warfare 3 is sure to achieve.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

View Comments

  • Not surpsing its essentially the same game everytime. They never live up to the hype IMO. THe multiplyer is the best part about the game, and it would be pretty hard to find a fault with the multiplayer in MW2, they could have just made more downloadable content for that, but I suppose thats no way to bring in the big bucks.

  • On first play it's immediately obvious that nothing much has changed. Fundamentally, it's Modern Warfare 2 with a few touch-ups.Activision do release Map Packs every few months or so which are €10-15 every time. So by the time the next release comes around you'll probably have spent as much as the original game costs on map upgrades. Then there's COD Elite for around €45 per year - basically online gameplay analytics.

  • Not to mention Black Ops, same game different levels. At least yearly releases of football games show a noticeable gamplay difference, MW just changes power ups, perks, guns, and maps all of which doesn't justify a new game.

  • I'd say it will be a different story next year. People are realising the lack of new innovation and are turning to Battlefield 3 as an alternative in their droves. Unless they change it up next year?

  • Not surpsing its essentially the same game everytime. They never live up to the hype IMO. THe multiplyer is the best part about the game, and it would be pretty hard to find a fault with the multiplayer in MW2, they could have just made more downloadable content for that, but I suppose thats no way to bring in the big bucks.

  • On first play it's immediately obvious that nothing much has changed. Fundamentally, it's Modern Warfare 2 with a few touch-ups.Activision do release Map Packs every few months or so which are €10-15 every time. So by the time the next release comes around you'll probably have spent as much as the original game costs on map upgrades. Then there's COD Elite for around €45 per year - basically online gameplay analytics.

  • Not to mention Black Ops, same game different levels. At least yearly releases of football games show a noticeable gamplay difference, MW just changes power ups, perks, guns, and maps all of which doesn't justify a new game.

  • I'd say it will be a different story next year. People are realising the lack of new innovation and are turning to Battlefield 3 as an alternative in their droves. Unless they change it up next year?

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