Latest Call of Duty sequel shoots past Avatar sales benchmark
Black Ops beat blue cats
In December 2011, Activision boasted Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had clocked up $1 billion in sales more quickly that James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster Avatar had done back in 2009. CoD reached that milestone in 16 days, ‘Dances with Wolves in space’ in 17 days.
A year on, the games publisher is making exactly the same comparison with the Treyarch-developed Call of Duty: Black Ops II which, it says, hit $1 billion in 15 days, one less than its predecessor and two ahead of Avatar. The game was released on 13 November.
Of course, the Cameron epic went on to gross pass the $2 billion mark in 2010. It has since gone on to take almost $2.8 billion worldwide.
We can’t see Black Ops II coming anywhere near that total - games tend to achieve almost all of their financial success in the early weeks of release as fans pile in. And direct comparisons with films are invidious: ticket prices are a lot lower than those of AAA-titles discs and downloads; films have a broader demographic and more global appeal.
Still, it’s a sign of just how important the videogames business has become that it can rack up such a large amount of money in such a short time, and to do so
“Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise have exceeded worldwide theatrical box office receipts for Harry Potter and Star Wars, the two most successful movie franchises of all time,” added Activision. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Is it sustainable?
There plenty of other FPS games out there that are free to play.
You mean pay-to-win. I got sick of the F2P model ten seconds after it appeared. If you want to have any kind of useful content, or stand a chance against the paid players, you have to pay in, and the total cost is way more than just buying a game outright. To get all the content, you need to pay a frankly infeasible amount of money, and unlocking it through free play is reckoned in some cases to take several decades.
I was excited as hell for Tribes to come back, and I got into the beta. I quickly realised how the F2P model ruined it. Same goes for Planetside 2, which looks really interesting, but at $7 per weapon they can fuck off. Hawken too, looked amazing, right up until they announced it was F2P.
I really hope the F2P business model dies a horrible, painful death. It ruins everything it touches.
Re: 8bitStyle
Your right they have come a long way.
£5 has changed into £50 to buy a game.
Originality has given way to re-skinned generic cloned games.
Tape to Tape copying is a bit of a waste of time nowadays.
Flogging and reflogging a dead horse with DLC was never part of there game plan.
Being abused by 12 year olds practicing there swearing was never a problem on the 8 bits.
Swapping playability and re-playability for shiny graphics.
I can see how years of progress has changed Activision for the better
Ok, that shows that
Mediocre games sell well, so do mediocre movies and mediocre music and mediocre phones and mediocre etc etc etc...
Being abused by 12 year olds practicing there swearing was never a problem on the 8 bits.
You obviously never played round at our house......
Why compare apples with oranges?
I may have missed the point here but what's the purpose (other than penis/$$$ envy) in comparing computer games with movies?
It could just as easily be said that Kodak sold more rolls of film than VW sold Beatles.
