Thread: Modern Warfare 2 sells nearly 5 million in one day!

On behalf of everybody at XboxFriends I would like to apologise to all non-COD player for the overexposure this game is receiving, but here comes some more anyway...

According to "internal Activision estimates", Modern Warfare 2 didn't just have a good launch, it had "the biggest launch in history across all forms of entertainment".

This claim is based on sell-through sales, with Activision reporting the game managed to pull in ?187 million in its first 24 hours on sale. And that's not a worldwide number, that's just in North America and the UK. ?187 million. In a single day. In three countries.

In the first 24 hours on sale, Modern Warfare 2 sold 1.2 million units in the UK alone! (Seeing as almost any other game on the planet would take 1.2 million as a great worldwide figure, for a month, for Modern Warfare 2 to have managed it in a single country over a 24 hour period speaks volumes as to how much cash is flowing into Activision HQ right now.)

That ?187 million was earned off the back of an estimated 4.7 million units sold, another frightening number when you consider it's again excluding sales from all the other PAL territories.

So there you have it people, we are in the presence of greatness ? now lets hope all this cash Activision won?t have to release another Guitar Hero any time soon, surely their Xmas bonuses are covered already!

that is staggering when you think about it rationally its amazing, at the end of the day its only a game, granted a bloody good one, and probably the best one of the year, but still that is amazing.........

Thats accross all platforms i take it including handhelds. pretty amazing Halo would have smashed that though if it was on all platforms

This is purely on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, also not including PC sales as it is not yet available from Steam and PC sales are notoriously difficult to track.

Halo 3 sold 3.3 million copies after 2 weeks on sale.

Just speaking personally here but I know more people who bought MW2 than who went out to buy Halo 3, and all my friends own Xbox 360’s, I just think the Call of Duty brand is much bigger than Halo, don’t know why but there you go.

Thats it now Joey will get you...........

Originally Posted by tcg joey

Thats accross all platforms i take it including handhelds. pretty amazing Halo would have smashed that though if it was on all platforms

Green dosen't suit you, Joe.

I wish I had money as I feel a lil hop, skip and jump onto the MW2 band wagon looks inevitable. Damn u peer pressure, lol.

Reminds me of my young experimental youth days and older were kids smoking weed and drinking buckfast and trying to offer it to me. Needless to say those where fun summers

I'll get AC2 first then wait for a month then get MW2 for xmas, if I still have a job. (which aint looking promising.)

I checked the leaderboard online on Modern Warfare 2 shortly before midnight. (24 hours after release)
And the lowest person on my friends list was ranked 2,830,000...

so that's just shy of 3 Million on Xbox Live alone.

Then take into account all those who hadnt been on Xbox live (Ranked games)
all of those who arent even on Xbox live.

and then the Playstation 3 on top of that, and these figures look about right to me.

Well done Activision, not only on a fantastic game, but on selling it so damn well too.

Funny thing, hype. Sometimes it builds up for months, until the pressure becomes almost unbearable. And other times, it comes out of nowhere. Drops from the ceiling, punches you in the face, steals your wallet and just disappears.

You may have noticed. Activision and Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 was officially released, a game that will easily be the biggest game of 2009, if not of all time. Thousands of stores across the planet opened their doors at midnight to greet an unprecedented number of gamers, all eager to catch up on the adventures of some Allied special forces and some guy called "Soap".

One look at the sheer number of stores open at midnight - over 10,000 in the US alone - and the number of consumers it must have taken to secure such an event, and it's quickly becoming clear this was one of the largest launches of the decade.

Yet there's something funny about the whole thing. Where did this hype come from? Anyone even casually following the games business over the past few years will have remembered the launches of juggernauts like Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV. Marketing machines kicked in months before those games were due for release, bombarding us with expensive TV ads, countdown clocks, inescapable street advertising and celebrity endorsement.

But Modern Warfare 2? We all knew it was coming, sure, and everyone knew it was going to be popular - the first Modern Warfare, after all, has sold well over 10 million copies - but I don't think many people realised it was going to "maybe biggest game of all time" big. There were some game trailers, and some press "controversy" surrounding one of the game's earlier levels, but nothing on the scale of Microsoft or Rockstar's big bashes. There was no "Soap" flavoured Mountain Dew.

It's almost as if the only people truly prepared for how massive it was going to be was were the publishers of other games, who saw MW2 was coming in November, picked up their own titles due for release around the same time and, in an unprecedented move, pushed them back into 2010. Not out of respect, but out of fear, and a knowledge on the part of those publishers that people were going to be buying one game in November, and it wasn't going to be theirs.
How did they see what we didn't?

I've got a theory. It's almost as if it took the night of the game's launch for several different types of gamer to realise they were all interested in the same game. As someone who is, on a daily basis, ass-deep in video games, I know of a lot of other people who play video games. Yet they're all different people. Some only really play sports games. Some only play online. Some prefer shooters, some only buy one or two games a year, and some only buy one or two games a year for their kids.

Yet, and I am serious, every single one of my friends - or even acquaintances - that owns a video game console not only wanted to buy Modern Warfare 2, but has it already. Which I find simply astonishing. They either got it at midnight, downloaded it beforehand, or went into a game store on launch day in their lunch break to pick it up.

Funniest part? To many of us, this was a surprise. "Oh, you got it too?" has been a common question over the past couple of days.

And that’s the beauty of it. Modern Warfare 2 didn't need to bore us to death with months of advertising, or obnoxious countdowns. It (well, its makers) already knew it was an instant purchase for millions of people, and whether out of prudence or sheer arrogance, spared us the over-exposure that nearly soured the release of games like Halo 3 and GTAIV. They simply stuck to a tasteful, on-target campaign restricted to well-timed and exciting trailers, and let the product itself do the talking.

It's a tactic I wish more publishers of major titles would employ.