According to Microsoft, they’ll keep Call Of Duty multiformat ‘as long as there’s a PlayStation out there to ship to’.
But many people don’t believe them. Just as they wouldn’t believe the guarantee of any company that wasn’t going to be held to account if they changed their tune.
Nevertheless, Xbox boss Phil Spencer is adamant they won’t change their mind. Why? Reason number one is simple: it sells the most on PlayStation 5 and 4. In fact, no Call Of Duty has sold more at launch than the new Modern Warfare 2.
Activision hasn’t released any figures, so it’s unclear how well it did on Xbox or exactly how many copies it sold on PlayStation. Still, supposedly it’s the biggest launch ever for pre-orders and day-one sales.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
Although it’s not an official announcement, the suggestion that Modern Warfare 2 has done so well will greatly relieve Activision, as last year’s game, Vanguard, was one of the worst-selling ever.
The success of Modern Warfare 2 likely means that Activision will steer away from the Second World War and other historical settings for the foreseeable future. However, that wasn’t the only reason Vanguard wasn’t famous.
Although there are no sales figures in terms of units sold, a report by Barron’s claims that the opening weekend brought in more than $600 million across all formats.
A very rough calculation that assumes it costs $70 across all formats (in a significant proportion of cases, it was probably less, especially on PC, so we’ve rounded down) suggests launch sales of 8+ million copies.
The failure of Vanguard was one of the main reasons that Activision Blizzard became cheap enough for Microsoft to comfortably afford it, but if anything were to go wrong with the acquisition – given both the UK and Europe are now investigating it more closely – Activision Blizzard would be a lot more expensive the next time round if Microsoft had to make a second bid.
Check out our Gaming Guide for November 2022 here.
