Black Ops Surpasses MW2 UK Day 1 Record

Kovacs 43 Comments

We admit it; we were among the many people who had some doubts regarding Activision’s claim that Black Ops would be the biggest launch game ever. Surely not bigger than Modern Warfare 2, the first game ever to surpass 1 billion dollars in sales! Lesson learned people, when it comes to sales projections, Activision know their beans.

Then again, with an increased 360 and PS3 install base (and DS and Wii versions of the new Call of Duty game, versions that didn’t exist for Modern Warfare 2) it’s probably not that surprising. However, taking into account Black Ops sold 14% more than Modern Warfare 2, and only 4% of its sales were on Nintendo’s platforms, that’s still a 10% increase. Has the PS3 and 360 install base increased by 10% since Modern Warfare 2 came out? Probably. All of a sudden that sales prediction is looking less like voodoo magic and more like common sense.

In terms of numbers, in just one day, Call of Duty: Black Ops sold a staggering 1.4 million units in the UK. By comparison, previous record holder, Modern Warfare 2, sold 1.23 million copies on its first day. The US kicked in another 4.2 million units, generating $360 million across both regions.

Now we sit and wait to see if (more likely when) Blops surpasses the one billion mark. Any second now …

Source: MCVUK

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43 Comments

  1. Good lord! That’s a lot of sales of blops (which now seems to be the recognised term!) – Mind you, it’s probably accurate judging by the amount of people playing it on my friends list!

    • CoD BLOPS just sounds wrong! Hope it sticks though!

    • May I ask how you judged it accurate by your friends list? :-p

      • Well, I think of all of my friends that were online last night, it must have been somewhere in the region of around 80% that were playing ‘blops’ in some form or another (sp, mp etc) – That equates to a hell of a lot of people playing that game as most new releases will see a few friends playing, but never that many!

        Therefore, clearly millions sold (the logic worked in my brain anyway!)! :)

  2. Some hotfixing has been going on as well, with the first of many, many patches to come – apparently

  3. Yesterday I had 8 friends online on PSN. All of them were playing Black Ops.

    • Same I feel like the better man by not playing it :P

  4. Well I admit, I didn’t think this was going to surpass MW2 either. Haven’t purchased it yet, probably be acquiring it for Christmas though :)

    I guess the user base will have increased from the relaunch of the 360, and also the new PS3 slims with the bigger HDDs, which also had a price reduction iirc?

  5. It’s kinda funny cos, enjoyable as it is, it’s certainly not the best game ever.

    • The online is broken, the difference between what you see on the screen and the killcam when killed is huge. Thats with a really fast internet connection, no other games do the same for me.
      Zombies and the amazing single player make up for this but it’s not the best game ever, agreed.

      • Yep deffinetly, I had a kill came last night where I threw a smoke grenade into a room, snuck round the wall and someone walked straight in and shot me. I couldn’t see them, but on the killcame they had no smoke!

      • I’ve never come across any problems (apart from my lack of ability), so I’m not sure you can make wide ranging statements based on your experience, or even that of a few comments on various comment boards.

      • What am I supposed to base it on then, cc? The words of treyarch? I have no doubt that they’ll sort the problem out, but until then I’m gonna give the online a miss, too many other games to play.
        And there’s a lot more than a few people affected, every game I go in, I can hear people on headsets complaining about the bullet lag. That’s not an exaggeration, either.

      • agree with the bullet lag, on hardcore tdm, its like core tdm on all other CoDs, i hope the sort this out, until them, i am not going to be online much, also, sniping is terrible now :( and i loved sniping.

    • i’d agree with that, but its simply selling due to its name… nothing you can do about that i suppose!

  6. Crazy numbers!! One wonders if it can do it again next year? :p

    • Infinity Ward. Brand Modern Warfare. I’m thinking a resounding YES.
      :)

      • I didn’t think IW was doing the next CoD? Isn’t it Sledgehammer or something like that?

      • Both. IW will do MW3. Sledgehammer will do Call of Duty: Something Else.

      • Wait you’re kidding. Two CoDs next year? I thought it was only the Sledgehammer one?

      • Seriously? Aw sweet. Dunno if my wallet can take the hit of 2 CoD’s though :/

      • COD is one of the most lucrative franchises in existence. It makes sense for Activision to have THREE studios (IW, Treyarch and now Sledgehammer) working on multiple titles concurrently.

        I’m thinking MW3 for Nov ’11. COD: Swallop (or whatever Sledgehammer’s game will be called) will be 2012. Giving Treyarch a break to come back with Black Ops 2 in 2013, MW4 in 2014 … you see where I’m going with this. Or we could get more than one COD per year. One in the summer. One in the winter. Very possible.

      • Oh so it is was I thought, just one next year? That’s okay then :-p

      • Depends. Sledgehammer may have something ready for Christmas 2011. I seriously doubt it, however. The studio was founded in November 2009. It’s unlikely (though I admit possible) to set up a company and have a AAA game out in two years.

      • Ddin’t activision recently say they wanted to extend the revenue stream they get from COD over the year rather than in one hit. I can see us getting two COD’s next year. A (not the same anymore) Infinity Ward and the Sledgehammer one.

  7. Black Ops is so much better than MW2 it’s like it’s from a different developer or something…

    • I’m the other way round. I thought MW2 was better than BLOPS

      • With the nofster

        I felt mw2 was such a mess (one of the most over-rated games ever) I couldn’t even be arsed to progress. blops is far more cohesive, the action is similar but the feature set is so much larger as a package there is no comparison.

  8. Over the past twelve months the Xbox and PS3 have probably expanded their user-base by around 20 to 25% so those figures are well within expectations. Then again, if they’d produced utter shite I’d still expect it to sell well.

    • Of course there’s more consoles around than a year ago, but with the recession is biting harder in the US & UK (ignoring 0.x figures which show we may not technically be in a recession) any increase in numbers is still impressive, especially when you take into account that many of those console sales will be phat upgraders, nearly everyone I know through TSA has now upgraded to a slim meaning that the sales number you mention wouldn’t have a direct bearing on the number of active users.

      also, everytime we see end of year financial, we see the software market shrinking ~20% year on year for a couple of years now. So whichever way anyone adds it up, impressive sales are impressive.

  9. I thought infinty ward isn’t infinity ward anymore after the goings on last year with the upset between activision and them! The head of the infinity ward has made a new company and a lot of people left IW to go with him, and surely they have the right for modern warfare not the remaining IW, i also heard they’re making a cod beater

    • Infinity Ward is Infinity Ward. West and Zampella created Respawn and will likely create an FPS that people will call a “COD beater.” That said, Activision owns the Call of Duty (and Modern Warfare) brand. Infinity Ward are working on Modern Warfare 3. You could argue that the team that are making MW3 isn’t the same as the people who made MW2. Sure, but it’s still MW3 and it’s still from the Infinity Ward studio.
      :)

      • thats what worries me, but will wait & see
        they lost some talented staff, time will tell

      • It all depends on the weight the high profile leavers carried. Also, lets not forget the thousands of talented people who applied for the handful of vacancies, it could be that IW is actually in far better shape than before, afterall who on the top of their game wouldn’t want to work at such a renowned developer.

      • It’s worth noting that Bullfrog just weren’t Bullfrog in anything other than name after the departure of Peter Molyneux those who left to form Lionhead.

  10. Ok thanks kovacs for clearing that up. @grey_ghost13 i thought MW2 was better than black ops that’s why i swapped my black ops to my m8, he gave me 3 brand new games unopened for it :)

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