'Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare' Sells Most In Franchise History In First Year

It's official, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has performed better than any other CoD game in its first year. Activision Blizzard has announced that the FPS game sold more copies than any of its predecessors in its first year, and it had a month to spare, achieving the recording-breaking numbers from between October 2019 to September 2020.

Gamespot notes that Activision hasn't given us the official figures of how the game has sold, however, we do know that two-thirds of the sales of the game happened digitally - consumers aren't buying games physically these days for understandable reasons.

The game has seen a lot of success in part due to the battle royale Call of Duty: Warzone which has drawn a huge audience into the game. The report from Gamespot quotes Activision, saying the company saw "substantial growth" in sales through people coming for free-to-play Warzone, and then upgrading to get the full Modern Warfare experience. Warzone is even performing better than Fortnite among teens at the moment.

As another impressive figure, Activision says that the total hours played in Modern Warfare and Warzone together totals to about seven times higher than the hours people have spent in Black Ops 4. Perhaps that's not so surprising when you remember that everyone has had to spend a considerable amount of time inside this year due to COVID restrictions but shows that players are still getting a lot of pleasure out of playing Activision's games.

Of course, the game is only really performing well for Activision Blizzard if it's not only making money from initial purchases but also microtransactions - and no surprises for guessing that the devs made a lot this year from players spending money in-game. Without knowing the official figures, this year Activision Blizzard made four times the amount from microtransactions it did last year from Call of Duty.

It's all very impressive and something that Activision Blizzard is no doubt proud of, so we're waiting to see what they've learned from building these games into such a success when they go on to release Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War which should be dropping November 13. You can see the entire report from Activision Blizzard here.

Topics: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare