Modern Warfare 2 Sales

In order to measure the success of the gaming industry, one need not look further than the "Modern Warfare 2" sales. Considering the hype for the game's predecessor, it makes sense that the "Modern Warfare 2" were anticipated to be high. What nobody expected, however, was for them to smash even the projected sales. Let's take a look at the "Modern Warfare 2" sales and see just how successful of a first-person shooter this game really is.

The sixth game in the "Call of Duty" series, "Modern Warfare 2" was released on November 10, 2009 and was projected to only sell 5.5 million copies within its first 24 hours. However, it managed to exceed even these expectations—selling approximately 7 million units worldwide, including midnight pre-sales. Of these units, 55% were sold on the Xbox 360, 33% on the Playstation 3, and only 12% for the PC. Given these diverse numbers, it's no surprise that during the first 24 hours, more than 5.2 million player hours were logged on Xbox Live, which were shared by over 2.2 million unique gamers. Moreover, the PS3 player base was so huge that the servers were actually shut down due to an inability to cope with amount of players trying to get a game in.

However, it's best to look at the "Modern Warfare 2" sales figures in the bigger picture. At the time, it earned a new five-day sale record of $550 million, making it the largest entertainment opening in human history, at that time. To give you a better idea, the largest book premiere to date was the release of "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows," whose five-day record stands at $220 million. The largest movie opening worldwide, after a five-day period, was "Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince," at $394 million, while the domestic counterpart to that figure is "The Dark Knight" at $203.8 million. Before the "Modern Warfare 2" sales figures crushed the record, the previous high for a video game release after five days was held by "Grand Theft Auto IV," which peaked at $500 million. Clearly, the "Modern Warfare 2" sales speak for themselves.