Whenever something, be it an achievement, product, or person, sets new, unprecedented benchmarks within any field, there are always those few skeptics ready and waiting to cast fresh doubt wherever an opportunity arises. With the Call of Duty franchise having continually blown other titles out of the water in terms of sales statistics during the past couple of years, there were still plenty of question marks pondering whether the famed CoD series had lost its touch. Today, publisher Activision has answered that question quite emphatically by delivering the damning news that the latest installment – Call of Duty: Black Ops II – has passed the billion-dollar holy grail in a mere 15 days.
To gross a billion bucks is, by itself, a massive achievement – no matter what your specific field may be. However, such has been the snowballing nature of CoD’s popularity, that we as consumers and tech fans have come to expect these kinds of numbers from Activision’s record-shattering title.
The hardest of the hardcore Black Ops II fans queued up for the thousands of special midnight launches – an institution to many similar to the gatherings seen prior to the launch of an Apple iDevice. So many turned out to be among the first to play the latest CoD, that $500 million was grossed in the first 24 hours – topping the record of $400 million set by last year’s Modern Warfare III.
Activision neglected to publish its five-day total, prompting many to suggest Black Ops II wasn’t making the same waves as previous releases, but how little did they know. The concerns analysts and perhaps even shareholders may have had with regards to Black Ops II must now have been put well and truly to rest, and although other titles have sold impressively this year looking retrospectively at 2012, they will make for yet another footnote in this seemingly endless story of one particular first-person shooter.
Activision once again did the film thing – where it compares the gross sales figures of its flagship title with the amounts of money made by box office smashers. Apparently, the $1 billion mark was reached by Black Ops II quicker than James Cameron’s Avatar movie, which took a grand total of 17 days.
Perhaps more importantly, Black Ops II has, thus far, outperformed Modern Warfare III, which took 16 days to reach nine zeros. MW3’s failure to continue in the trend of outdoing the previous release suggested the franchise was about to slide, but by the looks of things, CoD is still going very strong indeed.
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