Sales of Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops in the year 2011 have seen Activision Blizzard’s revenue rise to over the $1-billion mark.
The Call of Duty series is one of the best selling interactive entertainment franchises in the history of the industry. The original title, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare did well for itself after a slow start.
However, once that game got itself going there was no stopping it and the trend carried on into the next game of the series with Call of Duty: World at War selling like hotcakes and setting an industry wide record as the fastest selling game upon release.
Infinity Ward also benefitted from the increased hype of the CoD series and Modern Warfare 2 sold like hot cakes with jam, as it broke World at War’s record and replaced it with its own.
Next up was Call of Duty: Black Ops, which earned a staggering $625-million in its first five days of release.
So no one was surprised when Modern Warfare 3 broke Black Ops’s record by recording a new world record of $775-million in just five days, beating out the previous record in the Entertainment Product industry, which was held by the Hollywood mega-hit, Avatar.
The sales figures have greatly helped Activision’s financial statements as the company can now boast net profits of $1.09-billion! What is even more impressive is that the total revenue from all sources for the publisher clocked in at $4.76-billion.
While the sales figures of Modern Warfare 3 played a huge part in the record year for the company, Black Ops also contributed as its sales early on in the year were a tremendous help. Not only that the game continued to sell well throughout the year, rarely
leaving the top ten spots in the sales charts.
However, game sales were not the only means of revenue for the company, as the Call of Duty themed social networking platform, Elite, also managed to gain 1.5-milllion paying subscribers, out of a total of over 7-million users.
The company is also planning to launch a ‘sequel’ for the service, which is expected to be released alongside Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 later on this year.
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