Anyone who says the Call of Duty franchise is one big cash cow is right on the money (hah!).The latest entry in the series has become the quickest to reach a milestone most game publishers only ever dream about - $1 billion in sales revenue.
It's less than a month and a half since Call of Duty: Black Ops was released on November 9th. That day it raked in more money than any video game - or any entertainment product at all, for that matter - has ever accumulated in the US on alaunch day. And sales have only continued to climb.
In addition to that, it set the sales record for the most sales revenue in its first five days and also became the most widely played launch game in Xbox Live history. Activision is having a very merry Christmas this year.
Meanwhile, on the technical side of things, Activision and developer Treyarch continue to work on patching bugs that have arisen, mainly in the PS3 version of the game. Activision was under a lot of pressure to put out the game specifically on November 9 - the exact same date as the 2009 launch of the previous Call of Duty title, Modern Warfare 2.
As such, some have complained that the game was rushed, sent out with known glitches in it with the idea that it could just be patched after the fact. We've seen this mindset start to creep up with other games, like Fallout New Vegas and the new downloadable Tomb Raider game - which was released even though it wasn't even finished. Hopefully this doesn't set a new precedent.
[Source:Forbes]
Dec 22, 2010
