In a staggering achievement, Call of Duty: Black Ops has topped the one billion dollar sales mark in a mere six weeks of being in the market. These figures have been revealed in a press release from the game’s publishers Activision Blizzard. “In all of entertainment, only Call of Duty and “Avatar” have ever achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone this quickly,” said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, driving home the point of just how rapidly Black Ops has sold.
And those are not the only impressive stats backing up Black Ops. The release goes on to tell us that the game sold more than $650 million worldwide in its first five days of sales, outpacing theatrical box office, book and video game sales records for five-day worldwide sell through in dollars, according to internal Activision estimates and boxofficemojo.com.
Incidentally, the previous record for five-day worldwide sales was also held by a Call of Duty game – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had garnered $550 million in its first five days last year. Top that off with the fact that gamers have logged more than 600 million hours playing the game since its launch in early November, and you can see why we are getting so impressed.
All this in spite of freezing and connection error problems, which the developers have attempted to fix through patches. Videogames are indeed taking on Hollywood in entertainment terms.
Gaming sure is a big fish, no wonder everyone from Apple to Microsoft are only looking to increase their commitment in the entertainment / gaming space.