This year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has quickly become the most played Call of Duty game of the current console generation. Activision has released a new game in the series every year for well over a decade, and the “Warfare” games have made up the majority of those titles.
Without counting Black Ops 2, there have been a total of seven mainline Call of Duty games over the course of this console generation. This includes every entry that was first released on “eighth generation” hardware, which encompasses the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and even Nintendo’s ill-fated Wii U. Each successive game in the series has been one of the best selling titles in the industry, garnering millions and millions of players around the world who play for dozens of hours. But according to Activision, the popularity of the 2019 rendition of Modern Warfare has broken even those records.
In a press release today, Activision touted the sheer numbers for Modern Warfare, detailing new highs in multiplayer hours played per player and the amount of daily players in the first 50 days after the game’s release. Modern Warfare has now outstripped all previous Call of Duty multiplayer experiences of this generation, with 500 million multiplayer hours played since launch in almost 300 million matches. A major factor in these numbers has been the addition of cross-play between different systems, which is a first for the series and unifies the player base as well as their multiplayer progression between platforms.
Activision also stated that Modern Warfare has become the highest selling full-priced game of 2019 in just the past month, and has made over $1 billion worldwide. The game’s sales figures include both retail and digital unit sales, and is listed as the top-selling “premium game” of the year in the U.S. based on data from both Activision and the NPD. However, this excludes free-to-play games like Fortnite.
There has been an unusual level of excitement surrounding Modern Warfare, even for a Call of Duty game. The hype that it built up before launch has translated very well into sales, and most players seem satisfied with the game. While Modern Warfare thankfully does away with loot boxes, they have been replaced with a battle pass that is directly tied to progression. The game technically offers most of its content for free, but it is still a full-priced AAA release and not every game needs a battle pass.
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
