Activision’s touted cash cow, the Call of Duty franchise, has nabbed another sales record with Modern Warfare 3 stealing Avatar’s crown by pulling in over $1 billion in 16 days.
The gaming industry staple topped its predecessors by making the quickest sales yet in the Call of Duty gaming franchise and outsold the Avatar franchise to the $1 billion mark by a day.
It isn’t the first time Activison Blizzard has used the Avatar metre to measure its success. Activision last year announced Modern Warfare 2 hit the cinema blockbuster’s billion dollar after two months on sale.
Before the Call of Duty franchise became Activision’s biggest pull, Guitar Hero III and World of Warcraft were pulling in the billions for the continuously growing gaming conglomerate.
While Guitar Hero and WoW thrive off subscriptions and downloadable content, so too has Call of Duty ventured down that value-add (for a price) path. The game comes with an optional ‘Elite’ subscription that gives players a year’s access to gradually updated content like new maps for online play.
A ‘Hardened Edition’ of the Xbox 360 version of the game which includes this one year membership sells for $157 – a high premium on the typical game price that hovers closer to the $100 mark.
