NOV. 27, 2009 • Thanks to strong sales of its new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 released earlier in the month, Activision Blizzard announced the franchise had surpassed $3 billion in global retail sales. Modern Warfare 2 posted more than $550 million in sales during its first five days in release, with 4.7 million units sold on launch day in the United States and United Kingdom. Based on BitTorrent trackers, web site TorrentFreak estimated that 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version had been logged by late December, plus 970,000 unauthorized downloads of the Xbox 360 version.
Impact: Modern Warfare 2 is a huge hit, especially on consoles. Yet the title drew huge ire from PC gamers upset at how multiplayer server options were curtailed. Despite that outcry, online play of the PC version hasn’t seemed to have been hurt substantially. We wonder how many of the generally savvy computer gamers are playing purchased copies of the game.
