Activision: MW2 is The Biggest Entertainment Launch in History

(I live in France), not far from you Mister "arbre à café" ^^

@koffieboon : inflation is like 6% per year in the USA and in most "developped" countries, the 2/3% rates are gov propaganda to boost GDP growth, that's a well known fact... but maybe I was wrong about the inflation of video games...

If movie tickets and Books cost $60 a pop then Activition would have to change their statement. Great job with MW2 sales though.

In the UK, the publisher of MW2 were testing new game prices. The price was £54.99 but many online retailers sold it cheaper. There was also a supermarket price war at the launch of the game where you could pick up the game for 360 or PS3 from between £20-26

GTA4 cost me €60, and MW2 cost me €45.

@killergran Games in Europe/Others are usually priced at around €60, in the case of GTA IV which was priced at around €65-70 at most big retailers thats around $97-104 revnue per game. Lets take the average of $100 revenue per game and multiply that by the number of copies sold which is 2.5 million and we get total revenues of $250.000.000. Add in some retailers that sold it for less than €60, plus the extra revenue of the limited editions which were priced at around €85-90 and I think the 250million number looks quite plausible.

Activision also priced MW2 more on PC than normal games worlwide. MW2 was priced higher on consoles in EU and other regions than regular games. So this might have helped in gaining such big amount of revenue

@shams yeah,the first sales numbers that came out were a bit exaggerated.They were saying 10m units sold but that wasn't true.

"The largest reported five-day worldwide video game sales record, previously held by Grand Theft Auto IV (6 million units, $500 million)" So, by the same reckoning doesn't that make MW2 closer to 6.5m sales first week? Seems a lot lower than reported sales (and more feasible IMO).

I describe this game in one word: More sexier than your sister..ok well more than one word lol

@akuseru - You live in Norway... We all know that Norway is one of the most expensive countries in the world. We also know that your game industry counts for squat :) It's even smaller than ours (I think)! But seriously, the bulk of the copies were sold in the Americas. Some 3.5 million. That leaves 2.5 million copies in the rest of the world (Others, did not launch in Japan until later). 3.5 million times $50 is $175 million. That means the 2.5 million outside americas must have brought $325 million, or a whopping $130 per copy. And that's just ridiculous. Somewhere there must have been something that added to the revenue stream that was not just regular GTA copies. I'm thinking GTA bundles were counted, but I'm not sure... That $500 million figure is simply fishy.

@TheThunder it's highly unlikely that MW2 is as open to all kinds of audiences as Harry Potter. The fact is, MW2 has a rather limited audience of a lot of people who want to play it, regardless of cost. If games cost $10 there would still be a huge amount of money made, no doubt, but its target audience is so tiny compared to Harry Potter's that there's no way this would ever be an argument. Yes, MW2 pulled in the most money in a single day/five day period, but we're comparing apples and oranges. Family film accessible to virtually anyone with ten dollars vs Mature-rated video game available only to people with 360, PS3 or a good PC (wow what a limiting factor) and (if we're talking about offering the game at the same price as a movie) $10.

DON'T forgot the special editions. those prices have a big impact also. GTAIV had a special edition and MW2 had 2 special editions on top of the regular game. sales figures and income will differ if you forget those important facts!

@killergran not all games sold in america. therefore not all games are priced in dollars. for instance, games where i live cost $107. different currencies you know ^^

@Kai Master: I don't know where you live, but not that many countries have a 10% inflation rate in 1,5 years.

I've been wondering, how on earth can 6 million copies of GTA IV bring in $500 million in revenue? That's an average of $83 per copy! Didn't it release at $50? Where is all the extra money coming from? Especially if MW2 did $550 million with a $60 launch of 8.6 million copies.

@TheThunder - I hope you didn't mean what I think you meant. Standard ticket price is (I suppose) around $10, which means around 40 million people saw Harry Potter in the first 5 days. If Modern Warfare 2 had sold for the same as Harry Potter, the movie would have outgrossed it several times over.

Wow what are you people smoking ? If MW2 and TDK or Harry Potter were at the same price (both either $10 or $60) MW2 would still come out on top.

"domestic box office" : I think you really should avoid being American-centric, English is the lingua franca of the world and we're not all Americans!

if it costs more and made this much revenue it may look like a spinoff but u also g2a look into it and realize ppl actually paid $60 for a game compared to $10 for a movie and still made this much that's also an accomplishment on its own costs 6x more and still sold 8.6 million units day 1....i ono i may be completely wron n make no sense but i think theres a point there somewhere lol...

$550M : inflation adjusted? if not, I don't think that's a record, inflation has been far more than 10% since GTA4 release... let's say that's just a record in sales units, not in dollars. and are the final numbers know, the previous article mentioned "preliminary data"?

@Cheebee You can just as easily turn that around, it is a lot easier to sell something that costs $10 compared to something that costs $60. Also games can be used by multiple people while you have to buy seperate tickets for everybody if you want to see a movie together.

Definitely quite an accomplishment. But guess they forgot that Dark Knight did 13.5 million units on its first week of release: http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6623618.html But revenue wise it's going to be more but Dark Knight definitely was a big seller. Seems like we were slightly over in early projections but in a good range. Congrats to Activision on a successful launch.

How much either product costs to make has nothing to do with it koffieboon, it's about the day 1/week 1 revenue being made, not profits. So I think Paperdiego has a point, of course something that costs like $60+ and sells millions is gonna bring in more money than something that costs $10 or less and sells millions... This ís way to spin things indeed.

@Paperdiego Since movies might actually be more expensive to make than games it seems like a fair comparison to me.

wait wait wait.. so it is ok to compare the revenue made by a movie (which costs less then 10$) to a game (which costs upwards of 65+$$)?? wow.. way to spin spin spin..

@onionpaper If MW2 cost as much as a movie ticket then it will be bought more than TDK or anything else. Your argument goes both ways you know.

@sully1311 lol i kno where r the psn records the highest number of ppl i seen online were close to 220,000 n the system crashed :/

@ioi Do you have any idea how high downloadable sales are for the PC version? I assume those sales are also included by Activision

Well, MW2 (and all video games) get a bit of a head start, because they charge 6x the cost of admission to movies and 3x the cost of a new book. In reality, I think it's much more impressive that 20 million (approx) people went to the dark knight in the first five days, or 39 (or so) million people saw the harry potter movie world wide.

Yeah we were about 10% too high it seems, total sell-through in week one was about 8.6m not the 9.4m we reported. Also day 1 sales were more like 6.5m than the 7m we initially reported - so we were a little high all round with the preliminary figures

And the game isn't even that special >_>

Seems like Vgchartz was pretty close with its 600 million figure.

lol at the part at the end. surely its broken som psn records as well. it crashed the system