Call Of Duty Is No. 1 In Launch Month For 15 Years In A Row

For many many years now, Call of Duty has been a license to print money for Activision Blizzard as each annual entry in the series has been a blockbuster success story. October’s release kept that tradition alive as analyst firm the NPD Group has reported that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II was last month’s best-selling title in the US in dollar sales, making the 2022 release the 15th consecutive year that a Call of Duty release has ranked as the best-selling game during its release month.

While exact details on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II’s performance on PC and Xbox haven’t been made public just yet, the NPD Group did confirm that the game took first place in the US Xbox charts for November. On PlayStation, Modern Warfare II broke a number of records on the Sony platform and was its biggest game of October as well. Eight of the top 20 best-selling games of October 2022 were new releases, including Gotham Knights, which took second place in US Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 charts.

Modern Warfare II surpassed $1 billion in global sell-through revenue in just its first 10 days of being on sale on PlayStation, having earned $800 million of that sum in just the first three days alone. According to Activision and Sony, it’s the biggest PlayStation Store launch of all time for the COD series.

In the bigger business picture, Elden Ring is expected to be the best-selling game of 2022, while Modern Warfare II will come in at second. Thanks to an early start this year, critical acclaim, and solid sales every month, From Software’s hit game is likely to break Call of Duty’s winning streak in 2022.

In more analysis of October 2022, it was revealed that video game content sales grew 2% when compared to October 2021, to $3.7 billion. There have been some dips in numbers when compared to last year’s pandemic highs, as mobile content and video game hardware sales declined, year-to-date spending has fallen 7% to $42.7 billion when compared to this point in 2021, and sales of video game hardware fell by 10% to $424 million last month when compared to October 2021’s performance.