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Bobby Kotick: "Call of Duty has sold OVER 300 million units in just 15 years" 1 game away from beating Pokemon for 2nd biggest game franchise.

https://screenrant.com/call-duty-pokemon-mario-franchises-sold/
Kotick relayed that Call of Duty is "one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time," remarking that the franchise has achieved a considerable "cumulative sales exceeding 300 million games" in its lifetime. Even among a stony group of ultra-wealthy business people who frequently push the company to take cold measures (to say Kotick was in good company would be an understatement), it's hard to imagine that this energizing statement didn't rouse at least some of them.

If any more proof was needed that Call of Duty is still a mega success in the world of gaming, joining the likes of Pokémon and Mario should be the last word on the matter. And like Nintendo's flagship franchises, Call of Duty shows no sign of slowing down in its ambition to push even more units and reach even more players, with the next unnamed game in the series already existing in a playable state. It's rumored to be the next sequel in the long dormant Modern Warfare trilogy, but, even so, it's not slowing down support for the battle royale-centric Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

Call of Duty is over 300 million units. It has done this in only around 15 years, and without the game spam of the two games above it, Pokemon and Mario. Usually just One game a year, that's 15 games in 15 years, plus 1 remake, and a few spinoffs. That's not very many games, and yet it has managed to be in the top 3 without the quantity aspect that many developers (hi Capcom and Megaman and Hudson/Konami and Bomberman), especially Japanese developers, thought would be the key to larger sales.

Many people have mixed feelings on the series and for good reason. However, whether the way they changed the industry was good or bad is irrelevant, it did what no other game franchise has done, especially with their main games, and that's sell an average of around 17 or so million units per game since it started till present. That's impressive for a game printed on a Blu Ray disc that kills millions of people. ;)

Seriously though, something attracts people to Call of Duty so much that no other game has ever had a similar attraction. Fifa is one of the biggest selling franchise world wide, running since the early 90's, COD started in 2003 and didn't become decent until COD3, and huge until COD4. Yet, It passed Fifa 4-5 years ago.

So in conclusion, I demand we bring in a jury of our peers and put Call of Duty developers and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, along with the CFO, the CTO and any other big admin position occupant, and try them all for treason and brainwashing schemes, because clearly, there is some kind of mind controlling technology inside of those discs.

Another advantage of HD DVD like Freedom Gate said! A company wouldn't be able to put a brainwashing chip in an HD DVD, only Blu Ray allows this horrible thing. It's the only explanation that makes sense other than Activision sending undercover hitman to threaten to kill your entire family unless you buy 10 copies of each COD game per house and that's a bit far fetched so it's clearly the BLU RAY that's at fault.

Grrr....
 
Apparently looking around it's seems to be close to 320m though that's a rumor, but plausible since it was 288+ right as Black Ops 4 came out, so...
 
New CoD will still likely do massive numbers on par, then you have the several year gap of no Pokemons and 1 CoD yearly.

Also when the new COD comes out the current one and the one before will still be selling.

Not to mention that thee's the rumored MW2 remastered and a rumored Switch spinoff.
 

Caffeine

Member
so it made 50 mil in 3 years ? If mwr is roughly around 7m then iw/ww2/bo4 are roughly ~14.333m a piece damn cod has fallen out of the 20-30m spot no wonder the micro is so egregious. did the maths in another post
 
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Codes 208

Member
That's a shame, it's a pretty average game.
It’s the McDonald’s of shooters. As in its mostly a entry level shooter. And it’s easy to know exactly what you’re getting after years of service. But it works and people keep coming back regardless of how average it really is.

And just like McDonald’s, they sometimes screw up your order (ghost), burn your burger (advance warfare) or give you stale unsalted fries (infinity warfare)
 

Graciaus

Member
That's impressive but I haven't really enjoyed the multi-player since black ops 1. Modern warfair 3 had some good ideas but I didnt play as much. I keep trying them and they get worse and worse.
 
S

SLoWMoTIoN

Unconfirmed Member
Key word - game
Pokemon as a franchise is more than just games.
 
GTA V has sold 100 million copies alone. That's equivalent to 4-5 Call Of Duty games in terms of revenue, but the difference being Rockstar focus on quality in contrast to quantity.

Literally took GTA over 10 years to create ONE game that outsold the average sales of a COD title. With a outlier that is GTA V which won't happen again. COD also doesn't have that many titles, you're basically insulting Mario and Pokemon indirectly by going after COD"s "quantity"
 
Well deserved. It brought multiplayer FPS gaming to the masses, just like Pokemon brought RPG gaming to the masses.

It's hard for a game to bring rpgs to the masses when there the genre was already selling to the masses. But I would say it diffidently got kids involved more. In fact, that's one of the reasons it sells so well.

Key word - game
Pokemon as a franchise is more than just games.

And so is COD.
 
No matter how you feel about the Call of Duty series, it is, without a doubt, one of the hallmark franchises of modern day gaming. In other words, COD has cemented itself as a legendary gaming franchise.
 
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Bolivar687

Banned
One of the value propositions of Microsoft's early Xbox strategy was that they were bringing the marquee Windows developers out from the office desk and into the living room console space. This did wonders for making Bethesda and Bioware household names but they were still only porting inferior versions of what were primarily PC games. The one series that I would say actually became better was Call of Duty. I'm not going to lie and say the gameplay became more skill intensive or that they began designing the games for a more sophisticated audience.

I just think the play experience of playing these games with a controller in your hand, as the focus of the entertainment center made this one of the signature franchises in gaming today.

I would also say that for a certain time frame, maybe CoD4 to Blops II that no other franchise out there could compete with the sheer amount of content they ship on the disk, in terms of the number of maps, weapons, customization and progression. Something went off the rails a bit with Blops 3 specifically, where, despite more and more developers and entire studios working on each individual game, we're somehow getting less and less content, with Infinite Warfare then recycling a lot of the interface and gameplay systems. The map design really sucks too, and every map is basically the same three lane hallways with a few connections between them.

I haven't gotten the last few games but I'm hoping for a big return to form for Modern Warfare 4. It would be a great way to revitalize the MW universe as CoD starts gunning for that top spot in gaming.
 

tr1p1ex

Member
CoD is still the go to fps on console.

Not accurate to say that ATVI doesn't spam the CoD titles though. They are spammed more than Mario or Pokemon.

Mario and to a lesser extent, Pokemon, cover a wide swath of different genres. For example, there's Mario Kart, there's Super Mario, there's Super Mario Bros, there are the various Mario sports titles, there's Mario puzzle games... As a rule of thumb, each of these comes out once per platform per generation. Pokemon also reaches into different genres from puzzles games to fighters to the dungeon games to the mainline pokemon to remakes.

CoD is the same shooter every year with a few tweaks.
 
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DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
It's hard for a game to bring rpgs to the masses when there the genre was already selling to the masses. But I would say it diffidently got kids involved more. In fact, that's one of the reasons it sells so well.
Well, I'm not sure RPGs were sold to the masses with nearly the same level of success. Red/Blue/Green sold 31M

Did any RPG up to that point (1996) sell even half that prior to Pokemon? Genuinely curious.
 
Well, I'm not sure RPGs were sold to the masses with nearly the same level of success. Red/Blue/Green sold 31M

Did any RPG up to that point (1996) sell even half that prior to Pokemon? Genuinely curious.

One of Red/Green/Blue sold around 11 million on average so yes.

However combined no, however, it's more about RPGS in general not just an individual game (and the 3 versions of said game). RPG sales were actually less overall when Pokemon first took off, so clearly there was a larger rpg base at first. Which is what I meant.

Only question is what caused the decline (which was temporary). I guess with all the computers dying outside outside PC that pretty much gave only one computer platform rpgs so that might be part of it, but still a curious situation.
 
S

SLoWMoTIoN

Unconfirmed Member
You went from saying Pokemon is "more than just a game to moving the goal post.

COD is also more than just a game. If you wanted to make a "how much they make outside of gaming" argument you should did that in the first place. My point was COD is more than just games as you clearly implied it wasn't, that is all. Thread is about game sales though so..
I did say keyword game on my first post right?

Then I linked you to what I meant since you didn't get it.

But I'm moving goal posts? What?
 

FStubbs

Member
Nintendo builds their hardware around Mario and Pokemon.
Microsoft and Sony build theirs around Call of Duty.

It's a game lots of people enjoy, and yes, at this rate CoD passing Pokemon is pretty much guaranteed.
GTA will probably pass it with GTA6 but only for awhile.
 

Tesseract

Banned
the series has seen greatness in its life

modern warfare 2 is solid, so is black ops 2

blops 4 almost got there, they need better systems engineers because the movement is getting worse
 

Garnox

Member
I was never a big CoD fan. I fell into the Halo camp during the FPS wars.

However, I can definitely see the impact that CoD had on the gaming industry and how it resonates with so many. Props where props are due.
 

Stuart360

Member
300mil wow, and its COD we are talking about, probably 250mil of them copies will of been sold at $60.
Dat money tho.
 

MagnesG

Banned
You went from saying Pokemon is "more than just a game to moving the goal post.

COD is also more than just a game. If you wanted to make a "how much they make outside of gaming" argument you should did that in the first place. My point was COD is more than just games as you clearly implied it wasn't, that is all. Thread is about game sales though so..
I wanna know what COD is then if it is more than just a game. Again, I still don't understand how is that 'moving the goal post'. Their business model are clearly different from the start, a new Pokemon will always be accompanied by a new Pokemon anime series + tons of related Pokemon merchandises, and that is just the tip of iceberg. They had their Pokemon movies, events on national scale (Pikachu marathon for exp), mobile game Pokemon GO, Pokemon Trading Card Game, and also spewed a few notable spin-off titles. The only thing similar between them is how they make their games from a tried and true formula, where they basically nailed it from the start, and stayed off from butchering the core mechanics. People will always go back, they knew where to find a goddamn FPS or a monster catching RPG.

But yeah,maybe that's okay for a '2nd biggest gaming franchise'.
 

Kerotan

Member
Didn't become decent until cod3? Eh call of Duty 2 big red one was a Savage game on the ps2. Way better then cod3 in fact.

But yeah it was cod4 that made it mainstream. That game was like crack.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
300 million units multiplied by avg number of hours played per unit = A gazilion hours of gameplaying

300 mill x 50 hrs per gamer (?) = 15 billion hours = 625 mill days = 1.7 mill years
 
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