Holy huge numbers Leigh! Congrats to Activision, and the whole team. So I would guestimate that translates to roughly 10 million units, *gulp* WOW. Though that number would not make sense with a mere 22% engaging in online play. Maybe it speaks to the power of single player campaigns? Though I suppose titles I've worked on with online multiplayer modes tend to have similar proportions; seems most players just don't like 'real' competition.

You mean 9.16 million units. 550 / 60 = 9.16 repeating.

Massive cash...it will keep coming in too.

Keep in mind the revenue won't correlate directly to $60 per unit because of the Hardened and Prestige editions.

@Jonathan - I am willing to bet the profit margin on the Hardened and Prestige is MORE than buying just the game @$60.

I can't believe games can make so much money. Then again, COD6 is a HUGE game.

I've seen some of the commercials and have to admit they did a helluva job making it look great. Activision has always been a marketing machine and this is a stellar example of it.

Like playing a role in a great shoot em' up movie. Short but a hell of a lot of fun.

There are unconfirmed reports that Activision has bought Luxembourg and will be moving its operations there. The country will soon be called Atvibourg.

viva la shorter games! i got no problem with the length. quality first!

As Jonathon points out we can't take these revenue numbers and extrapolate sales numbers from them because of the 2 SKUs that were available for each console. These sorts of Limited Edition SKUs do a good job of inflating these revenue numbers but also tell us that gamers are willing to spend even more on games they value.

I do think this title would make an interesting case study in terms of it's marketing efforts. We were not bombarded with game media from IW/Activision prior to it's release. Since it's showcase at E3, few details were released and it did not see a multiplayer beta either (perhaps I could be wrong on this). My impression (correct me if I'm wrong) is that this game had very, very good word of mouth advertising to complement their marketing efforts.

I do remember a time where purchase intent polls marked this game relatively low, and they increased when Activision included "Call of Duty" onto the title again. Again, very interesting.

I wonder how much of that gross the core designers made?

If they were filmmakers or musicians they could reasonably have made a small slice of that gross.

I'm sure IW has enough clout at this point to push for a larger share of the revenue but even if you consider they're probably getting no more than 25% of that (50% to retail, 25% to Activision...and this is optimistic), that's still a pretty damned large nut. $140 million?

As far as units, I think you're safe in assuming the vast majority of units sold will be regular editions. People put out for better editions but the starting price for the regular edition was $60 regardless of platform. Shelling out $90 or $150 for the Hardened and Prestige editions will be hard for a lot of people and outside of the NVGs, those editions don't come with any serious benefits.

Despite the PC flak (some of which is actually justified after playing through the SP campaign, Spec Ops and MP), IW did a great job as always with creating a great story and providing an environment to have fun. My only concern is the fact that the high sales will bolster IW/Activision's decision to slant towards consoles. I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything but following the money will only get you so far.

Now, if they could skip the usual cycle and instead of giving Treyarch COD7, let IW do DLC maps and campagins on the same engine so we can get more to do sooner rather than later.

This article seems to have the best breakdown I have found....
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-duty18-2009nov18,0,5238209.story

Honestly, i'm not to surprised. Call of duty has a huge fan base and that fan base looooooves to talk. Seriously, almost all of my information about the game came from other players on other fps titles.

This game causes me great confusion.

I want to celebrate such an awesome feat of game making, wonderful SP game and collosal sales - all is great for the industry

But I also want to punish (bitch/moan) that they were so so lazy and cheap with MP, these parts are bad bad bad for the industry

Also need to take into account that these are worldwide numbers, which means currency conversions. European versions bring in a lot more revenue.

They had plenty of advertising and it was probably the biggest advertising costs ever, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was their advertising. COD4 was a very good game single player game, and MP was much better than most. The good MP actually goes back to the original COD and COD2; I remember playing them and they were really good back then. So with a franchise this old, you don't really have to market all that much. There's people like me, the old timers that played COD1 and COD2 on PC, and will be interested in the new COD, then there are the new generation that played COD4 that will definitely want to follow up where they left off. This wasn't an overnight hit guys, COD is an old series with a certain consistency among all titles.

I don't know what you guys are talking about. MW2 has plenty of marketing. There were videos and trailers everywhere, and most of them were showing MP because they KNOW this fanbase loves the MP aspect of CoD series. They have a diehard fanbase.