King of the hill: The rise and rise of Call of Duty

Some interesting news hit the inter-web last week, no not another hacking scandal but that Modern Warfare 3 has raked in an astounding $1 billion.

Ok some of you may be reading this thinking “so what!”. Well this isn’t news because of the amount they made but just how quickly they did it. The latest Activision title, raked the money in an amazing 16 days. An ecstatic spokesman for Activision had the following to say as they rolled around in piles of cash;

“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has shattered theatrical box office, book and videogame sales records for a five-day worldwide sell-through,”

The news was released alongside comparisons to Avatar and the latest Harry Potter films, which even though both were major summer blockbusters still took  17 days to gross the same amount of cash. Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision said:

“Call of Duty is now among that rarified group of franchises like Star Wars, Harry Potter and the Lord Of The Rings that attract or engage tens of millions of people every year”

At one point industry types talked about gaming as an industry to rival Hollywood and with this little computer game beating James Cameron’s sci-fi classic and the nerdy wizard film to the $1 billion  with 24 hours to spare, they should now be looking how they can exactly stay ahead…

With Christmas just days away this $40 billion-a-year industry has to learn that the industry cannot continue to survive on 70% of its annual revenue coming from the last 3 months of the year. So how can they do this? Well i believe a slight reduction in the costs of games could really help. We all die a little inside as we hand-over €50 for the latest offering from the likes of Activision, Microsoft, Sony and EA but could this be eased if the games industry agreed to an industry-wide reduction. What would this mean reduction mean… Well we can imagine that the reduction would bolster flagging new game sales, while eating into the 2nd-hand market but also give the new “recession” generation a chance to enjoy the thrill of opening a brand new game from it’s plastic wrapping.

All that being said, you have to admit that we all take the news of COD – MW3 beating the film industry with a little “i told you so” mentality, as we could stack-up the best of the gaming industry against the best of the film industry any day and there would only be 1 winner… the latest figures only prove this.

What do you guys think?