Current Events > Call of Duty: MWIII's sale numbers might actually be way down this year

(+) Yeah! (+)

I was curious about the numbers so I looked it up. First off, it was released officially on Friday, I think it had a 3 day early release for the campaign, and Activision hasnt announced anything about its sale numbers as far as I know. That is already a red flag. They usually LOVE bragging about how many copies were sold or how many players are playing during the opening weekend. None of that.

There was a report today that MWIII had a 25% drop in sales compared to MWII when it comes to physical copies in the UK. You could say that is because more people went digital or say its an actual drop in sales. Its hard to really know.

Another report is about Steam. The game isnt selling as well there either. MWII peaked at 238,522 players at launch. The report said this was WITHOUT Warzone or any free to play component. It rose to 491,670 when Warzone 2.0 launched later on. The current peak for MWIII, which includes Warzone, is 177,881. That is a 25% drop in players compared to launch MWII and a massive 64% drop compared to when Warzone 2.0 was released later that year. So there is no hard numbers but a lot of evidence is pointing to the fact that the game isnt selling well for a CoD game. It looks like people are finally putting their foot down.

Ill be honest, this is my first CoD game I didnt buy. I bought MWII for the campaign and barely played the multiplayer. After hearing that MWIIIs campaign sucked then I had no reason to buy it. Maybe they will start to actually fully listen to the community and fix the game. It has been overall bad IMO since MW 2019 came out Multiplayer wise

I'd wait and see if it isn't the top selling game in the US this year first.

Steam is a bit of a flawed measure as the game is more console focused and it's being included with F2L Warzone.

Right now it's the second top played game on Xbox behind Fortnite but that also includes Warzone.

Punished_Blinx posted...

I'd wait and see if it isn't the top selling game in the US this year first.

Steam is a bit of a flawed measure as the game is more console focused and it's being included with F2L Warzone.

Right now it's the second top played game on Xbox behind Fortnite but that also includes Warzone.

The fact that it is still behind Fortnite on Xbox its opening weekend should say something IMO. Usually they rise to the top for a while

Im just realized, that the Steam peak number of 177,881 I mentioned? Apparently that INCLUDES MWII as well because of that weird CoD HQ thing they have going right now to combine the games. So its worse than I thought

I thought it was good in the beta but after playing it it's potentially the worst CoD ever made

The multiplayer matchmaking and netcode is legitimately abysmal. The weapon balance is horrible too

DepreceV2 posted...

Im just realized, that the Steam peak number of 177,881 I mentioned? Apparently that INCLUDES MWII as well because of that weird CoD HQ thing they have going right now to combine the games. So its worse than I thought

I don't think this means much, particularly. The number was a lot lower prior to release, and there's a good chance a majority of those players switched over to the new game. We're also not sure how much of the drop in Steam is caused by people switching over to console, considering how console availability has greatly increased since last year

The other part that complicates things somewhat is that MWII sold particularly well, breaking the record for fastest selling game of the series, so being down from MWII specifically doesn't tell us a lot.

When was the CoDless year supposed to be?

It is a 10/10 if your expectations are remastered MW2 (2009) maps

Beyond that, I wouldn't expect anything else. Blatant nostalgia grab (which I shamelessly enabled)

ForsakenHermit posted...

When was the CoDless year supposed to be?

This year. Activision apparently forced it into a sequel instead. There is plenty of evidence to support this. There was the report that the Devs were told this was DLC for MW2 then Activision forced them to change it to MW3. They only had 16 months to do it. Apparently you can get refunds of MW3 from Steam as far out as 7 days because Steam has it listed as DLC for MW2 instead of MW3 in the back in. No idea if that is fixed now. There was also a clip of someone installing MW3 from a disk on Xbox without any internet and it was loading MW2 instead. Once he got an internet connection then he had a massive patch that turned it into MW3.

That's what I thought.