Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's record-breaking, first-day sales are impressive, but almost more impressive is the life these Call of Duty games seem to have online.
This morning I hopped online to see how the past four year's worth of Call of Duty games were doing online. Yes, people still do play the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I did the same thing at the beginning of the year, to see how the games were doing. Let's compare.
Each of these games show the current number of online players when you log in to find a match on the Xbox 360. I happen to only have all of these games on this platform, so I wasn't able to check out the PC or PS3. Here's what I found:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had 776,152 people logged in shortly before 11 a.m. eastern on Veterans Day, a work day for many. Last year's Treyarch-developed game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, had 196,648 players logged in. The previous Infinity Ward-developed game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 still had 62,541 people playing it. Remember, that's a 2-year-old game and it's a weekday. Call of Duty: World at War, a game set during World War II, still had 5,800 people playing it. Finally, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the game that helped propel the series into the stratosphere, was being played by 3,309 people four years after the game was released. Not bad.
Back in January of this year I had the same idea of looking at how many people were still playing this dated Call of Duty titles. One evening on Jan. 30, I logged into all four Call of Duty games, from the original Modern Warfare to the then most recent Black Ops to see how many were playing. Comparing those numbers from almost a year ago to today's, I'm a little surprised how little they have changed.
Here's a quick run down:
Black Ops: 757,237
Modern Warfare 2: 174,059
World at War: 15,079
Modern Warfare: 15,361
What's it all mean? Well judging by these numbers, it looks like the series has a strong fanbase that like to stick around.