Less than a week since release, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has already proven to be a tremendous success for Activision. The company announced today that just during the first three days of its launch, this year"s entry managed to pull in over $500 million across all platforms.
While earning boatloads of money, the game also had time to break several franchise records during that same time frame. From all Call of Duty titles that have released for the current generation, Black Ops 4 had the "most combined players, average hours per player and total number of hours played".
Even though this is the first mainstream entry in the series to not feature a single-player campaign, it looks like fans were more than happy with all of the multiplayer offerings, where Black Ops 4 also managed to beat out Call of Duty: WWII and Black Ops 3"s concurrent player records.
Another oddity this year was the PC version, which avoided Steam altogether and launched exclusively via Blizzard"s Battle.net client. However, this move also appears to be a major success, with Activision reporting that Black Ops 4 has double the number of PC players compared to last year"s entry, WWII.
Digital sales were especially strong for the title, with it taking the crown for PlayStation store"s "Largest day one digital full game sales" as well as the record for Microsoft Store"s "best-selling Activision Xbox One digital game on day one." Black Ops 4 also managed to pull in the highest viewership ever for a Call of Duty game on Twitch.
The addition of the new battle royale Blackout mode is probably a major reason for the record-breaking stats. We will have to wait and see how Treyarch will manage its post-launch support for the multiplayer, zombie co-op, and battle royale modes to keep things fresh.
With a success like this, a big question that comes up now is what will Activision do for next year"s Call of Duty entry. We may be moving towards yearly battle royale mode launches by the company.