Activision: Modern Warfare 2 May Be Best Selling Call of Duty Ever

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare took the industry by storm when it shipped for Holiday '07.  Now a year and a half later, Activision's blockbuster shooter has sold a whopping 13 million copies. Activision Blizzard once again hopes to dominate the holiday shopping season later this year when the company ships Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2.

We asked Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith during E3 what his expectations for the title are. Not surprisingly, he's extremely confident.  And he should be – Infinity Ward has the pedigree, gamers are hungry for more, and everything that's been shown for the title so far has looked phenomenal. 

Modern Warfare 2 is already looking extremely slick

Without specifying a certain sales goal, Griffith told IndustryGamers, “We have goals for all of our titles. ... We fully expect Modern Warfare 2 to be one of, if not THE largest, title in the industry this year. When you look at when Modern Warfare 1 was launched in 2007, it had a substantial jump in consumers engaged in the Call of Duty franchise. World at War, which was launched in Holiday 2008, saw that more than a fifth of its purchasers were first time users of the Call of Duty franchise. So all those new purchasers are ready for the Modern Warfare 2 experience because they haven't historically been in the franchise.”

He continued, “We also look at Modern Warfare 2 and where it's strongest on the next-gen platforms of PS3 and Xbox 360... the installed base from the first Modern Warfare to the second one will be nearly double.  So you add all those elements up – the greater installed base of consoles, the greater consumer base that was generated by World at War – all those things suggest that Modern Warfare 2 is set up to be more successful than any other Call of Duty we've launched so far.”