Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Lost Share to Battlefield 3, Insists EACorrection: We've modified this story. The original post indicated a sell through number of 10 million for Call of Duty, which we thought had been referenced by Peter Moore, but this was a mistake, as he was actually referring to a 10 million sold in number for BF3. Sorry for the confusion.
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 once again set an entertainment record with 6.5 million units sold in its first 24 hours and $775 million generated in the first five days. While we haven't gotten a unit sales update yet, you can bet it's now way higher than 6.5 million. With such major success for MW3, is it possible that EA's Battlefield 3 managed to take share anyway? EA COO Peter Moore believes so.
During a special 'Better Know' interview to be published this week, IndustryGamers asked Moore if EA truly succeeded in grabbing a piece of the shooter pie from Call of Duty. Moore commented, "I'm not sure that we didn't steal any share. To your point, it's early days and we're only a month in – we feel very good about it. Two entities have benefited from Call of Duty and Battlefield being on the market: gamers and the industry (retailers and people who rely on the ability to sell big blockbuster games). Together we've grown the genre enormously. 10 million sold in and 5 million sold through doesn't come out of nowhere – if we haven't gained share, that means in the first week we've added 5 million new FPS gamers."
He continued, "I think when the dust fully settles, maybe when we're looking at this at the end of our fiscal year (March 31, 2012) we'll do an analysis and I think we will have taken share. I don't think there's any doubt about that, unless everything BF3 sells is just incremental."
It's worth noting that the interview was conducted right before Thanksgiving and Black Friday and EA has just recently updated its Battlefield 3 sell through numbers to 8 million. As for MW3, some analysts have predicted that the game will hit 25 million.
Regardless of whether or not EA took share from Activision in the genre, the battle between the two has been good for the industry, generating lots of interest in gaming.
"I'm more focused on how we've done by our gamer and consumers, and yes many of them bought both games undoubtedly. Have our retail partners enjoyed this? Absolutely. And does this help push the game industry to the front pages of newspapers? You bet it does. Go look at USA Today, go look at The New York Times – the big entertainment blockbusters this year are not movies, they're video games. Call of Duty and Battlefield have done that," added Moore.
Stay tuned for the full interview in which Peter Moore talks about his career highlights, the Dreamcast and Xbox and more.
