Apocalyptic Soapbox: The Call of Duty Generation

The major powers in this current so-called “Console War” may just have come to the negotiating table a bit early. Xbox 360 sales for Christmas of 2011 were staggeringly high to say the least, and despite the Nintendo Wii’s ski slope-like decline in sales, the PlayStation 3 and Sony may just have to accept defeat for this cycle (well not defeat, but a bronze medal or an “‘A’ for Effort” or…something else of that nature…). Who’s to “blame” for this? X-Bots will scream about better versions of multiplatform games on their console (not necessarily untrue). PlaySlaves will clamor about poor dev support (also not necessarily untrue). Nintendo fans will probably just remain silent and keep playing Animal Crossing: City Folk or whatever it is they do. Despite these relatively accurate interpretations, they might have to look in a different direction to point their fingers of arrogant smugness, irrational blame or complete indifference, respectively. Namely in the direction of a little game series that began as what one could consider a Medal of Honor clone (but a much more attractive and fun-loving clone who likes to wear flashy clothes and go out on weekends doing flashy things). I am, of course, talking about Call of Duty.

On a recent episode of the Pixel Apocalypse podcast, I made a reference to the possibility that the hardware sales of this generation, at least at this point in the cycle and specifically in the United States, are pretty much pre-determined by the Call of Duty series (at least by the post-Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare games). I admitted I essentially ripped this point from the mouth of seemingly-self-appointed superstar video games analyst Michael Pachter who, love him or hate him and his talking points, sometimes makes some very interesting observations. This was one of them. On the GameTrailers 2011 wrap-up episode of their weekly show, the Bonus Round, while talking about how Sony fared in 2011, he made what I thought was a possibly hyperbolic statement that can understandably cause someone who cares about the gaming industry to recoil in horror. What he first said was this:

“The 360 continues to outsell the PS3 primarily because of the network effect; it’s like, ‘My friends all have it, they’re all online, and, you know, so when you think about getting a box that the teenage boy says, ‘I wanna play Call of Duty online with my friends…”

After Pachter makes some other, in my opinion, pretty good points about Sony not being able to control what platform people play multiplatform games on, the editor-in-chief of GameTrailers Shane Satterfield asks with notable skepticism:

“Is it really Call of Duty, though? I mean is that what it ultimately comes down to? Is it that everyone plays Call of Duty and everyone knows that their friends are playing it on Xbox Live, and that is what helps them make their decision on which of those two [consoles] to buy, at least in North America?”

As this is asked, Pachter says “yes” about fifty times and then elaborates:

“I really believe that Call of Duty is the driver of console sales.”

I can’t blame someone for having an adverse reaction to a statement like this. I mean seriously: how the hell could ONE FRANCHISE, no matter how absurdly successful it might be, have such a monopoly on gamers’ wallets that it essentially dictates which consoles sell better? It’s quite a claim and it struck a chord with me and seemed to make almost too much sense for it not to get more attention in the video game press. But in the midst of what Pachter probably saw as a headline-grabbing statement, there seemed to be a nugget of delicious truth; a way to explain (or at least somewhat explain) the trends of console sales this generation. So I decided to do as much digging as I possibly could into this (taking into account that the NPD Group no longer publishes sales records of games, making it hard to track how the platform sales broke down after Modern Warfare 2).

Since the phenomenon didn’t really hit until the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, let’s begin there, shall we? As you no doubt remember (except for the six of you, yours truly included, that never bought the game), the game was released to quite a bit of fanfare in November 2007. Publications were slinging “Game of the Year” slogans all over the place and gamers were eating this gem up. During that month alone, over 2 million copies of the game were sold; 1.57 million were sold on the 360 and 444,000 were sold on the PS3. That means the 360 made up approximately 77% of the games sales while the PS3 made up about 22%. The trend began to show its face.

We jump ahead another year to November 2008 when Call of Duty: World at War was released in all its Nazi zombie-massacring glory. It was not developed by Infinity Ward (the reins had been handed to Treyarch for this one, the Obsidian to…well, everyone else’s Infinity Ward) but that didn’t seem to affect the gaming public’s interest. About 1.41 million units were sold in that month alone; they’ve gone down a bit but not by much. About 1.33 million units were sold on 360 and 533,000 were sold on PS3. The sales numbers for the PS3 are climbing up but the 360 version still claims a goddamn whopping 94% of the game’s sales that first month.

But it was November 2009 when shit really began hitting the fan, when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was unleashed upon us and every sales record in entertainment industry history was shattered beyond recognition and the term “No Russian” took on quite a new meaning. In the first month alone, 6.07 million units were sold overall, 4.2 million of which were on the 360 while a not-too-shabby-but-still-significantly-less 1.87 million were sold on the PS3. Microsoft’s console was raking in 69% of the sales for this mega-ultra-super blockbuster and the PS3 was merely getting 30% of the pie.

Sadly after this, as I mentioned before, the NPD Group shut its doors on the public and we never got official sales reports (nor how the sales broke down by console) on the subsequent Black Ops and last year’s Modern Warfare 3 releases, but we obviously know what happened, especially considering the lines wrapping around the corner of every GameStop back on November 8^th. But I think it’s safe to say everyone who’s still reading is seeing the continuing trend here. The PS3 version’s sales continued to climb like a poor knee-capped soldier going up a hill, but the 360 version always, without fail, took the biggest piece of the sales pie. Now the data isn’t complete, I grant you that. But to my knowledge the PS3 versions’ sales have never outsold the 360 versions’ sales, at least not in America or in the first few months of release, and there’s no reason to expect that to have changed at all with these last two games. Not only have they never out-grossed the 360 sales, but after the initial 22% slump, they seemed to settle around the 30-odd percent mark with no sign of increasing.

But that’s not the claim in question here: do these sales numbers reflect on console sales? For that question, let’s first turn to the reported revenue of the recent Modern Warfare 3. According to Activision, Modern Warfare 3 grossed $1 billion dollars in 16 days and sold 9 million units by the end of November. Assuming the trend established by the first Modern Warfare and the subsequent games still held, that means that most likely only 2.7-3.51 million units were sold on PS3 (a large number to be sure, but still not even close to what was sold on the 360). The Xbox 360 sold the most consoles in the U.S. in 2011 and has never been consistently outsold by the PS3 (though it has been known to happen for short bursts). But the month in question for this theory is November: last November, the 360 sold a WHOPPING 1.7 million units while the PS3 sold a relatively paltry 900,000. Was this part of a pattern, especially in light of the phenomenon that the Call of Duty franchise has become? Well in November of 2010, we see something similar: the 360 sold 1.37 million units and the PS3 sold 530,000. In November 2009 the difference wasn’t as large (possibly due to the release of the Jesus H. Christ of games this generation, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves), but the 360 still outsold the PS3 by about 119,000 units. If you want go back even further, take a look at this chart from the video game sales wiki page. Notice anything between September and November 2007? There is a MASSIVE 2 million unit spike in sales for the 360. And what came out during that time? Yep, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And you see it again between September and November the following year when, yes, Call of Duty: World At War was released.

You get the idea. Now while the 360 has been outsold by the PS3 before (December 2009, for example), the overall numbers don’t lie: the Xbox 360 has sold approximately 30.9 million units in the U.S. as of November 2011 while the PlayStation 3 has sold about 18.9 million units. Now I know that correlation never necessarily equals causation; many other factors probably come into play when it comes to spikes in console sales, such as the Kinect, which had sold 10 million units as of March last year. But I’d say there’s pretty damn strong correlation present in Pachter’s theory that the network effect combined with and perpetuated by the massive popularity of this juggernaut of a franchise drives console sales in a very 360-oriented direction. In other words, this theory has what scientists call “a metric fuck-ton of water.”

But an important question still needs to be asked: Why did this start? How did it start? Some speculation is needed. Pachter also said in this episode of the Bonus Round that Microsoft got its boost in sales on Call of Duty (most likely initially) by the exclusive map pack exclusivity window they established. I don’t think this is untrue, but I do think there is more to it than that. The Call of Duty franchise did not begin on the 360; it began on PC where it did have a pretty sizeable audience and had ports to the consoles that also enjoyed relatively good sales. But they were nothing special (nothing of Modern Warfare proportions at least). Then in fall of 2005, the Xbox 360 launched. What was its killer-app game? It wasn’t Halo 3 like most people expected. It was Call of Duty 2. Did that game get a second release on PS3 or Wii when they were released a year later? Nope. PC sales notwithstanding, it was that moment of true exclusivity from the other consoles that I believe began cinching the knot of victory for Microsoft this generation. Within its first week of release, Call of Duty 2 sold over 250,000 copies. By January of 2008, it had sold over 2 million. The audience of Xbox 360 Call of Duty players had been built and quite effectively fortified and I posit that this network effect was established here. With the defining moment that was the Xbox 360’s first month of release, this console cycle was ushered into our lives by the Call of Duty franchise and there was no looking back.

So it’s now 2012 and with the impending release of the Wii U and the announcements of the next generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft looming on the horizon, it’s just starting to sink in with gamers that this generation has begun to enter its twilight years. I couldn’t help but wonder when this dawned on me: will the Call of Duty franchise continue this incredible potential influence over console sales unabated? Comparisons with other popular franchises, like Activision’s other (former) powerhouse Guitar Hero, would suggest that no, the massive popularity will not continue. While Call of Duty may have extremely tight, responsive and fun gameplay, it’s a franchise that doesn’t change, and unchanging franchises are, in my opinion, ultimately unsustainable. I don’t like giving the average gamer too much credit (after all, they keep eating this up for breakfast and asking for seconds and thirds and most likely fourths), but I would imagine that eventually they’ll get sick of the repetition. Eventually all that will be left will be the hopelessly addicted; those that would demand a new iteration years after the franchise has folded and those that would sign the petition urging a retired Bobby Kotick to start up a new publishing company to release Modern Warfare 12. We’ve now arguably seen something that hasn’t happened before in gaming, at least not in the recent generations of consoles and never with a multiplatform franchise. More importantly, we now know that it’s possible for a single franchise to have this kind of power over us as consumers. With the likelihood of Call of Duty’s eventual stagnation in mind, the real question becomes this: what will dictate console sales next?