Brett Walton
19th November 2009

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke all first week records to become the fastest-selling game of all time this week. With 8.14 million units sold on Xbox 360 and PS3, and over 8.6 million when including the PC release, Modern Warfare 2 generated over $550 million in revenue in 5 days – more than any other entertainment product in history. The previous record-holder was Grand Theft Auto IV with 5.92 million units sold and $500m generated in revenue (at a much higher average price).

Modern Warfare 2 also sets the record for the fastest-selling game on both Xbox 360 and PS3 formats individually and also the fastest-seller on a single format of all time (Xbox 360 version) – selling even more than Halo 3 (Xbox 360) or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2) in the same timeframe. The top ten single-format week ones of all time are shown below (note that this doesn't include Japan sales for Modern Warfare 2):

Aside from Modern Warfare 2, new software releases were very quiet this week – many publishers had actually moved release dates to purposely avoid the game. Dragon Ball: Raging Blast had a reasonable opening, performing far stronger on PS3 than Xbox 360, but sold significantly less than the last console Dragon Ball title. Wii Fit Plus and Wii Sports Resort look set to dominate the holidays (along with New Super Mario Bros Wii) and are clearly picking up momentum along with Wii hardware – expect another strong Christmas for Nintendo. Dragon Age: Origins has a smaller than normal drop this week, as I predicted a few weeks back – strong review scores and good word of mouth should propel the game to strong sales after a fairly modest first week.

On the hardware front, all formats saw increases this week – the holiday season has begun! Interestingly, Xbox 360 saw one of the smaller week-on-week increases, around 12%. This is due to last week’s sales being massively inflated due to the Walmart giftcard offer in the US. VGChartz estimates that without the offer last week, this week’s increase would have been more like 50% and this is in large part down to the Modern Warfare 2 bundle which sold around 70,000 units. The implication here is that despite Xbox 360 looking to have made up a lot of ground on PS3 in the last two weeks, we expect sales next week to be fairly flat for Microsoft while all other formats should see another 15-20% holiday increase – so PS3 should pull ahead significantly over the remainder of the year.

Year on year comparisons are still down in general but getting closer. VGChartz still predicts that December 2009 will almost match December 2008 overall, just that things seem to be picking up more slowly this year due to the general market slowdown.

Next week is probably the biggest of the year in terms of big new games – New Super Mario Bros Wii should sell well over 1 million copies in its first week, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 should also be strong performers – over half a million units per SKU will be easily attainable. Modern Warfare 2 will show some enormous drops next week – we estimate around 1.5 million units combined (an 80% drop) – but still more than most games ever manage in their first week when putting things into perspective. Total Modern Warfare 2 sales for 2009 should come in at around 14 million units.

As always, the full data will be posted on VGChartz in the next few hours so be sure to check the charts out:

Worldwide
Americas
Japan
Others