A single Call of Duty game has outsold entire video game franchises

New court documents underline the sheer enormity of Call of Duty and show that a single game in the series has outsold entire video game franchises.

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Activision's latest responses to an ongoing lawsuit with Uvalde massacre survivors (24SMCV02494 VERONICA MATA ET AL. VS META PLATFORMS, INC., A CORPORATION, ET AL.) has revealed new info about the $32 billion+ Call of Duty video game series. A document filed Dec 23 has direct testimony from Call of Duty series head Patrick Kelly, who discusses key data points of the series.

According to Kelly, 2019's Call of Duty Modern Warfare reboot sold 41 million copies, which is an incredible figure for any game, let alone one that is just a few years old. But things get really interesting when we compare this figure to lifetime sales data of other video game franchises--some of which have been around for decades.

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Call of Duty has sold over 425 million copies total as of 2022 (after 2 major releases since then, COD's total sales are probably more like at least 435 million at this point).

At 41 million copies, Modern Warfare 2019 alone has made 9.6% of total franchise sales. If we compare that with the updated figure I provided, MW could have made around 9.4%.

As a singular release, Modern Warfare has actually outsold actual whole franchises, including:

• Gears of War (40 million)
• Last of Us (37 million)
• Kingdom Hearts (36 million)
• Spider-Man (33 million)
• Horizon (32.7 million)
• Devil May Cry (29 million)

That's just one game, too. Modern Warfare isn't even the biggest title in the series: Black Ops 2 is the king of the franchise, generating $1 billion in full game sales alone in just 10 days.