Modern Warfare 2 breaks records as PlayStation's biggest Call of Duty launch

Modern Warfare 2 has broken a new sales record on PlayStation and the game made the largest PlayStation debut in Call of Duty history.

Today Sony confirmed that Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is officially a mega-hit. The game has achieved the "biggest PlayStation Store launch ever for a Call of Duty game," beating out Modern Warfare in 2019 and Black Ops Cold War in 2020, the latter of which released with the introduction of the new PlayStation 5 console.

This reaffirms my predictions that 2022 will be the best-ever year for Call of Duty earnings. The franchise managed to generate $3 billion in 2022, accounting for 42% of Activision-Blizzard's total earnings, thanks to the combination of Call of Duty Mobile, Black Op Cold War's mainline release on two console generations and monetized multiplayer, and the strong introduction of Warzone.

2022 will see all of those games, content, and services carrying forward alongside the popular launch of Modern Warfare 2 and what should be an explosive release of Warzone 2.0 later this year.

We also can't forget about Warzone Mobile, which is coming sometime in 2023. Apart from the stellar franchise sales (Call of Duty managed to sell 25 million copies in one year alone, hitting a total of 425 million lifetime series sales as of mid-2022), the franchise's heavy impact on mobile is a big reason why Microsoft is poised to purchase Activision-Blizzard for nearly $70 billion.

Call of Duty Mobile has earned $1.5 billion as of April 2022, and comprised nearly 20% of the record high water mark franchise earnings in 2020.

Activision expects to make over $8.9 billion dollars this year on the backs of Modern Warfare 2, Warzone 2.0, Overwatch 2, Candy Crush, and new mobile experiences like Diablo Immortal.