Call of Duty Vanguard, the one that missed expectations, still sold 30 million copies

Call of Duty Vanguard, the one that didn't live up to Activision's expectations, has apparently sold 30 million copies across a two-year span.

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There's no other video game franchise quite like Call of Duty. No other game series are able to consistently sell tens of millions of full-priced premium games per year while also making billions of dollars in microtransactions along the way. Official numbers are sparse--we know that the shooter series has made over $31 billion as of Modern Warfare II's release in October 2022, for instance--even doubly so now that Microsoft owns Activision, but it looks like there's an inadvertent sales update from a surprising source.

We don't have official updates for total Call of Duty game sales and/or lifetime revenue. We did get an interesting snippet at Vanguard's overall performance, which is at over 30 million sales. That's according to Brian Hong, who worked as a social media strategist on Call of Duty Vanguard's marketing campaign.

The data was included in Hong's LinkedIn CV, and what I find most interesting about the info is the time table. Hong worked at Roughmint Consulting for 2 years, from June 2021 to June 2023. It's possible that Vanguard sold 30 million copies in this timeframe, which could mean Vanguard reached the milestone in less than 2 years on the market.

Whatever the case may be, neither Activision nor Microsoft have delivered any sort of updated metrics on the franchise, let alone for individual games like Vanguard.

Activision did share its disappointment with Vanguard's initial sales. Here's what ATVI said in a brief from 2022:

"While Call of Duty remains one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time, our 2021 premium release didn't meet our expectations, we believe primarily due to our own execution. The game's World War II setting didn't resonate with some of our community and we didn't deliver as much innovation in the premium game as we would have liked."