A few months ago there was a popular game called Halo 3. Anybody remember that game? You know, the game that was marketed everywhere until you got sick of looking at the ads on television, burger joints, and the Internet.
But an odd thing happened recently. When you logged onto Xbox Live, it seems that all your friends were missing from Halo 3.
There was a reason for this and its name was Call of Duty 4.
Mark Rubin, the producer of CoD 4 at Infinity Ward, released the figures of just how popular CoD4 has become. According to him the game is reaching numbers of "between 1.2 and 1.3 million users every day."
Rubin underscored the success of CoD4 by pointing out that these figures are only the numbers for Xbox Live.
"That’s just 360. There’s even more on the other platforms [PS3 and PC], but we just don’t have the same numbering system. Overall, even without the other consoles, we are beating the competition. PS3 numbers are monstrously huge. No other game has come close, either online current, or total unique users in a day."
What Rubin is obliquely referring to, as far as daily numbers are concerned, is how CoD4 is fragging its competition — namely Bungie Studios’ Halo 3. "We’ve created a lot of heartache for a lot of companies who go up against [CoD4]. I think Halo’s website says they get something around 845,000 to a million [per day]."
While the big bucks were clearly behind the marketing efforts of Halo 3, it seems that the newest kid on the block has overtaken the biggest kid on the block by currently appealing to more fans of the shooter genre.
But as games go, the lead can only be held on to for a finite period of time so until the next new game comes along before Call of Duty 4 is dethroned, Infinity Ward can bask in the warm sunshine of success.
[via gameindustry]
