- Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 logged more than $550M in its first weekend of sales, Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI +0.2%) reports, establishing an early benchmark for a crucial holiday season for games and retailers overall.
- The company happily compared the three days to every other entertainment launch this year, including Jurassic World -- which grossed some $523M worldwide in its opening three days.
- Activision has a new partnership with Sony's PlayStation as the preferred partner platform, and the new game set a platform record for first-day sellers (digital full game, by units moved).
- Fans also played more than 75M hours online over the weekend in the multiplayer-heavy first-person military shooter. It's on a pace for more hours per player than any other Call of Duty game, says Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg.
- Digital downloads overall on next-gen consoles was up nearly 100% from the year-ago launch of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
- Call of Duty is a $10B franchise for Activision Blizzard, and a critical piece going forward: Activision is basing a key part of its e-sports strategy on a worldwide league around the game, and it plans a "robust cinematic universe" around the game as a key project for its new film studio.
- Previously: Activision creates TV/film studio to build off games; releases 'Black Ops 3' (Nov. 06 2015)
- Previously: E-sports: Activision widens competition; Turner has prime-time plans (Sep. 24 2015)