Bean counters rejoice, Activision’s Call of Duty Black Ops took in $650 million in revenue during its first five days on sale. That’s a record, of course, and an important one for entertainment industry buffs. Activision says the number shattered theatrical box office, book and video game sales records for five-day worldwide sell through in dollars,” making Black Ops the “largest entertainment launch in history.”
“Call of Duty has become the first entertainment property in history to set five-day launch records for two consecutive years across all forms of entertainment,” added Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. Modern Warfare 2, the company’s last Call of Duty game, held the previous record at $550 million in five-day sales.
Microsoft and Sony both want to sell you on their version of events. According to Microsoft, over 5.9 million multiplayer hours playing Black Ops were logged by launch day close, and over 2.6 million unique gamers played the game the same day. Sony won’t match figures, but claims the game is “driving unprecedented traffic to the PlayStation Network” and calls the PS3 version the “flagship online experience this holiday season.”
Operation Delouse
And with that out of the way, let’s get to the real news: Activision just released a slew of fixes for this tragically bug-riddled first-person shooter that should hypothetically quell further urges to slam the game on Metacritic, Amazon, and the game’s Steam forums.
The “full title update” includes a slew of matchmaking improvements, a party system tweak to ensure “parties don’t get broken apart,” client/server changes to “decrease the amount of failed Film uploads,” leaderboard fixes, audio fine-tuning, and other enhancements.
Further fixes are in the offing, and Treyarch promises “there will be many more to come.”
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