Modern Warfare 3 might be selling like hot cakes and breaking records every second day, but that doesn’t mean it obliterated the competition. Its biggest rival, Battlefield 3, performed exceptionally well, selling huge amounts and receiving more or less the same scores as MW3.
EA COO Peter Moore believes Battlefield 3 has taken a large share of Modern Warfare 3’s sales. “It’s early days and we’re only a month in – we feel very good about it,” he told IndustryGamers.
“Ten million sold in and five million sold through doesn’t come out of nowhere – if we haven’t gained share, that means in the first week we’ve added five million new FPS gamers.
“I think when the dust fully settles, maybe when we’re looking at this at the end of our fiscal year (March 31, 2012) we’ll do an analysis and I think we will have taken share. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, unless everything BF3 sells is just incremental.”
“But I’m more focused on how we’ve done by our gamer and consumers, and yes many of them bought both games undoubtedly,” he continued. ”
Have our retail partners enjoyed this? Absolutely. And does this help push the game industry to the front pages of newspapers? You bet it does.
“Go look at USA Today, go look at The New York Times – the big entertainment blockbusters this year are not movies, they’re video games. Call of Duty and Battlefield have done that.”
So it looks like EA did manage to do what they wanted to all along. Now, for the big win with the next installment… I guess.