So apparently Black Ops has made more money that just about anything, ever. Honestly, 25 million copies sold is a huge deal, and the seventh entry in the Call of Duty series has reached that point less than one year after release, according to a recent Activision sales call. The thing it had to surpass in order to win the title of Best Selling Whatever Of All Time Or Something was its predecessor, Modern Warfare 2 which is currently weighing in at a hefty 22 million units sold. You’ve probably heard how Black Ops made over a billion dollars within six weeks of release. A billion dollars. That is ten times more than one hundred millllion dollars. That is more than the GDP of some developing countries. Enter Battlefield 3. Did you hear about how EA thinks they can take down Activision this holiday season? Because they do, and to that end they’re pouring a cool hundred mil into marketing their new high-tech juggernaut because they believe that they can outsell the greatest selling series of all time. Let the chaos and fanboyism ensue.
This showdown has been a long time coming.
In the fall of 2002 I was in middle school and I kept hearing people talk about this game where you could go into online arenas and shoot other people. Apparently it was really good. Now this concept was nothing new, there was already Quake, Unreal, Tribes, and other games of the like, but there was something special about this one. It wasn’t set in some fantastical magical futuristic arena, it was set in World War Two. The game was Battlefield 1942, and while I was trying to learn pre-algebra, it was busy taking the world by storm.
The World War Two Shooter genre had been largely pioneered a few years earlier in 1999 by Medal of Honor, and the market flooded with games trying to achieve the same level of success. Battlefield 1942, developed by DICE, rose to prominence because of it’s deep and well balanced multiplayer, however nothing seemed to be able to touch Medal of Honor’s engrossing single player campaign. Cue Call of Duty.
A year after the release of 1942, Call of Duty, developed by Infinity Ward, wowed players with its cinematic storytelling. Additionaly, it was the first game in the genre to succesfully give a player the sense that they were actually part of an army, fighting alongside AI comrades. Online play was fun, but nowhere near as deep as that offered by 1942. So the stage was set. For the next few years, Call of Duty would be known for it’s dramatic singleplayer, and Battlefield would be recognized for it’s engrossing multiplayer.
Battlefield was the first series to make the jump to the modern era in 2005 with Battlefield 2. It focused almost entirely on perfecting the class-based multiplayer dynamic that it had pioneered with 1942. Call of Duty followed suit two years later with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. However unlike Battlefield 2, which was released only for PC, Modern Warfare was released for three consoles simultaneously. That year it surpassed Halo 3 as the best selling video game in the US, and for all intents and purposes, sealed itself securely in the position of best-selling shooter series.
Now, it’s October 2011. In just over a week, Battlefield 3, the eleventh game in the series will be released. Two weeks later will see the release of Modern Warfare 3, the eighth game in the Call of Duty series. Battlefield certainly has quite an uphill battle to fight, but they think they can do it.
What do I think? I’m not so sure. It’s almost guaranteed that both games will be well received critically, and chances are good that many adult gamers will simply pick up both. However at this point, Call of Duty is the juggernaut, and for those who haven’t been die-hard fans of Battlefield, MW3 may simply be the safe bet. To be honest the whole thing is actually a little absurd to me. There is an incredibly popular game of a very specific genre (modern military first person shooter), and there is another studio saying, “We’re going to make a better game of the exact same type.”
Bear with me, and think about Pirates of the Caribbean for a moment. Like it or not, it’s hard to argue that it was at least a very popular series of movies. Now imagine if, prior to the release of one of the PotC movies, another movie studio had announced, “We are also going to release our own Piratey Fantasy Adventure Film, only ours will be better!” It sounds ridiculous, but that’s exactly what’s happening.
The thing I’m least looking forward to is the immanent debate that will surely break out in the gaming community over which game is better. It’s never enough just to have a preference, you need to make sure everyone else has the same preference as you, and if they don’t only one response will do: contempt. Maybe it would be good for our upcoming presidential election if we could practice a year in advance not disdaining people who don’t agree with us. But that’s a post for another time.
So there’s the story of these two series, and we’re going to get to see how it all plays out in a matter of weeks.Personally I’m looking forward to Battlefield (that Frostbite 2 engine is just so pretty), but my money is on MW3 keeping the top spot. What about you? What game do you think will be better? Which do you think will be the top seller? Weigh in below.