Call of Duty's sold $3 billion worth of product to over 200 million people in the last year

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare season 4 - Captain Price — (Image credit: Activision, Infinity Ward)

Activision has announced in a press release that the Call of Duty franchise, "as it shifts to a shared ecosystem business model", has surpassed over $3 billion in net bookings. The latter term is a metric for total sales, so this includes all game sales, DLC, merchandise, everything.

These numbers are exceptional. Activision says its year-to-date increase from 2019 shows "net bookings up over 80% and units sold through up over 40% year over year. Over 200 million people have played Call of Duty this year." It also says that across console and PC this means "the franchise has delivered the highest number of players in recorded history this year".

Activision EVP and general manager of Call of Duty Byron Beede writes: “The momentum over the last year across the Call of Duty ecosystem from free-to-play Warzone as well as post-launch support of Modern Warfare, and now to Black Ops Cold War has been incredible [...] We are focused on building a continuous pipeline featuring a tremendous amount of free, post-launch content and events across the franchise.”

Not everyone loves Cold War, but Warzone's momentum remains huge and, with the integration of the two games in December, shows no sign of slowing down.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."