By: Aseem Gaurav, May 10, 2011
California-based Activision Blizzard, one of the largest video game publishers and online entertainment companies in the world, is on a high as its insanely popular “Call of Duty: Black Ops” has become the best-selling online game of all time for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The game series was launched across multiple platforms last November.
Activision Blizzard's Q1 2011 financial results revealed that Black Ops was able to achieve this feat in the first quarter and it is the "best-selling game of all time in dollars" on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC "in the US and Europe.
In the financial results report, for the quarter ended March 31, the company said its income jumped to $503 million, from $381 million, a year earlier.
It also said that for the first quarter, it had three top-10 PC titles with Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and Activision Publishing's Call of Duty: Black Ops.
The company mentioned that total unique online gamers playing Call of Duty: Black Ops were more than 33 per cent greater online gamers who played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the first five months after each game's release.
A second content pack, Black Ops Escalation, which was released last week on Xbox Live and Activision, has also generated rave reviews by consumers which the company hopes to sell it in the PlayStation Store later in the quarter, if the PlayStation network can be restored.
The company also sold 1.4 million units of its First Strike map pack for Black Ops in the first 24 hours after its release in February which “shattered” previous online downloadable content sales records, said Thomas Tippl, chief operating officer of Activision Blizzard.
More than 1.2 billion hours of online game play have been logged by Black Ops players.
Activision Blizzard is working on a new Call of Duty game called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 which may be released by the end of this year, but the company did not confirm its release date. With all hype surrounding its release it is believed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will be the biggest game in world once released.
