http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/11/06/call-of-duty-ghosts-sells-1-billion-into-retail-in-24-hours
Activision has announced that it sold more than $1 billion of Call of Duty: Ghosts into retail for the game's worldwide launch.
Curiously, the publisher has decided against disclosing how much money was generated by sales of the game in the first 24 hours; instead, this figure merely reveals how much stock was sold to retailers ahead of launch. It doesn't confer any insight into actual sales to consumers.
So while it may sound like COD: Ghosts succeeded in its aim to snatch back some records from GTA V, we don't actually know what's happened yet. GTA V made $800 million from sales in its first day; Activision hasn't released a comparable figure for Ghosts yet - possibly because it doesn't want to.
Despite this, Ghosts has been decreed the number one game on Xbox Live, setting a "new high watermark" for average play time, beating out Black Ops 2 and Modern Warfare 3 "during the same time period".
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said, "Call of Duty is by far the largest console franchise of this generation. More people have played Call of Duty this year than ever before, logging four billion hours of gameplay. And in the last 12 months,Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, including its digital content, generated more revenues than any other console game ever has in a single year. Although it is too early to assess sell-through for Call of Duty: Ghosts, it's launching at a time when the franchise has never been more popular."
With next-gen versions of the games coming soon, there's always the possibility that Activision wants to wait until it has the full picture before disclosing figures. But with Kotick saying it's "too early to assess sell-through" for the game, it's slightly odd that the decision was made to announce anything right now.
