Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Sales Start Strong Despite…

Summary

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had strong sales during its launch week, becoming the best-selling game on Steam and the UK's top-selling physical title for the week ending just a day after its November 10 release.
Modern Warfare 3's week-one physical sales in the UK were still 25% lower than its predecessor's.
The game's early commercial success arrived in spite of its poor critical reception and some vocal fan criticism.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 enjoyed strong sales during its launch week, topping the UK boxed chart and seizing the title of the best-selling game on Steam. Its early commercial success arrived in spite of a poor critical reception that saw Modern Warfare 3 become the worst-rated game in Call of Duty history.

The series' first-ever back-to-back sequel was largely panned for its extremely short and uninspired single-player campaign, with reviewers also criticizing Modern Warfare 3 for some recycled content. A vocal subset of the fandom has also lambasted the game for those and other reasons, as underlined by the fact that its Metacritic user score currently stands at 1.7 out of 10, while its early Steam reviews are in the "Mostly Negative" category.

Yet Modern Warfare 3 still debuted at the top of the UK boxed chart for the week ending November 11, GamesIndustry.biz reports, citing the latest GfK data. Sledgehammer's title hence displaced last week's number one, Super Mario Bros Wonder, and ended up outselling heavy-hitters such as EA Sports FC 24 and Marvel's Spider-Man 2. The PS5 port of Modern Warfare 3 accounted for 72% of its physical sales in the UK, while the Xbox and PS4 versions were credited for 20 and 8 percentage points, respectively.

GfK's Top 10 Best-Selling Physical Games in the UK for the Week Ending November 11

Game	Ranking	Last Week's Ranking
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3	1	New release
EA Sports FC 24	2	2
Super Mario Bros Wonder	3	1
Marvel's Spider-Man 2	4	3
Football Manager 2024	5	New Release
Nintendo Switch Sports	6	7
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe	7	5
Hogwarts Legacy	8	6
Minecraft: Switch Edition	9	9
Assassin's Creed Mirage	10	8

Since GfK doesn't estimate digital sales, the current picture of the game's commercial performance in the UK is incomplete. But that's not to imply that Modern Warfare 3 might not have done well digitally; on the contrary, the latest Call of Duty game has been listed as the best-selling title on Steam since before its global release. That launch happened on November 10 following a brief campaign early access period, which makes the fact that Modern Warfare 3 managed to top GfK's UK boxed chart for the week ending a day later all the more impressive.

MW3 Week-One Boxed Sales in the UK Are 25% Down Compared to MW2

Nevertheless, its week-one physical sales in the UK have still been 25% lower compared to last year's Modern Warfare 2, as per the same source. Whether that drop signals an overall decline in the series' annual performance or is merely proportional to the well-documented rate at which digital game sales have been replacing their physical counterparts in recent years remains to be seen.

The commercial success of the newly released shooter will likely decide whether Activision ends up rethinking its overall approach to the Call of Duty series by perhaps giving its developers a bit more breathing room between entries, much like some critics and fans have been calling for. In the meantime, both the publisher and Sledgehammer Games have denied the claim that Modern Warfare 3 was rushed after Bloomberg reported that the game was developed in only 16 months, which is an astonishingly short time frame for a modern AAA title.

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Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) Tag Page Cover Art

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First-Person Shooter

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OpenCritic Reviews: Top Critic Avg: 58 /100 Critics Rec: 14%

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Released: November 10, 2023
ESRB: M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Use of Drugs
Developer(s): Sledgehammer Games
Publisher(s): Activision
Engine: iw 9.0
Multiplayer: Online Multiplayer, Local Multiplayer
Cross-Platform Play: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One & Xbox Series X|S

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The war has changed. Call of Duty returns with an all-new campaign, modernized versions of classic Multiplayer maps and an open-world PvE Zombies experience. The campaign, a direct sequel to the record-breaking Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, sees Captain Price and Task Force 141 face off against ultranationalist war criminal Vladimir Makarov as he extends his grasp across the world. In Multiplayer, the 16 maps that launched with Modern Warfare 2 in 2009 return with upgraded graphics, new modes and innovative gameplay features. In Modern Warfare Zombies, team up with other squads for the first time ever as you work together to survive in the largest Zombies map yet