Summary
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3enjoyed 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 sawModern Warfare 3become the worst-rated game inCall of Dutyhistory.
The series' first-ever back-to-back sequel was largely panned for its extremely short and uninspired single-player campaign, withreviewers also criticizingModern Warfare 3for 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.
YetModern Warfare 3still 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 asEA Sports FC 24andMarvel’s Spider-Man 2. The PS5 port ofModern Warfare 3accounted for 72% of its physical sales in the UK, while the Xbox and PS4 versions were credited for 20 and 8 percentage points, respectively.
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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 thatModern Warfare 3might not have done well digitally; on the contrary, the latestCall of Dutygame 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 thatModern Warfare 3managed 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’sModern 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 whichdigital game sales have been replacing their physical counterpartsin 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 theCall of Dutyseries 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 havedenied the claim thatModern Warfare 3was rushedafter Bloomberg reported that the game was developed in only 16 months, which is an astonishingly short time frame for a modern AAA title.
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023)
WHERE TO PLAY
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
