Call of Duty: Black Ops II makes $500mn within 24 hours of launch

The latest game in Activision’s flagship franchise, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, was released last week. According to Reuters, the company has revealed that the game has had sales of more than $500 million in the first 24 hours of release.

For the sake of comparison, one of the biggest games for the Xbox 360, the recently released Halo 4, saw about $220 million in sales on its first day. Though, this could be attributed to the fact that Halo 4 is an Xbox 360 exclusive release, whereas Black Ops II was released for all gaming platforms.

$500 million in the first 24 hours

This is par for the course when it comes to sales of games in the Call of Duty franchise. In 2011, Activision had reported $400 million worth of sales for the last year’s Call of Duty game - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The Call of Duty series has always seen record breaking sales since the release of Modern Warfare 2 back in 2009.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

A few days before the game’s release, it was revealed that the PC version of Black Ops II will have its FoV locked to a maximum of 80 degrees. The Treyarch community manager @pcdev had tweeted, “And don’t ask me to raise the FOV cap. Max is 80. Thankyouverymuch. <3, -pcdev”. When users asked Pcdev the reason for the FOV cap, he replied that technical limitations were stopping Treyarch, otherwise it would have increased the cap just to prevent a backlash from fans. FOVs are generally locked because of the hardware limitations of gaming consoles, as the consoles have problems streaming high-resolution textures in a game. The FOV is locked so that less in-game area is visible, and hence, less in-game area needs to be streamed. Games on the PC don’t generally have the same problem as the hardware on gaming PCs is leagues ahead in terms of power than that on gaming consoles, and hence, have no problems streaming more high-resolution textures.

This is a big deal when it comes to first person shooters because the FOV determines how much you can see in the first person view. While FPS games on consoles are usually capped at 60-65 degrees because of the hardware limitations of the systems, this isn’t a problem because players are generally far enough away from the screen for the FOV to be right. When playing a PC game, players are generally much closer to the screen and require an increased FOV to avoid feeling nauseous due to tunnel vision.

Back in 2009 when Activision had released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the company faced a lot of complaints from players for locking the FOV of the game to 60 and removing the capability of playing on dedicated servers. This forced PC gamers to play on peer-based games, which caused high amounts of problems if the host of the game was on a slow connection.