Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is released

“Modern Warfare 3”, the eighth game in the “Call of Duty” series is now out. While the usual suspects like GameStop and Best Buy will be open late to accommodate the crowds, Wal-Mart is going all out by hosting tournaments centered around the game at more than 2,700 stores in the US. Best Buy is also offering a smartphone with the game reported VentureBeat.

To give you some idea of how big the market for this game is, last year it took a little over two months for “Call of Duty: Black Ops”, the seventh game in the Call of Duty series to generate $1 billion in global sales. According to a report by Bloomberg the eighth “Call of Duty” may sell as many as 6 million copies in 24 hours starting today and 18 million units by 1 January.

In 2010, the last edition of the Activision military game sold more than 5.6 million copies, or $360 million worth units on its first day on sale. That is more than double Harry Potter’s record-breaking opening weekend box office take in June.

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But how much will it make this year?

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said that he expects “Modern Warfare 3” to outsell its predecessor by 10 percent and for 5.5 million to 6 million units on its first day. The game should sell 18 million units in the December quarter alone, he said.

VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi, reported, "

As I went on the multiplayer version of Modern Warfare 3, the indicator map show green dots where people were already playing across the globe. The map showed big swaths of green in Australia, Western Europe, and the East Coast of the United States. And more than 100,000 players were already ranked in the Call of Duty Elite Leaderboard."

USA Today already has a review out for the game by Mike Snider, where he writes that

“This new Modern Warfare plays out like the previous installments in the hit series - and that’s a good thing. The bigger-than-life plot touches down in London, Paris, Berlin and Prague, as well as Siberia and Somalia.”

The early indicators are that the game is bigger, better and has a lot of action for all the die hard gaming fans.

With inputs from Reuters