The numbers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are going to be monstrous when the tallies come in over the next few weeks. A sampling of Xbox 360 gamers who'd picked up Modern Warfare 2 on launch day last night suggests Activision and Infinity Ward's shooter is going to shatter records. As I shut down the game around 3:00 a.m. PST last night, I scrolled to the bottom of the Xbox Live global leaderboards. After nearly 30 minutes of scrolling down (there's no "see the bottom of the list" option and the list scrolls at a mind-numbing pace), the magic number appeared:
2.35 million.
There are apparently tens of thousands of players who have picked up Modern Warfare 2, popped into multiplayer for only a handful of seconds to a few minutes and racked up zero points in the process, but Infinity Ward's tracking data logged them anyway. The amount of players who have signed onto Xbox Live, if only to briefly check out multiplayer, was 2.35 million. That doesn't even take into account the many players (like me) who most likely are still engrossed in the single-player campaign.
This is just a isolated sampling taken on the first day of Modern Warfare 2's emergence onto the market, not to mention just one platform among three that Modern Warfare 2 is being sold on.