Call of Duty is Best-Selling Video Game Franchise For a Decade Straight

Year after year, Call of Duty continues to maintain its success, despite changes in market trends along with the ups and downs of the video game industry. Even when major changes to the series arise, like traveling to space, going to the distant future, or completely removing its single-player campaign mode, the games print money. Today, Activision thanked fans via their blog as 2018 marks the tenth year in a row in which Call of Duty is the best-selling video game franchise in the US, with Black Ops 4 taking the top spot last year. These stats come from the NPD group, a market research company that tracks video game sales.

This is huge news, considering how many incredible games have released within the past decade. We all expect Call of Duty to sell, but putting it into perspective and looking back over 10 years worth of games is amazing. The series has come a long way since its original release in 2003 and really took off with 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Call of Duty topped the charts with Modern Warfare 2 in 2009 and hasn’t looked down since.

Since the release of Call of Duty 2 in 2005, we’ve seen annual entries in the series ranging from WWII, to Vietnam, modern warfare and beyond, with various story arcs throughout. The most recent release, Black Ops 4, is unique in that it’s the first game in the series to exclude a single-player campaign mode, something that many believed would hurt the game’s sales. Clearly, it still came out on top in 2018, marking this momentous occasion for the series.

Whether you love it or hate it, the fact that Call of Duty has been the best-selling console game for a decade straight is telling, and it the franchise deserves much praise for this accomplishment. In total, the series has sold an estimated 250 million copies, with Black Ops 4 reaching $500 million in sales within its first weekend after release.

As Activision and Infinity Ward gear up for this year’s Call of Duty, we can’t help but wonder if the series will continue this trend. We don’t know what the next game will be, but we have a couple guesses.