On July 9, ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 were released by Xbox Game Studios. The ports were handled by Iron Galaxy, and despite the uncertainty surrounding Xbox’s future multiplatform strategy, they were released on PS5. And boy, did they do well.
According to the latest data from the Alinea Analytics newsletter, written by Rhys Elliott, Call of Duty: Black Ops managed to sell 3 million copies on PS5 and PS4, generating $110 million in revenue. Not too shabby, yeah?
However, the really staggering numbers belong to Black Ops 2, which sold—hold your breath for this one—8.2 million copies. Apparently, 93% of those sales were on PS5, with just 7% on PS4.
Going back to the first Black Ops, 94% of its sales were also on PS5, bringing in $325 million in revenue.
Combined, that’s 11.2 million copies sold and $435 million in revenue on PlayStation in just under a month. Those are mind-destroying numbers and a massive financial boost for Xbox. And Sony.
You see, Sony’s 30% platform cut would equate to roughly $130 million in revenue dropping straight into Sony’s constantly hungry pockets for doing pretty much nothing except hosting two backwards-compatible ports from its biggest competitor. The rest, well, that flowed straight into Xbox’s coffers.
Considering Microsoft did very little in terms of marketing, and there will be no ongoing development costs, Xbox is looking at a pretty hefty payday from two fairly bare-bones ports. That’s not to belittle the work done by Iron Galaxy, but these can’t have been especially expensive projects. I’m sure the profit margins are impressive, to say the least.
In fact, to put it into a bit more perspective, Rhys Elliott points out that the combined $435 million in revenue is already nearly as much as Forza Horizon 6 has made from base game sales all year.
The timing was also very much in Xbox’s favour. Just as we’re about to head into what’s shaping up to be a very busy September, July didn’t have too much landing, so these ports weren’t buried beneath a flood of other releases. It’s also another nice way to build momentum towards the launch of this year’s Call of Duty.
Basically, it was a win-win situation for Xbox and even for PlayStation, which got to rake in a huge chunk of bonus money for doing exactly fucking nothing.
Unfortunately, Alinea did not provide sales data for the other platforms.