Black Ops snares 1m concurrent players on Live, 140,000 on Steam

Call of Duty Black Ops looks to have been a sales success on its launch day, following fears that it may not outsell Modern Warfare 2.

A tweet by Treyarch community manager Josh Olin revealed that just shy of one million gamers were shown as playing the game on Xbox Live yesterday.

"Am I getting solid intel? Is there really almost 1,000,000 players on Xbox LIVE right now?" he exclaimed.

Meanwhile, Steam stats reveal that a peak of 77,609 people were playing the PC version's multiplayer mode concurrently over the last day, and 64,267 its singleplayer. This is a significantly higher amount than those playing perennial Steam multiplayer hits such as Counter-Strike and Modern Warfare 2 over the same period.

None of these figures represent the game's total sales, as in both instances they reveal just the number of owners of the game playing at a given time, and in the 360's case just those online and logged into Live.

In addition, Black Ops' unlocking on Steam was delayed in a number of territories until 10AM EST (3PM UK time). Furthermore, no data for PS3 is available as yet.

Twitter trends also highlighted Black Ops' dominance of gamers' attention, accruing a total of 104,830 tweets over the last 24 hours - with Microsoft's Kinect, which launched last night, mustering a mere 28,495 by comparison. Those figures refer only to Tweets using the relevant hashtags.