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

Wed 10 Nov 2010 9:28am GMT / 4:28am EST / 1:28am PST
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Plus 105k daily Tweets vs Kinect's 28k

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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.

14 Comments

Pier Castonguay
Programmer

What a good way to say invalid information. This article's title seems like it want to sink down PC games when you know a first person shooter like this is much more interesting on PC.

The actual reason for the lack of players, if you visited any community forum about the game yesterday, the multiplayer portion of the game have a extreme lag and people are waiting for a patch. Didn't try to game myself yet though.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Pier Castonguay on 10th November 2010 1:25pm

Posted:2 years ago

#1

Alec Meer
Director

Rock, Paper, Shotgun Ltd

I think you've misinterpreted, Pier. There's no intent to be down on PC games whatsoever, it's just reporting the numbers: rather, it's actually a reflection of a game selling very well on PC in just one day.

Posted:2 years ago

#2

Christopher Weaver
Independent Computer Games Professional

Frogster America

I have no way of proving what I am about to say, but I wanted to say this.

Last night I tried out Call of Duty: Black Ops on Xbox 360. When I entered the game on Xbox-Live in the lower left side of the screen it said there were over 2.4 Million players playing. So your intel must be correct, as what I seen with my own eyes more then doubled the number you posted. If you could check with your sources again you should find its well over the 1 Million.

Posted:2 years ago

#3

Shaun Farol
Studying Computer Information Systems

California Polytechnic State University

Just to confirm what Christopher Weaver is saying I too am suprised by the 1 Million number because I saw Xbox-Live reporting 2.4 Million players playing last night in the lower left side of the screen as well. Definately 1 Million at least. Possibly even more depending on who you are listening too.

Posted:2 years ago

#4

David Rider
Publisher

Hustler UK

As an Xboxer who took the day off work yesterday to get stuck into the MP section of the game (for the record, this is not the sort of thing a man in his 40s should be doing, as my wife points out regularly). I watched the number of users on Xbox Live go up and up. Although I was still in the top 10,000 on the leaderboards, I suspect things will have changed dramatically when I next log on…

Posted:2 years ago

#5

Terence Gage
Freelance writer

"Although I was still in the top 10,000 on the leaderboards"

You posted just so you could get that in, didn't you David! ;)

Posted:2 years ago

#6

Ian White
Animator

Rebellion Developments

Was at 1.8 then 2.1million when I was online last night

Posted:2 years ago

#7

Christopher Willis

Can't wait to see the sells numbers here after week 1. I don't really care much about how many were online at once as much, but up to 2.4 million is pretty amazing.

According to the link below it wasn't 5 million copies sold in 24 hours but a whopping 7 million. 7 million motherfrickin' copies of this game already sold! I wander though if it will pass the total 22 million that MW2 had in total.

http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/82685...

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Christopher Willis on 10th November 2010 5:56pm

Posted:2 years ago

#8

Jorge Gonzalez Sanchez
President

Blue River S.A.

I wish original, good games had this kind of attention. COD itself is a rehash of a rehash of a rehash. Not a single original gameplay mechanic, storyline or character can be found in this entire franchise.

Meanwhile, things like Team ICO's products, Shenmue and Katamari Damacy go unnoticed.

Some guy said once "nobody ever went broke underestimating the american public". I guess he was spot on.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Jorge Gonzalez Sanchez on 10th November 2010 6:22pm

Posted:2 years ago

#9

Temi
Web design

@jorge the MP could probably be kept from cod2 till now and simply modded to what it is today. I still have to give them credit though as few games come close to being as good in MP.

Posted:2 years ago

#10

Kaneda Maskell
Engineer

I still feel sad for all the XBOX gamers who play FPS on a console and believe that is good as it gets, alas they shall never know the pure pleasure of PC FPS gaming.

Posted:2 years ago

#11

David Rider
Publisher

Hustler UK

@ Terence, my prowess with Battlefield 1943 saw me in the top 1000...

Posted:2 years ago

#12

Richard Pattie
Critic/Writer

I used to play FPS's on PC. Now I play them on Xbox Live. It's not that one is better than the other, more of a persons personal preference. My preference is Console, other opinions may vary. There is no need to get defensive about something so dependant on personal preference.

Posted:2 years ago

#13

Jordan Woodward
Studying Interactive Games Design

University of Gloucestershire

That is absolutely insane but not at all surprising considering the amount of people I know who went out at midnight to get it and stayed up to complete it lol.

Posted:2 years ago

#14

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