Call of Duty: Modern Warfare may not have broken every sales record, but end-of-year reports suggest that 2019 may have been one of the franchise’s best-performing years on record. SuperData’s 2019 ‘Year in Review’ report on the performance of the games and interactive media industry estimates that the Call of Duty franchise as a whole generated around 1.13 billion dollars in revenue; an absolutely massive figure.
Call of Duty Franchise Revenue in 2019
Overall, SuperData’s new report found that 2019 was a record-breaking year for the gaming industry; total revenue rose by around 4% to $120.1 billion, and SuperData predicts similar growth for 2020. Of course, the profits of the Call of Duty franchise are dwarfed by the industry total. However, it did still bring in an enormous amount of revenue for Activision in 2019. Thanks to the performance of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, together with the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the franchise’s revenue totalled over a billion dollars.
Broken down, Modern Warfare’s profits were around $647 million, while Black Ops 4 made around $487 million. (No small amount in the latter case, given that the game launched back in 2018.) Indeed, given the performance of Black Ops 4 post-launch, Modern Warfare is similarly likely to generate significant profits in 2020. In fact, given Activision’s more intensive push towards a games-as-a-service model with Modern Warfare, it’s possible that it will be even more profitable than its predecessor.
Although Modern Warfare’s profits of $647 million are high, a few other properties did exceed them. FIFA 19, for example, made around $786 million; the highest earnings of any premium title. This figure, however, was dwarfed by the profits of the highest-earning free-to-play title; Fortnite. Epic Games’ juggernaut of a title was the single-highest-earning game in 2019, with profits exceeding $1.8 billion. (Almost three times as much as Modern Warfare!) It’s interesting to note that, almost counter-intuitively, free-to-play games make up considerably more of the industry’s total profits than premium titles do. Roughly 80% of the industry’s $120 billion revenue in 2019 came from free-to-play games.