It's been a common excuse for underwhelming early PS3 releases, but according to Infinity Ward, the developer of the Call of Duty series, developing the game on the PlayStation 3 was easy.
In honour of PlayStation's 30th birthday yesterday in the US, data company Circana has dug out figures showing the top 20 best-selling PlayStation video games ever (date-range Jan 1995 to July 2025). Don't get too excited.
This is a great reminder of how game sales have become more concentrated in a smaller number of games/series over time. In the PS1/PS2 era a game was a success if it sold a million or a few million copies. The GTA games (3/Vice City/San Andreas) were pretty big outliers in selling as much as they did during the PS2 era. So in the minds of a lot of gamers something like FF VII feels like it was as big of a PS1 game as God of War 2018 was for PS4, but in reality far fewer people bought it (though it has obviously reached additional people through remasters, etc.).
What this says to me is, not many people are buying a PS to play PS exclusives. Like so many false narratives, like Xbox gamers don't buy games! It seems Playstation as a default system is a vanilla system to play call of duty, Minecraft, GTA games and a sports games.
if you look back into the PS history, it has always been the 3rd parties who sells the most games. it was just that the PS1 and PS2 were so dominant that many of those 3rd party games were exclusives. so, back during the PS1 and PS2 days, the strategy was "to sell as many consoles as possible in order to sell more 1st party exclusives" to ride on that wave. The strategy to push many 1st party exclusives to sell consoles only started with the PS3 when many of those prior 3rd party exclusives went multiplat but more accurately, it started with the PSP.
Sony saw with the PSP, which was being trounced in sales by the DS, that 3rd party exclusives are hard to come by if you're not dominating the market. So they started building more 1st party games and when the PS3 were facing difficulties in sales, they knew they had to rely on their own to differentiate the PS3 from the 360. So the strategy back then changed to "release more 1st party exclusives in order to sell more consoles".
the only manufacturer that is still consistently selling their hardware to play 1st party exclusives, is Nintendo, and that was because they gave up the armrace for power thus they can't rely on 3rd parties anymore as all multiplats play better on competing consoles. AND that's also why they are the most ominous in going after emulators and also patent trolling!
so, you're not wrong there, but not an "aha!" moment or anything. it has been this way since the last, at least, 15 years for Playstation.
@zerobalance
So... what this tells you is that Call of duty, being the absolute check writer that it is, has been outsold by Last of us, God of war, 2 Spider man games..... Saying Playstation exclusives doesn't sell is like saying call of duty doesn't sell because they have outsold some of iterations. Does that make sense to you?
Everything you need to know about Modern Warfare III coming to Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.
Will be interesting to see what sort of numbers GP users draw in come tomorrow. It is believed that this is one many have been waiting for.
Darth,
That is not accurate; this game is old, and most people who want it have already bought it. You might get a small number of subs, but we will mostly see a good influx of players(not new subs) from people with Game Pass who will try it, which is what happened with D4.
CoD: BO 6 will be the test for actual sub numbers.
That's fair... seeing as many have been saying they want CoD in GP. My comment was more of , now that its here... what can it do. Im sure there will be other titles in the franchise that will either entice or turn off different users.
No one's buying a console and signing up for a monthly bill just to get this game to avoid buying it. That's ridiculous. Besides everyone bagged the crap out of this on release for the 4 hour campaign.
MW 2019 is five years old at this point and on previous gen hardware, but it is still the best looking Call of Duty game to date.
MW was an excellent videogame. They messed up Spec Ops big time, but aside from this it was a huge step in the right direction initially. Most notably, at launch it seemed to come from a very cohesive creative vision that was felt across gameplay, to story to art style/visual direction. It was also very notably written by prominent ex-Naughty Dog guys that quit almost immediately before release.
That COMPLETELY dissolved through post-launch content and the full pivot to a "cross-mode" narrative that completely obliterated the cohesion in overall story direction. Warzone then "became" the new face of Call of Duty and the franchise completely removed itself from anything remotely creatively "good". It is a pure money machine, so I kinda get why they're doing it....but I personally completely lost interest.
I would love to see Infinity Ward move off CoD and get to make their own product with full control. They clearly have some massive talent in their ranks but it's perverted by Activision's corporate interests.
Who said it was not easy? that it took longer to get to know the system does not mean is harder to dev for it. Look at Kojima's Team(MGS4).
I guess it all depends on who are the devs.
the developers get used to making games on it and when that happens it's a wrap ....there going to start making some crazy games on it...this is good for gamers like myself
no matter what console
thats why we got games on time from Team ninja. and COD4 devs Infinity ward. i will support them to the end because they rock. awesome devs deserve our money.
and comments like this from the developers will finally shut-up the lazy developers who whine that the PS3 is harder to develop for.