Black Ops 4 breaks record on first day digital sales

Activision has announced that Black Ops 4 release day broke sales records among all the Call of Duty instalments, including Call of Duty: WWII from 2017. The title had very strong sales on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and became Activision’s best-selling digital game of all time.

Same can be said about PC sales. Black Ops 4 is very successfully sold on Battle.net store, the same one Blizzard uses to distribute games like Overwatch, World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3. CoD is the second franchise that has been moved to Battle.net from other online game stores on PC.

Black Ops 4 success is attributed to smooth beta experience and the new Battle Royale mode, implemented in the game. Developers did a very good job adapting the game to this popular genre, which feels like PUBG with zombies and familiar CoD mechanics, although they might have oversold it to some gamers.

The game doesn’t have a full-fledged campaign, but developers released 3 maps to fight against zombies (4 maps if you bought Black Ops Pass). Standard multiplayer is slightly changed with more tactical complexity than previous games. The cooldown on healing and frequent firefights force players to be more careful about their positioning.

Despite a huge success on digital platforms, physical sales of the game are extremely lacklustre. GamesIndustry.biz reports that Black Ops has been experiencing the slowest physical sales over the last 11 years of Call of Duty game launches. Very few people want to go to a store for a game they could purchase online in just a few clicks.