Lending weight to CEO Bobby Kotick's claim that Call of Duty is as much a social networking phenomenon as it is a video gaming one, Activision released numbers boasting of online time that, per user, surpasses the Facebook average.
More than 20 million users on Call of Duty: Black Ops logged more than 600 million hours of playtime between the game's Nov. 9 release and Dec. 24, Activision said. That computes to an average of 87 minutes per day per player. Facebook's per-day/per-user average is around 55 minutes.
Gamasutra noted that the Xbox 360 exclusive Halo: Reach logged 50 million man-hours of play over its first week of availability - or a little over half of Black Ops' total if it was sustained over 45 days.
In an interview with CNN last week, Kotick boasted of Call of Duty's heft alongside Facebook, text messaging, and other social networking phenomena. "The audience of 'Call of Duty' is probably greater in terms of size than in any other interactive form of entertainment," Kotick said.
Activision: Over 20 Million Black Ops Players Log More Than 600 Million Hours [Gamasutra]