Call of Duty Elite's launch was rocky, Activision tells us, missteps were made, but we've never had any sense of just how many paying customers it might have attracted, until now.
During their third-quarter earnings report yesterday, GameStop spilled the beans on just how many people picked up the paid version of the community-building, stat-tracking, movie-playing, ability-tweaking, 404-error-delivering, in-game video-hosting service. (It also includes a year's worth of DLC.)
"In the case of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, we worked closely with Activision, Sony and Microsoft to pre-order and deliver nearly 600,000 instances of the Modern Warfare 3 DLC Elite to date," GameStop president Tony Bartel said yesterday. "This places the launch of Elite as one of our top ten launches of the year so far. The consumer demand for downloadable content at launch is very strong...."
Of course, that doesn't count the online orders for the service, which can be purchased fairly easily from a console. Nor does it account for the likely millions of non-paying members, who are checking out the chunky free-version of the service.
Bartel adds that a lot of people buying DLC from them, often have never purchased it before.
"Based on our research we know that one half of the DLC we sell is to customers that have never purchased DLC before," he said.
You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.