Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 left an inch-deep bootprint on video gaming's biggest retail month, and dominated most measures the popular press use to designate big-game-itude. Yet Peter Moore, the Electronic Arts chief operating officer, is insisting his label's Battlefield 3 drew blood from the year's biggest commercial release.
"I think when the dust fully settles, maybe when we're looking at the end of our fiscal year, we'll do an analysis and I think we will have taken [market] share," Moore told MCV. "I don't think there's any doubt about that, unless everything BF3 sells is just incremental."
Moore also suggested that the Battlefield—Modern Warfare rivalry benefitted "gamers and the industry," so he may be offering a deeper meaning than the usual zero-sum calculation. Maybe the market grew. Maybe Battlefield took more of that market. Maybe a bunch of people bought both Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, considering the first came out two weeks before the second, who knows.
I just know that we're due for annual releases of both series from now until who knows when, both published by companies with unearthly resources, so no matter what happened or happened this year, it's not settled.
EA: Battlefield 3 stole market share from Modern Warfare 3 [MCV]