Activision Blizzard continues to print money with the Modern Warfare 2 video game. Today, the company launched its Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package for the PlayStation 3 and Windows PC.
Players who bought the game on those platforms can now download the additional multiplayer maps for $14.99.In the grand scheme of things, multiplayer maps are not big deals. But this one is generating more money than a lot of hit games.
When Activision Blizzard released the stimulus package on Xbox Live earlier this month, it set a record as more than a million gamers downloaded it in one day and more than 2.5 million did so in the first week. Now the rest of the gamer universe can do the same.
I thought it was a steep price for the amount of benefit it delivered, since there are only five maps and two of them were used in the original Modern Warfare game. But Modern Warfare 2 fans have spoken with their pocketbooks and are happily blasting each other in cyberspace. Activision Blizzard announced on April 15 that its first quarter revenues would be better than expected because of Modern Warfare 2 map pack sales, as well as better World of Warcraft revenues. Activision Blizzard reports results on Thursday.
Right now, the map packs are easy money for Activision Blizzard. But we’ll see how the company delivers on the Modern Warfare franchise in the future, given the troubles at its Infinity Ward studio, where the cofounders were fired and started a new game studio, Respawn Entertainment. That studio has hired a lot of Infinity Ward workers now.