Despite a bit of controversy in Russia, Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 has taken the video game world by storm, and now it is breaking sales records across the entire entertainment industry. The title reportedly generated $550 million in sales during the first five days available, beating all other video game launches and raking in more cash than any movie in the same timeframe.

Read the whole story

The only reason those movies took in less money is because it only costs between 5 and 10 dollars to go to a movie and it costs 60 for a new game, so more people went to those movies than baught those games the games are just 6 times as expansive hence the 5 day gross difference. =) hows that for some math

I think that's pretty obvious, and it takes nothing away from the game earning $550 million in sales during the first five days. :)

Those are some crazy money-making figures! Wonder what the production and development costs were for the game. Probably the same as most - around the 20-25 million dollar range.

Curious to see how L4D2 did in sales....

Comparing apples to oranges...movie sales vs game sales should not be compared. Kudos to Infinity Ward though.

I think Matthew covered that when he said "entertainment industry" It would be interesting to know how much it costs to produce a 'A' list game like CODMW2 compared to profits, as I believe I read that the average production cost of a major feature movie is 85 Million these days.

This game is awesome! It's common knowledge that the gaming industry makes more revenue than the movie industry.
The only down side to this game is that you can't play split screen on line.

It will be very hard to top this record. let's just hope that the next time this happens it will be done by an kick-*** game much better than this one ^_^

it has to be...a not-fun, dull game wont break a record.

It doesn't have to be a great game. It has an insane fanbase from the series. This alone will push massive purchases and pre-orders.

The game could be a complete disaster and it would still sell well out of the gates.

Lots of people are very upset with the game for valid reasons, and you see how it still sold.

First day/week sales are more reliant on marketing than real assessment.

If you could return Open Box software, ill bet my left nut, that half of the copies of this game would have been returned with in first week.

Instead, people are stuck with this game, thus they are trying to get the most out of their $60.

I'll agree that you can't return the opened game, But I don't see 4.5million copies ($550mil/$60 a game = 9.1mil copies) floating around E-Bay or craigslist. Nor do I see massive complaints and blogs/tweets/articles/facebook groups/etc stating how this game is a ripoff and not worth the hype.

Better get used to having 'only the lonely'

You cant sell it on e-bay or craigslist, because once the game is activated, it is tied in with your steam and email account for ever!

There are massive complaints as to how this game is a huge ripoff , you just looking at the wrong place,.. face book and twitter is the last place you should be looking.

please do tell....where would I find these mass uproars? I'd love to read about it.

Every PC game now-a-days has that same issue. Limited installs. DRM is awesome!!! But, that's something PC users deal with, old hash (look up spore...good stuff on that one)

The game can be listed on and selling site unless its a pc version... so far i havent heard one complaint about the game overall... this isnt including the glitches that pretty much every game experience.. but i do like to see these "uproar" complaints... only complaints i saw was ps3 mutliplayer went down for half a day... its been over a week and i still play it for 5 hours place... the online mutlipalyer gaming is intense anything can happen...

that russian thing was false, the game didn't get recalled in the end... just rumors.
and MW2 sold well just because of the hype, it wasn't such a great game...
still, makes me wanna work in games..

Those are defintely some massive sales numbers...550 million in the first five days!
It's a shame though that they destroyed everything that made multiplayer on PC cool. No more dedicated servers and no more real lan support. We've had a ton of PC lan parties playing CoD 4 and were really looking forward to Modern warfare two only to find out we can play it on the lan.
Definitely a disappointment there

Still many are disappointed by the game but the numbers talks! And besides that who said they can't fix the MP with a massive patch? :)

The BEST War game PERIOD........