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Activision’s digital-only Call of Duty: Black Ops ports dominated the PS5 in July, according to estimates from analytics firm Alinea.
The sales tracker claims that the two PS3 games – rereleased on modern hardware with no improvements – sold a combined 11.2 million copies on the PS Store, more than every other game on its chart combined.
The sequel, Black Ops 2, sold best – accounting for 8.2 million sales.
While we criticised these barebones ports in our reviews, they shot straight to the top of the PS Store charts upon launch, and apparently had more players on PS5 than latest game Black Ops 7 across all platforms combined.
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The biggest surprise for parent company Microsoft may be seeing these ports handily outsell its remake Halo: Campaign Evolved, which is estimated to have sold 351k in July (rising to 452k at the present).
While that number may seem low, Alinea predicts the game did even worse on Steam, where it’s predicted to have sold just 212k copies. This number excludes Xbox on PC, however.
I asked analyst Rhys Elliot for clarification of his company’s 900k prediction for the game on Xbox, and he told me this number accounts for “sold through plus the Game Pass early access upsell”.
This implies to me it’s excluding people who played the game purely as part of their subscription, so the total number of players should be much higher on Xbox overall.
I’m a little surprised at the estimated discrepancy between PlayStation and Xbox here considering the novelty of this release and the install base difference, although I suppose it makes sense that Master Chief’s fanbase would mostly exist on Microsoft’s own machine.
The rest of the estimates are largely unremarkable; we know, for example, AC Black Flag Resynced has done really well, so it’s no surprise to see it pick up a ton of sales on the PS5.
The release of Palworld v1.0 also appears to have given the game a good bump across all platforms, and so that’s reflected in these predictions.
It should be noted that there’s still debate over the methodology of Alinea, and how accurate its numbers actually are.
Several industry insiders claim its figures are in the right ballpark, but some of its other predictions have been proven to be pretty inaccurate.
As always, consider this data an estimate until more reliable information emerges.