Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – there are other games? (pic: Activision)
Sony’s costing cutting on marker pens has cost it dearly, as it reveals some peculiar Call Of Duty statistics that it meant to keep secret.
For many people, even those that spend hundreds of hours a year on their console, video games mean only Call Of Duty and/or FIFA (or other sports if you’re in the US). That’s been understood to be the case for decades now but, as with most things in the games industry, there’s never been any hard data to verify it.
Now there is though, with Sony’s failed attempts at redacting information about the budgets of The Last Of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West also revealing that 1 million PlayStation owners playing nothing but Call Of Duty.
It’s not entirely clear how many people that’s out of (and it seems to include both PlayStation 4 and 5 owners) but it’s still a staggering figure, with over 6 million PlayStation gamers spending 70% of their time only on Call Of Duty.
These figures come from Sony documents submitted in the ongoing court case between Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and all the numbers were supposed to be redacted.
Whatever marker pen Sony’s lawyers used though, the original print was still visible afterwards, once it was scanned, and so it’s very easy to make out most of the numbers.
The mistake was first spotted by The Verge, and it seems like one of the figures suggest that in 2021, Call Of Duty players spent an average of 116 hours a year playing Call Of Duty.
That figure isn’t very clear, but it definitely says that Call Of Duty players who spent more than 70% of their time on the game averaged 296 hours a year.
Also revealed by the same document is that, according to Sony, almost half of PlayStation 5 owners in the US also own a Nintendo Switch (so roughly 8 million).
This stat was being used by Sony to reinforce the FTC’s opinion that the Switch is not a direct competitor to the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5, but something separate.
By comparison, Sony estimates that less than 20% of PlayStation 5 owners in the US also own an Xbox Series X or S.
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Sony’s costing cutting on marker pens has cost it dearly, as it reveals some peculiar Call Of Duty statistics that it meant to keep secret.