14 DAY TRIAL // Eric Brown, who is the Chief Financial Officer at video game publisher Electronic Arts, has told an audience at the Baird Technology Conference that the DICE created first person shooter Battlefield 3 has been sold more than 8 million times since launch, with 12 million copies shipped to retailer during the same period.
EA says that 10 million of those copies were shipped during the first week the game was on sale and that the bulk of sales, 5 million of them, happened during the same seven day period.
The CFO says that this was the biggest launch in the history of the publisher.
Before launch a number of executives at Electronic Arts have said that they expected Battlefield 3 to be the game that would take the first person shooter crown from the Call of Duty series from Activision Blizzard.
This has not happened and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has managed to become the biggest entertainment launch of the year and has beaten the series record for first week sales.
But Electronic Arts will be happy to have a series that can compete with Call of Duty head to head after the rather bad performance of the rebooted Medal of Honor during 2010.
Battlefield 3 uses the new Frostbite 2 game engine, which allows for more environmental destruction and allows some of the most realistic graphics gamers have seen this year.
The game is available on the PlayStation 3 from Sony, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PC and the developers at DICE are still working on new content and on delivering more game balancing patches.
Neither the developers nor the publisher have officially announced whether a Battlefield 4 is being worked on but the fact that a Call of Duty has been confirmed for 2012 probably means that EA is also preparing a rival game experience.