14 DAY TRIAL // A representative of developer Treyarch, the team which put together the first person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops, has said that no latter than 1 AM Pacific Time on launch day more than one million gamers were playing the multiplayer element of the game using the Xbox Live multiplayer service offered by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 home console.
In a message posted to Twitter by Josh Olin, who is the community manager working at Treyarch, said, “Am I getting solid intel? Is there really almost 1,000,000 players on Xbox LIVE right now?? #CODBlackOps #Launch”.
The excitement might have gotten the better of Olin's grammatical abilities but the number quoted is truly impressive, especially considering that historically Call of Duty games tend to be most popular on the Microsoft platform.
No information on how well Black Ops is selling on the PlayStation 3 from Sony and on the PC has been offered until now.
The statistic also shows that the multiplayer component of Call of Duty video games is becoming more and more important to the success of the game, eclipsing the single player campaign, which was one of the reasons the franchise gained prominence in the first place and also contributed to the good reviews of the first Modern Warfare.
The single player element of Black Ops takes place during the Cold War period and will take players to such locations as Russia, Cuba and Vietnam.
The same locations will be revisited as gamers engage in multiplayer, looking for kills, prestige, COD Points and bragging rights.
Ultimately the way the multiplayer is balanced will be the most important element for the long term success of the new first person shooter from Treyarch and Activision.
Call of Duty: Black Ops has already broken pre order records for the series and analysts are expecting the game to sell more than 18 million units worldwide.