13 days have passed since Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was launched, and the game keeps making the headlines. Prior to its official launch, the title faced some serious controversy regarding its PC version. Infinity Ward, the game's developer, announced that it planned to remove the
dedicated servers from it, and later that it would impose an 18-player cap on the IWNnet servers. The game's PC community didn't take the news very well and an online petition was signed by over 220,000 players asking IW to reconsider its decision. When the company refused to rethink its approach to the game, all out war was declared by PC gamers that threatened to steer clear of the title completely.
The game brought in $550 millions in just five days, so, when the exact numbers for sales came in, the PC boycotters felt pretty smug about “opposing the system.” There's no doubt that the title sold amazingly, becoming the biggest entertainment launch in history, topping everything and everyone. But when it was revealed that the PC sales of the game amounted only to three percent of the total, PC players everywhere felt a bit more united than when the boycott Steam community page was filled with its members
hogging the MW2 on the launch day (via PC Gamer Forums).
But the official point of view on this is not that the game's sales were sabotaged by IW's decision to sap the PC version of the title, just that the console version sold all that much better and that the PC-fan community is an insignificant spec. Community Manager Robert Bowling posted on the official forums that, “Yes,
PC is the smallest percentage in terms of how much sold on each platform but that hardly means anything other than the PC is just the smallest market.” So the company doesn't really need to properly support the game for the PC anyway.
When numbers got set on the same paper and lines were drawn, it seems like MW2 still outperformed the original Modern Warfare. “The PC version of Modern Warfare 2 has actually
outsold the PC version of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in its first week. Making it the most successful PC version,” Bowling added. “Essentially, all this percentage proves is that the console versions sold great, not that the PC version sold poorly, because that's actually not the case. The PC version has done tremendous in its first week, better than our previous game.”
